Tondo and Maynila

Not painted Indians

peakDrafted from (editors), The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume III, 1569-1576 (1903)

When Martin de Goiti's ships rounded the bar of the Pasig river in 1570, what they found was not the undefended village Spanish officers in Mexico had been led to expect. Maynila stood on a tongue of land between river and sea, its front fenced by a palisade filled with earth, defended by bronze cannon manned by bombardiers with lighted match-cord, its warriors visible in the streets and crowding the shore beyond. Four Chinese trading ships lay at anchor by the native houses, their crews rowing out in skiffs to sell brandy, hens, rice and silk to the new arrivals before they had even made contact with the town's own chiefs.

An uncle and a nephew, both called raja

Two rulers governed the town jointly, both bearing the Malay title raja: an older man, the first to greet Goiti's men, embracing the master-of-camp "and appear[ing] to be a man of good intentions"; and his nephew, Raxa Soliman, younger and prouder, who told the Spanish through an interpreter that he was glad of their friendship but that "the Moros were not painted Indians" - they would tolerate no abuse, and would answer any insult to their honor with death. Across the river stood the allied town the Spanish called Candola, whose own lord was reported, in the days that followed, to have been invited by Soliman to join an attack on the newly arrived fleet, and to have refused.

Bloomington, United States · (editors), The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume III, 1569-1576 (1903) · Boxer Codex, Lilly Library · Public domain

A foundry casting cannon of its own

What most struck the men who later inventoried Soliman's burned house was not the plunder alone - money, copper, iron, porcelain, wax, cotton, and vats of brandy that report valued above five thousand ducats - but the workshop next to it, filled with iron and copper and clay-and-wax molds for cannon still being cast, the largest built for a seventeen-foot piece resembling a culverin. Forty married Chinese and twenty Japanese lived permanently in the town, part of a trade substantial enough that its loss, when the town burned, struck the Spanish chronicler as a serious blow in its own right - a river port that cast its own artillery and hosted foreign merchants by the score, not the outpost of "painted Indians" later Spanish rumor liked to imagine.

A blood-red sunset

endDrafted from (editors), The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume III, 1569-1576 (1903)

The peace was sealed the way peace was customarily sealed on that coast: Goiti and the two chiefs cut their own arms and each drank the other's blood mixed with wine, the Moros of Maynila agreeing to support the Spanish settlement and pay no other tribute in return. Both sides kept their weapons after the ceremony. Filipino oarsmen with relatives among Soliman's people warned the Spanish that the Moros meant to fall on them at the first rain, when wet powder would silence their arquebuses; Soliman himself sent word that the lord of the allied town across the river had asked him to join an attack and that he had refused it, professing friendship even as, by every other sign, both towns armed further.

A sky the men called blood-stained

The evening before the attack, witnesses recorded a sunset so red that the soldiers said the sun itself looked blood-stained - the kind of detail a chronicler keeps only because what followed made it feel like an omen. The next morning brought it. Without warning, Maynila's fort opened fire on the anchored Spanish ships, one shot piercing a hull and scattering ashes among the crew. Prisoners taken afterward blamed young Soliman by name, saying he had overruled his uncle and fired the first shot himself.

The town that cast its own guns, ended by them

The Spanish answer was immediate. Arquebusiers stormed the palisade before its bombardiers could reload, captured thirteen pieces of Maynila's own artillery, and turned them on the town as it burned - a fire that, by report, killed or captured several hundred people and consumed the cannon foundry, the trading quarter of resident Chinese and Japanese, and Soliman's own house with everything in it. Two days later, with no word from any surviving chief and the season's winds turning against a longer stay, Goiti's ships withdrew, leaving the ruin of a town that had cast bronze artillery of its own now standing only as ash and melted metal on the riverbank.

Manila refounded

endDrafted from Morga, The Philippine Islands, Moluccas, Siam, Cambodia, Japan, and China, at the Close of the Sixteenth Century (Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas) (1868)

Legazpi himself had not been present for the burning; he learned of it in Panay, where he had spent the intervening months settling the affairs of Cebu and the other islands his expedition had already subdued. In 1571 he sailed north to Manila Bay in person, and this time found a peaceful reception waiting for him - the chiefs of the ruined town and its neighbors reaffirming the friendship and submission they had already offered Goiti the year before, this time without the ambush.

A name kept, a river's other bank left standing

On the nineteenth of May, 1571 - the feast day of Saint Potentiana - Legazpi founded a Spanish city on the exact ground where Maynila had stood, choosing the site for its defensibility and its position at the center of the islands rather than for comfort, since the narrow spit of land between river and sea left it hot and cramped. He kept the town's own name, transliterated into Spanish as Manila, and made it the seat of colonial government for the whole archipelago. Across the river, the allied town the Spanish had called Candola continued to stand under its own chief, absorbed into the new order as a native settlement rather than razed alongside its neighbor - the second half of the river-mouth partnership that had first met Goiti's ships, still there when the Spanish city rose on the other bank.

Morga, The Philippine Islands, Moluccas, Siam, Cambodia, Japan, and China, at the Close of the Sixteenth Century (Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas) (1868) · Unknown · Public domain

Seeing what had happened at Manila, Morga records, the natives of the neighboring islands of the bay came in peacefully to make their own submission and to provision Legazpi's camp, sparing the rest of the region the fate of Soliman's town - a peace bought, in the end, by the example of the one that had already burned.