Rizal's annotation of Sucesos De Las Islas Filipinas

 The people of the Philippines had a culture on their own, before the coming of the Spaniards
 Filipinos were decimated, demoralized, exploited and ruined by the Spanish colonization
 The present state of the Philippines was not necessarily superior to its past.

Morga wrote that the purpose for writing Sucesos was so he could chronicle "the deeds achieved by our

Spaniards i the discovery, conquest, and conversion of the Filipinas Islands - as well as various fortunes

that they have from time to time in the great kingdoms and among the pagan peoples surrounding the

islands. "
Conclusion

 Rizal was an earnest seeker of truth and this marked him as a historian.
 He had a burning desire to know exactly the conditions of the Philippines when the Spaniards
came ashore to the islands
 His theory was that the country was economically self-sufficient and prosperous . Entertained the
idea that it had a lively and vigorous community.
 He believed the conquest of the Spaniards contributed in part to the decline of the Philippine's
rich tradition and culture.

RIZAL'S ANNOTATION

The "SUCESOS" as annotated by Rizal, appeared for the first time

in the Philippines sixty eight years later when a publisher in Manila,

published the new work in 1958, to contribute his bit to the national

effort to honor Rizal. The present work is the sixth volume of the Series

of Writings of Jose Rizal which the Jose Rizal National Centennial Commission has no published in

commemoration of his birth.

In his historical essay, which includes the narration of Philippine colonial history, punctuated as it was with

incidences of agony, tensions, tragedies and prolonged periods of suffering that many of people had

been subjected to. He correctly observed that as a colony of Spain, "The Philippines was depopulated,

impoverished and retarded, astounded by metaphor sis, with no confidence in her past, still without faith

in her present and without faltering hope in the future."

Sucesos De Las Islas Filipinas

"To foretell the destiny of a nation, it is necessary to open the books that tell of her past"
What leads Jose Rizal to Sucesos De Las Islas Filipinas?

3 Main Propositions in Rizal's New Edition of Morga's Sucesos

1. Rizal commits the error of many historians in appraising the events of the past in the light of present

standards.

2. Rizal's attacks on the church were unfair and unjustified because the abuses of the friars should not be

construed to mean the Catholicism is bad.

It is then the shade of our ancestor's civilization which the author will call before you. . . If the work serves

to awaken in you a consciousness of our past, and to blot from your memory or to rectify what has been

falsified or is calumny, then I shall not have labored in vain. With this preparation, slight though it may be,

we can all pass to the study of the future.

JOSE RIZAL

Rizal's annotation of Morga's Sucesos

Ferdinand Blumentritt's Prologue

 He then decided to undertake the annotation of Antonio de Morga's Sucesos De Las Islas
Filipinas.
 His personal friendship with Ferdinand Blumentritt provided the inspiration for doing a new
edition of Morga's Sucesos.
 Devoting four months research and writing and almost a year to get his manuscript published in
Paris in January 1890.

 His extensive annotations of Morga's work number "no less than 639 items or almost two
annotations for every page."
 Rizal also annotated Morga's typographical errors.
 He commented on every statement that could be nuanced in Filipino cultural practices. For
example, on page 248 Morga describes the culinary art of the ancient Filipinos by recording: "...
they prefer to eat salt fish which begin to decompose and smell." Rizal's footnotes : "This is
another preoccupation of the Spaniards who, like any other nation in that matter of food, loathe
that to which they are not accustomed or is unknown to them... The fish that Morga mentions
does not taste better when it is beginning to rot; all on the contrary" it is bagoong,and all those
who have eaten it and tasted it know it is not or ought not to be rotten"

Ferdianand Blumentritt also wrote a preface emphasizing some salient points:

 The Spaniards have to correct their erroneous conception of the filipinos as children of limited
intelligence
 That there existed three kinds of Spanish delusions about the Philippines:
  Filipinos were an inferior race
 Filipinos were not ready for parliamentary representation and other reforms
 Denial of equal rights can be compensated by strict dispensation of justice

 Rizal spent his entire stay in the city of London at the British Museum's reading room.
 Having found Morga's book, he laboriously hand-copied the whole 351 pages of the Sucesos
 Rizal proceeded to annotate every chapter of the Sucesos

Antonio de Morga

His history is valuable in that Morga had access to the survivors of the earliest days of the colony and he,

himself, participated in many of the accounts that he rendered.

The book (Sucesos..) narrates the history of wars, intrigues, diplomacy and evangelization of the

Philipinnes in a somewhat disjointed way.

Modern historians (including Rizal) have noted that Morga has a definite bias and would often distort

facts or even rely on invention to fit his defense of the Spanish conquest.

Rizal's annotation of Morga's Sucesos

Sucesos De Las Islas Filipinas

A R G U M E N T

Rizal's purpose of the Morga's Sucesos

He went to say:

"... little by little, they (Filipinos) lost their old traditions, the mementoes of their past; they gave up their

writing, their songs, their poems, their laws, in order to learn other doctrines which they did not

understand, another morality, another aesthetics, different from those inspired by their climate and their

manner of thinking. They declined, degrading themselves in their own eyes. They become ashamed of

what was their own; they began to admire and praise whatever was foreign and incomprehensible; their

spirit was damaged and it surrendered."

 it is one of the important works on the early history of the Spanish colonization of the Philippines
pulished in Mexico in 1609 by Antonio de Morga.
 Annotated by Jose Rizal with a prologue by Dr. Ferdinand Blumentritt.

What is Sucesos De Las Islas Filipinas?

Antonio de Morga
  Spanish conquistador, gov't official, and historical anthropologist; author of Sucesos De Las Islas
Filipinas (Events in the Philippine Islands).
 He wrote the first lay formal history of the Philippines conquest by Spain.
 A doctorate in canon law and civil law

taking issue with the scopes of these claims, Rizal argued that the conversion and conquest were not as

widespread as portrayed because the missionaries were only successful in conquering a portion of the

population of certain Islands.

Rizal's annotation of Morga's Sucesos

What leads Jose Rizal to Sucesos De Las Islas Filipinas?

In Jose Rizal's dedication, he explained among other things, the purpose of the new edition of Morga's

Sucesos:

"if the book succeeds in awakening in you the consciousness of our past which has been obliterated from

memory and in rectifying what has been falsified and calumniated, I shall not have labored in vain, and on

such basis, little though it may be, we can all devote ourselves to studying the future"

 Writing in Spanish, instead of his native German language.

 Praised Rizal's work as "scholarly and well-thought out"
 He noted that Morga's Sucesos was so rare that "the very few libraries that have it guard it with
the same solicitude as if it were the treasure of the Incas"
 He criticized Rizal's annotations on two counts:
 He first observed that Rizal had committed the mistake of many modern historians who judged
events in the past in the context of contemporary ideas and mores.
 He perceived as the overreach of Rizal's denunciations of Catholicism. that Rizal should confine
his critique to the religious orders in the Philippines who spared no effort to suppress calls for
reform

To the Filipinos: "In my "NOLI ME TANGERE" I commenced to sketch the present conditions obtaining in

our country. The effect produced by my efforts gave me to understand - before proceeding to develop

before your eyes other successive scenes - that is necessary to first lay bare the past, in order the better to

judge the present and to survey the road trodden during three centuries. "

 CHAPTER 1 : Magellan and Legazpi's seminal expeditions. CHAPTER 2 - 7 : Chronological report

on gov't administration under Governor-General. CHAPTER 8 : Philippine Islands, the natives
there, their antiquity, custom and gov't.
Morga's puropose for Writing Sucesos

Jose Rizal

Like almost all of you, I was born and brought up in ignorance of our country's past and so, without

knowledge or authority to speak of what I neither saw nor have studied, I deem it necessary to quote the

testimony of an illustrious Spaniard who in the beginning of the new era controlled the destinies of the

Philippines and had personal knowledge of our ancient nationality in its last days.
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