Through the combination of its strategic position and the navigation brilliance of the Iberians, the Spanish Philippines soon became the main Merchant City in the Pacific, as well as the western end of what could be best described as a new silk road, which traversed from Philippines to México and from México to Spain and vice versa. The bustling port city of Manila formed a melting pot of cultures where Spaniards, Portuguese, Filipinos, Chinese, Japanese, Siamese and many others gathered, sometimes to secure lucrative deals over silk and silver and sometimes to fight and plunder. It has been called the beginning of globalization, the point where the three biggest empires of the time (Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese Ming) became connected.
Spanish hold onto the islands was tennuous and required constantly hard work, though, not only due to the Philippines being on the proverbial other side of the world, but also due to their closeness to clashes between eastern powers. Manila would be besieged in multiple occasions by people of all colors before the Spaniards had even conquered its very island, and a lack of reasons to engage heavily in anything other than commerce, exploitation and defensive warfare meant said conquest would be very lengthy. The history of Spanish Philippines is also crossed by constant revolts and rebellions, caused often by greedy governors and not any less often by tribal and religious conflict, which extended the perennial clash between Christianity and Islam to a new Pacific theater.
Background
The Philippines were first contacted by the Spaniards during Ferdinand Magellan's expedition in 1521. No conquering action was taken at that point, as the expedition was primarily one of exploration, whose goal was to reach the still faraway and recently established Portuguese Moluccas. Magellan did attempt to sign an alliance with the local Rajah of Cebu, Humabon, offering to fight in their place against their enemies in Mactan, but while Magellan was a great navigator, he sorely lacked military talent, and this got him killed in the subsequent mission, the amazingly ill-planned Battle of Mactan. After a traitorous ambush by Humabon, the remnants of the expedition escaped and reached his goal in 1522 under the command of another crewman, Juan Sebastián Elcano.Although the kingdoms of Castile and Portugal had previously agreed to respect their respective spheres of global influence in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, they were now arguing about the property and monopoly of the Moluccas. In 1525, Elcano returned there in a second expedition under García Jofre de Loaísa, but they became accidentally scathered around South America and the Pacific. A part of the expedition linked with the survivors of the flotilla of Álvaro de Saavedra Cerón, who had been sent by his cousin Hernán Cortés from the Viceroyalty of New Spain (modern day México), but soon they learned their subsequent skirmishes with the Portuguese were for nothing: Castile and Portugal had butted diplomatic heads again and ultimately ruled the damn islands fell on the Portuguese side of the map in the 1529 Treaty of Zaragoza.
However, this was only the beginning of the story. In 1541, yet another Spanish fleet headed by Ruy López de Villalobos sailed off from New Spain to search for new routes through the Pacific. The expedition was a disaster, as they ran short of supplies between the newly discovered islands and failed to find wind to return home, and after having an unwanted territorial dispute with the Portuguese, they let themselves be arrested too on a supposed violation because at least that way they would get fed. López died in prison in the Moluccas, with its captors recording that he died of sorrow, but he had already achieved the honor to give the Philippines their name, as a homage to the then prince Philip, who didn't forget about it.
Magellan's legacy
In 1561, the now king Philip II gave orders to New Spain to send another expedition to the Philippines. Its leader would be a veteran administrator, Miguel López de Legazpi, 62 at the time, assisted by his cousin Friar Andrés de Urdaneta, an experienced navigator and cosmographer who had been part of the Loaísa expedition years ago. At the head of five ships with 350 men, most of them Christianized Tlaxcaltecs with a desire for venture after the fall of the Mexica Empire, they sailed off to the Philippines in 1564, carrying royal orders of expanding the Spanish Empire across the new islands and being as just and pragmatical as possible in their assimilation to Christian rule, so obstacles like those found (and provoked) by Magellan could be avoided.Legazpi and his fleet passed by the Mariana Islands and reached their goal. After checking out the hostility of some of the Philippine tribes, the Hispanics smartly allied with those tribes's enemies per the Spanish conquering custom, in this case with Legazpi making tribal blood pacts with chieftains like Sikatuna and Sigala. As winter and hunger were approaching, the expedition approached the now infamous Rajanate of Cebu and offered their alliance in order to get supplies, but the Rajah Tupas, son of Humabon, advanced with 2,500 warriors against them. This time the savvy Hispanics routed the Cebuans by good ol' cannonfire, forcing Tupas to sue for peace and make another blood pact with Legazpi. The Spaniards founded then the first cities, Villa del Santísimo Nombre de Jesús and Villa de San Miguel (modern day Ciudad de Cebú).
Legazpi then felt it was the moment to search again for a route back to New Spain, the tornaviaje ("travel back"), so he sent his grandson Felipe de Salcedo along with Urdaneta to find the right winds and tides. Most previous expeditions had tried and failed at it, but this time Urdaneta's navigation knowledge made the difference. The ships traveled north until catching the Kuroshio Current, and from there they sailed to California, finally completing in 1565 the long desired tornaviaje, which would soon become the world's main sea trade axis. King Philip II was delighted at the news and decided to keep the lands, appointing Legazpi as their governor and sending back 2,100 men and women more from Hispanic territories to settle down in the new province.
Of course, there was still the little detail that the Philippines were technically on the Portuguese side of the world. The Portuguese protested, to the point of sending in 1568 a fleet under Gonzalo de Pereira that attempted a blockade of the Spanish base, but it failed, and Legazpi countered diplomatically by sending another friar and scientist, Martín de Rada, to explain through cutting-edge Copernican science that the islands actually fell on the Spanish side of the anti-meridian. Later research proved that this was not quite accurate, but by then the Spanish province was well established and nobody in the Iberian Peninsula saw it worthy to start a war about it (especially because it's not like the Portuguese didn't violate the treaties themselves whenever it suited them).
Manila
In 1570, having heard of the rich resources of Luzón and its strategic position to trade with China, Legazpi sent Martín de Goiti and another of his gransons, Juan de Salcedo, to head up a contingent of 300 Hispanic and 600 allied Visayan warriors. They befriended Matanda, the Muslim rajah of Maynila, modern day Manila, despite his previous war against Elcano, but negotiations to build a Spanish base were foiled by pressure from a more hostile vassal, Rajah Sulayman. Goyti and Salcedo decided to depart, but Suleyman suddenly declared war on their fleet, apparently because he had mistaken a cannon signal for an attack. The bewildered Hispanics and Visayans prevailed, but they abandoned Maynila anyways just in case, and the city burned down, with historians disagreeing about who started the fire.Making the most of the situation, Goiti and Salcedo moved to the Pasig river and took positions there, fighting a long guerrilla war against the Maynila forces while waiting for Legazpi to reach them. The latter arrived in June 1571, and after negotiating peace with the rajahs and their neighboring chieftain Lakandula, they all became vassals to Spain. Maynila, or Manila, turned into a double city of indigenous and Hispanic populations, and became the capital of the Spanish Empire in the East Indies and one of the greatest trade points on that side of the globe, their own counterpart to the Portuguese cities of Malacca and Macau. Ironically, its baptism of fire happened right after, when the rebellious Kampanpangan lord Tariq Suleyman (not to confuse with the previous, although they might have been allies) led an assault by the river and had to be expelled in a naval battle in Bangkusay.
Manila's commercial routes, which extended to China and Japan, were an obvious attraction to pirates from all the Pacific, but the most notable occurence of the like came in 1574, when the pirate lord Limahong brought a fleet of around 4000 Chinese and Japanese pirates to try to capture the entire city. Goiti was killed in his own house, so Juan de Salcedo had to take arms as the city's general along with Filipino militiaman Galo and governor Guido de Lavezaris, who had been in charge since Legazpi's death. Hispanics and natives fought a tough battle until repelling the pirate fleet, which Salcedo pursued with the Spanish armada and pinned in the river Agno. A Ming Chinese fleet arrived to arrest Limahong on the Wanli Emperor's orders, but the pirate ultimately managed to escape. Reality sometimes writes better scripts than Hollywood.
Limahong's attack caused many a revolt in the island, the first when a group of slaves tried to escape during the battle and many of them killed each other in a huge fracas. Moreover, Lakandula and Suleyman rose against the Spaniards, as they had already seen Legazpi's promises broken by the greedy Lavezaris, and when they heard about the power of Limahong, they quickly grabbed booty and hostages to congratulate him with in the seemingly likely case he defeated the Spaniards. When he had his hands free, though, Salcedo crushed the rebellion and signed new treaties with them. This would be far from the last rebellion in Spanish lands, as the administration of the indigenous vassals was hard to police from either Spain or America due to the sheer distance and left admittedly a lot to desire.
When cultures clash
The conquest of the Philippines would continue for the next decades as a series of expansion movements, indigenous revolts and small failed conquering projects. Spanish relations with China would only grow, as the Chinese were all over the silver, sugar and butchered products sold by the Spaniards, while the Europeans enjoyed the porcelain, silk and ivory brought by the Chinese. Even so, there would be some voices in Spain calling for military expansionism against the Ming, the so-called Empresa de China, with Jesuit Alonso Sánchez later proposing a particularly insane plan for the Spanish and Portuguese to invade China with the support of the Toyotomy regency, which luckily for everybody involved didn't pan out. Peace, or some measure of it, was much more profitable.In 1578, Christianity and Islam clashed when evangelizing negotiations failed between governor Francisco de Sande and the Sultan of Brunei, Saiful Rijal. De Sande invaded with a fleet of 400 Hispanics, 1500 Filipinos and 300 allied Borneans, among them a candidate to new Sultan, Pengiran Seri Lela, but although they managed to take the capital of Brunei by assault, a cholera outbreak ravaged their army and forced them to abandon the city. Despite the failure, they curbed the Sultanate's expansion and achieved some freedom of hands to fight other Muslim tribes, as well as the increasing presence of Japanese pirates, whom an aging Salcedo routed in the 1582 Cagayan Battles. A decade later, there was another attempt by adventurers Blas Ruiz and Diogo Veloso of instating an allied king, this time in Cambodia, for which they even had the help of Japanese mercenaries, but it failed again.
Speaking of the Japanese, an unpleasant incident happened in 1597. Portuguese Jesuits had been preaching in Japan since the 1550s, but Spanish Franciscans had recently joined the party, causing political friction due to their much less subtle methods. Still, things had been fine up to this point, but when the Manila galleon San Felipe was shipwrecked on Shikoku, one of its sailors decided to boast to the Japanese that Spain and Portugal were actually united at the time (they were, as the Iberian Union) and that missionary work was the start of a conquest. Naturally, Toyotomi Hideyoshi panicked and ordered all the Christians to be seized, crucifying 26 Franciscans and temporally expelling the Jesuits from the country. This would result in the two Iberian nations butting heads when the Spanish wanted to build a post in China, El Piñal, in order to become pals with the Chinese against possible Toyotomi expansionism, which the Portuguese shut down due to their own commercial interests, with gunshots included.
The early 1600s featured a failed campaign to assimilate the gold-rich region of Igorot, followed by a huge conflict within Manila's multi-cultural environment. The resident Spaniards, Filipinos and Japanese were all wary of the massive and increasingly powerful Chinese community, especially after a Chinese revolt killed a Spanish governor, Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas, and not less after they had suspicions that the Chinese were secretly collaborating with a Ming plan to invade Manila. In a possible case of Then Let Me Be Evil, many Chinese rose up and tried to capture Manila with siege towers and all, so a very motivated Hispanic-Japanese-Filipino task force routed and massacred them. Traditional sources claim up to 30,000 Chinese butchered, although it's highly unlikely there were half of that number in the island to begin with.
The last battles
In 1610, the Spaniards were close to accidentally getting the Portuguese expelled from Japan (again) when another shipwrecked galleon, the San Francisco, convinced Tokugawa Ieyasu that the Spanish could replace their Iberian neighbors, causing the spectacular Nossa Senhora da Graça incident, in which a Portuguese captain blew up his ship. This was overshadowed, however, by the the enemies of the Iberians in The Eighty Years' War, the Dutch, who attempted to dispute the Spaniards' conquest of Philippines. Three Flemish attempts to capture the province through the land of Playa Honda (modern day Botolan) were undertaken from 1610 to 1624, as well as multiple blockade attempts in Manila and an additional initiative to take the Portuguese Macau, but the Dutch fleets were defeated every time despite their size advantage. Tokugawa then declared the Spaniards unwelcome in Japan, though, which some believe was the result of a slandering campaign performed by the Dutch in revenge for their lack of success.The Spanish Empire took its new turn in 1626 by sending an expedition to Formosa (now Taiwan) in order to counter Dutch settlements and plant their own, the city of Santísima Trinidad, so they could protect Spanish and Portuguese trade with the Chinese. Shortly after, they would get in trouble with the kingdom of Siam due to a mistaken adventuring trip for which a Spanish crew was arrested, leading to a retaliatory attack by captain Juan de Alcarazo, which then provoked another clash with the Japanese because they were casually involved in both hits. In 1628, Spanish governor Juan Niño de Távora suspected Tokugawa and the Dutch were planning an invasion of the Philippines, but this never came to fruition.
The Portuguese would suffer two defeats around 1638, as they were also declared unwelcome in Japan due to their participation in the Christian Shimabara Rebellion, and then lost their star colony of Malacca to a Dutch siege (the second in its history). Reinvigorated, the Dutch and their own native allies did the same in the Spanish Formosa, managing similarly to expel the Castilians in the second attempt in 1642. Their final advance on Manila, however, would be stopped again by the Spanish, which scored decisive sea victories in La Base Naval de Manila and Puerto de Cavite, and this would be more or less the last round of the match, as the Eighty Years’ War ended the same year. This would end the existential threats to Spanish rule,note although as mentioned, occasional revolts would last until the end of their era and well into the Philippines' acquisition by the United States.
In fiction:
- The Spanish 2016 comic book Espadas del fin del mundo by Ángel Miranda and Juan Aguilera is set in this frame.
- Carrión: Un canalla sin ventura, also by Ángel Miranda, also showcases the battle.
- Playa Honda by Javier Máquina features the eponymous battle.
- The documentary Spain, the first globalization mentions the conquest and its subsequent trade among its many points about Spanish history.
- The historical novel Los primeros de Filipinas by Juan Antonio Pérez-Foncea is set during the conquest.
- Francisco Narla's novel Ronin (2013) is also set in the Spanish Manila.
- Jesús Maeso de la Torre's La caja china is also set there.
