Pre-Spanish Philippine History during the first years of the conversion-conquest was tabooed because of its pagan and infidel associations. Whatever had to do with the past, the many records there must have been in a land where literacy is reported to have been general, was religiously destroyed by the missionaries. Likewise the converts, and it was almost an unanimous conversion, were exhorted to banish from their memories all traditions and recollections as they valued their immortal souls. Thus was repeated, on a much larger scale and more effectively, the Christianizing of England’s Saxons.

The possibility of classical references to the archipelago had at first to be generally ignored, even had the early European comers been educated men, which for the most part they were not. Spain’s occupation was based on discovery from the New World and it would have been considered like championing Portugal’s rival claims to circulate accounts of earlier Asiatic associations.

The contempt in which the Chinese were held acted to prevent much mention of their former knowledge of the islands though scanty references, apparently unwittingly, have occasionally crept into some of the first chronicles.

Similarly a prejudice consequent upon the 1762–3 occupation of Manila banned English histories of the Indian Archipelago. Then during the last decades of Spain’s final century of rule her apologists sought to minimize the lamentable lack of progress since the first few decades by ascribing savagery to the people Legaspi found.

A suggestion of the antagonism to historical research appears in the frequent assertions of Spanish writers from 1888 to 1898 that the only Philippine history was the chapter of Spanish history dealing with Spain in the Philippines. More emphatic proof is the bitter criticism of the early Spanish historian Morga whose 1609 “Events in the Philippines” Doctor Rizal was blamed for republishing. That Spaniards were not ignorant of the Philippines’ past may be proved by Raimundo Geler, who, in a book issued in Madrid during the liberal rÉgime of 1869, made a brief summary of what foreign writers had gleaned from Arabian sources about the early Filipinos, but with the return of the Bourbon dynasty to power he had to withdraw his work from circulation till the claim is made that only a single copy remains.

Dr. Ferdinand Blumentritt, the Austrian professor, seems to have pioneered in applying modern critical methods to extract the true narrative from conflicting early authorities, in the later 1880s. Isabelo de los Reyes, a Filipino born in the Ilocos provinces, tried to make deductions to fill out this narrative and supplemented it with materials from folk-lore. Dr. T. H. Pardo de Tavera, another Filipino, sought the aid of philology, dealing with the considerable Sanscrit element in the local dialects. To Juan Luna, also a Filipino, belongs the credit for the first essays in Philippine historical paintings, for he availed himself of European museums to depict his characters in the real costumes of their times. And Mariano Ponce, in the Filipino students’ Madrid review La Solidaridad, popularized the chief events and prominent personalities of the conquest period.

Dr. JosÉ Rizal, greatest of all Filipinos, however, excelled all the rest. His is the first history from the Filipino view point (to be found in The Philippines a Century Hence, The Indolence of the Filipinos, and his annotations to Morga’s History). His was the first systematic work by a Filipino in zoology, philology, and ethnology as aids to history; and as well his was the earliest Filipino interest in the Chinese records referring to these Islands. It was in 1887, in Dresden, Germany, that Rizal conferred with Dr. A. B. Meyer and Professor Blumentritt on the Chua Ju-Kua account of Manila in the middle of the thirteenth century which had just been translated by Dr. Friedrich Hirth, an extract from the work begun in 1885 and continuing over ten years.