After the disastrous experience of Magellan in the Philippines, the Spanish did not make another attempt to colonize until 1542. This expedition was led by Ruy López de Villalobos. He set out from Mexico with six ships and approximately 400 people. Against his navigator’s advice, he landed in Mindanao, but far from any of the Chinese or Malay traders they’d hoped to find. Isolated, they made repairs on their ships but were prevented from getting back out to sea by the weather. Without supplies, they resorted to eating whatever they could find, much of which made them sick. The survivors eventually left and landed on Sarangani. They claimed the territory for Spain and named it for Charles V’s son, Crown Prince Philip. Shortly after, they were greeted by a Portuguese ship with a letter from the government of the Moluccas in Indonesia, demanding to know why the Spanish were in Portuguese territory, which began a brief correspondence that consisted of the Portuguese asking the Spanish to leave and the Spanish explaining the elements of the treaties that allowed them to colonize in the region. The Villalobos expedition tried to return to Mexico but were still incredibly low on supplies. They were captured by the Portuguese, who jailed Villalobos and sent the remaining Spaniards on a ship back to Lisbon, to be returned to Spain from there. Finally, in November 1564, an expedition under Miguel López de Legazpi left Mexico sailing west, and reached the Philippines in February of the next year. They arrived at Cebu, in the central part of the archipelago, conquering it despite local opposition. This marks the first Spanish colony in the islands and the beginning of a colonial hold that would last until the end of the nineteenth century. They expanded to the island of Panay in 1568 and came into conflict with Muslim pirates who attacked the settlement. He sent conquistador Martin de Goiti to conquer Maynila and Tondo; Tondo surrendered in the face of the massive naval force. Maynila was taken and renamed Nueva Castilla, or New Castile, and made the capital of the Spanish East Indies, which encompassed the Philippines and all Pacific Spanish territories. Despite the official name change, it has remained Maynila, though with different spellings, to the modern day. The Spanish took the barangays a little at a time, conquering via force and culture. The colonies grew rapidly through settlement directly from Spain and from the Americas. Like Britain, Spain used its colonies as a place to send undesirables, and so many who came from Europe were criminals or debtors. There was also a large part of the population who came from New Spain, and they created a Mexican-Filipino subculture. The Catholic missionaries were hugely influential in this effort, as they built schools and hospitals alongside their churches. The Spanish also built presidios, or fortresses, which proved their worth to the locals when outsiders attacked. This does not mean the islanders did not push back. In 1587, a group of local Datus, leaders, conspired to overthrow the Spanish. They tried to involve nearby Brunei and Borneo, playing on the conflict between their Muslim population and the Catholic Spaniards. They also had promises from the Japanese, but they did not follow through. The whole plan was revealed to the Spanish via a spy. The Datus were executed and their heads were displayed as a warning; the rest of the people involved were fined, imprisoned, or exiled. There were also external forces fighting against the Spanish. The Portuguese were a major source of conflict until the 1580 Iberian Union which brought the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal under the same government, for a few decades. Chinese pirates were a constant annoyance but were not a serious threat. A few times the Japanese claimed prior control over the territory and asked for fealty and tribute, but this ended with a normalization of trade relations between Japan and Spain in the early seventeenth century. The nearby Muslim states regularly attacked Philippine islands, both because they wanted specifically to push out the Spanish because they were Catholic and because they wanted the territory, a desire that existed long before the Spanish arrived. The biggest external threat, however, was the Dutch. This was not solely a fight over colonial territory, as the Dutch and Spanish had longstanding conflict in Europe. The vagaries of inheritance meant that the Hapsburgs who ruled Spain also gained control of the Netherlands in the early sixteenth century. The main conflict between the Dutch and their Hapsburg rulers was religious: Spain and the Hapsburgs were Catholic and demanded that everyone in their territories be Catholic as well, many of the Dutch were members of the newly emerging Protestant sects. This ongoing conflict, known as the Eighty Years’ War, spilled over into Southeast Asia and the Pacific where the Dutch held Indonesia and the Spanish held the Philippines. Three battles were fought between the Spanish and Dutch fleets, all indecisive. Ultimately, the conflict between Spain and the Netherlands was subsumed into the Thirty Years’ War and resolved within it. In 1599, King Philip ordered a referendum in the Philippines that would approve Spanish rule; unsurprisingly, it passed. They could now claim to the rest of the world that their overlordship of the archipelago was legitimate in the eyes of the people who lived there. Spain used the Philippines as it did its other colonies, exploiting natural resources for the benefit of the Empire, using it to reduce population pressure at home, and as a piece in the great colonial rivalry of the era. This required consistent governance across the entirety of the Spanish-held parts of the archipelago, which was established relatively quickly. The Philippines were then integrated into the Viceroyalty of New Spain, which oversaw all of the Spanish colonies in the Americas and the Pacific. Unlike their American colonies, however, the Philippines did not produce a great deal of wealth for the Crown and, in fact, often cost more to maintain than it contributed. This loss was deemed worth it, though, because of their strategic value, although it did mean that the maintenance, particularly of military fortifications, was not consistent. The Spanish systems of agriculture were forced onto the native Filipinos, with the encomienda, or collective farm, at its center. In this system, all of the land belongs to the king, the people work it for him as well as for themselves, and they owe a portion of their crop to the Crown after each harvest. For many, the focus was on cash crops: tobacco, coffee, indigo, and sugar. They also grew rice, both for themselves and for trade. That trade, and the trade of all of the goods coming out of the Philippines, was limited to Spain and Spanish holdings. In the eighteenth century, the Spanish Philippines were involved in more European conflicts with the Seven Years’ War. Britain took the opportunity of their opposing sides to make a run at Manila, in hopes of gaining control over what could be one of the most important trade cities in Asia. It was a logical extension of the East India Company’s unofficial rule over the subcontinent, which was backed by the might of the British Empire. A British fleet sailed into Manila Bay on 24 September 1762. Over the next twelve days, they bombarded the city’s fortifications, took control of some of the surrounding area, and assessed the Spanish ability to defend their capital. They found it wanting, which was in their favor. On the dawn of 6 October, they pushed into the city with little effort. The Spanish contingent at the Royal Gate refused to surrender and 180 of them were killed. Manuel Rojo del Rio y Viero, the Archbishop and temporary governor of Manila, agreed to surrender in hopes it would stop any more violence. He described the aftermath of the battle as a pillage that lasted over a day and made a point of saying that it was not only the British soldiers but also locals who took advantage of the moment of lawlessness. It ended only with an agreement to pay a four-million-dollar ransom, which was only partially paid. The agreement between Roja and British Lt. General William Draper had assured the Catholic Church and its activities would not be interfered with, that the property of the Spanish citizens of the Philippines would be respected and they would have the same freedoms of travel and trade as did the British. In the meantime, members of the Spanish colonial administration fled the city and arranged a sort of government in exile in Pampanga under the leadership of Simon de Anda y Salazar, the head judge of the Royal Audencia of Manilla. Anda wrote to inform Archbishop Rojo that he had assumed the position of governor-general, an assumption the Archbishop refused to accept. This stopped any potential negotiation between Anda and the British, as the former refused to even talk to the latter until he was addressed as the governor-general, but the British refused to recognize him as such because they’d already been working with Rojo. This did not stop the Audencia from putting together an army of 10,000 to prevent the British from making any gains beyond Manila Bay. Fighting continued through the early months of 1763, past the official end of the Seven Years’ War, because neither of the governments in Europe was aware of the capture of Manila, nor were the people in the Philippines aware the war had ended. But, in the meantime, after the death of Archbishop Rojo in January 1764, the British and Governor-General Anda agreed to an armistice. It went into effect at almost the exact time the British got word that the war was over. Their new orders explained the archipelago was to be retained by Spain. The occupation ended in the first week of April 1764. The shift to industrialism throughout the world at the turn of the nineteenth century made the Filipino trade in raw materials too valuable to be limited to only Spain. In 1834, Spain opened the ports to the world. At the same time, improvements in communication and transportation made it easier for people to get involved in this increased mercantilism. The communal state-owned encomienda were privatized, and private businesses were opened to cater to the new trade opportunities. A Filipino middle class emerged, as well as a wealthy one. Those who could afford to send their sons to European and American universities, these young men came home with ideas of freedom and liberty. This coincided with the wars fought in the Spanish colonies in the Americas, which were their fights for independence from the mother country. Some Filipinos fought in these wars and, like the French who fought in the American Revolution, they brought home new ideas. A Filipino national identity emerged, including both the descendants of Spanish colonists and the local indigenous peoples. This came to be opposed to recent Spanish immigrants, who took over governmental positions and sought to keep the Filipinos in a second-class position. This led to a brief revolt in Manila in 1823. By mid-century, demonstrations for independence were common and came together in what’s called the Propaganda Movement. The leaders of these sought basic civil rights and equal status under the law for Spanish and Filipino people, including giving the Philippines a place in the Spanish Parliament and the status of a province. They sought to abolish the use of forced labor and to end the requirement that some goods only be sold to the government. Lastly, they wanted secular control over the priesthoods. The Propaganda Movement ended with the arrest and deportation of one of its leaders, José Rizal. A revolutionary movement, called the Katipunan, took its place. The Philippine Revolution began in August 1898, with the express purpose of making the Philippines an independent country. The rebels did fairly well in the countryside but failed to take Manila. This war between Spain and its colony was combined with another war between Spain and another of its territories: Cuba. The push for independence on that Caribbean Island got the United States involved, which changed the balance of power. The Americans took the opportunity to gain a foothold in the Western Pacific. With the Battle of Manila Bay on 1 May 1898, the Americans essentially decided the conflict between Spain and the Philippines in favor of…themselves. The battle marks the end of the Spanish colonial period for the archipelago. The Philippine Revolutionaries, under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo, created a temporary government in June 1898, which oversaw the writing of a constitution and elections. The First Philippine Republic was born on 21 January 1899, with Aguinaldo as President. The US, however, refused to recognize the new state. This led to a brief war, in which the US was successful. The Philippines became an unofficial territory of the United States, a status which it maintained until 1946…