The Spanish–Moro Wars

I. Moors in the Pacific

When the Spanish arrived in the Philippine islands in the sixteenth century, they encountered Muslim communities whose rulers had adopted Islam over the preceding two centuries. The Spanish called them Moros, the same word they used for the Muslims of North Africa and of the former kingdom of Granada. The name carried with it the memory of eight centuries of war in the Iberian peninsula, described in The Reconquista and The Granada War, and the Spanish conquerors of the Philippines often understood their conflict with the Muslims of the islands as a continuation of that struggle on the other side of the world.

The conflict that followed lasted, with intervals of peace, for more than three hundred years. It was fought mainly in the southern islands of Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago, where the sultanates of Sulu and Maguindanao resisted Spanish efforts to conquer them, and it took the form of expeditions, sieges, treaties and raids. The Muslims of the south raided the Christian villages of the Visayas and Luzon, taking captives for sale in the slave markets of Southeast Asia, and the Spanish sent fleets to burn their towns. Historians speak of the Moro wars as a series of conflicts rather than a single war, and the term itself reflects the Spanish point of view.

This page examines the religious, political and economic dimensions of the conflict, the ways in which both sides drew on religious traditions to justify their wars, and the place of the Scriptures in the Spanish mission to the islands. The conflict forms part of the wider history of Iberian expansion described in The Age of Discovery and in Portugal in the Indian Ocean.

II. The Coming of Islam to the Islands

Islam reached the southern Philippines through the trading networks that linked the islands with Borneo, the Malay peninsula, Sumatra and the wider Indian Ocean. According to the genealogies of Sulu, the tarsilas, a Muslim teacher named Karim ul-Makhdum arrived in the Sulu archipelago in the late fourteenth century and built a mosque on the island of Simunul, traditionally dated to 1380. A prince from Sumatra, Rajah Baguinda, followed in the early fifteenth century.

The sultanate of Sulu was founded in the middle of the fifteenth century by Sharif ul-Hashim Abu Bakr, an Arab scholar said to have come from Johor or Palembang, who married a daughter of Rajah Baguinda and established Islamic institutions in the archipelago. The capital was at Jolo, also called Tiyangi Suug. The sultans claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad through Sharif ul-Hashim, and the tarsilas traced their genealogies back to him.

On Mindanao, Islam was established in the valley of the Pulangi river, the Rio Grande de Mindanao, by Sharif Muhammad Kabungsuan, who according to tradition came from Johor in the early sixteenth century and married into the local ruling families. His descendants founded the sultanate of Maguindanao, centred on the lower valley of the river near the modern city of Cotabato, and the rival sultanate of Buayan upriver. The Maranao people around Lake Lanao also adopted Islam in this period.

In the north, Islam had reached the island of Luzon through the sultanate of Brunei, which had close ties with the ruling families of Manila. By the 1560s the town of Maynila on the Pasig river was ruled by Muslim chiefs, including Rajah Sulayman and his uncle Rajah Matanda, who were related to the royal house of Brunei. The Muslim communities of the north were still small, and much of the population of Luzon and the Visayas followed the traditional religions of the islands.

III. Magellan and the First Encounters

The first Spanish expedition to reach the islands was that of Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese navigator in the service of Charles V, who arrived in the Visayas in March 1521. At Cebu, Magellan persuaded the local ruler, Rajah Humabon, to accept baptism with several hundred of his people. Magellan was killed on 27 April 1521 in a battle with Lapulapu, the chief of the island of Mactan, who refused to submit. The surviving members of the expedition sailed on and became the first to circumnavigate the globe.

Several later Spanish expeditions reached the islands without establishing a settlement. One of them, led by Ruy López de Villalobos in 1543, named the islands Las Islas Filipinas after the prince who later became Philip II. The Spanish claim to the islands was disputed by Portugal, since the Treaty of Zaragoza of 1529 had placed the Moluccas on the Portuguese side of the line dividing the world between the two crowns.

IV. Legazpi and the Founding of Manila

In 1565 an expedition under Miguel López de Legazpi, sent from Mexico by order of Philip II, reached the islands and established a settlement at Cebu. The expedition was accompanied by Augustinian friars, led by Andrés de Urdaneta, who discovered the return route across the Pacific to Mexico, the tornaviaje, which made possible the regular sailing of the Manila galleon between Manila and Acapulco from 1565 to 1815.

Legazpi's instructions, shaped by the debates over the conquest of the Americas described in The Conquest of Mexico and the Requerimiento, required him to settle the islands by peaceful means where possible. Yet his instructions also distinguished between the native peoples, who were to be converted by preaching, and the Moros, who were regarded as enemies of the faith. By a decree of 4 July 1570 Philip II authorised the enslavement of Moros taken in war, but only those who were Moors by nation and birth and who came to spread their religion or made war on the Spanish and their subjects; native islanders who had adopted Islam were to be converted by peaceful means, though the Crown later restricted this practice.

In 1570 Legazpi sent his lieutenant Martín de Goiti to Manila, where the Spanish fought with the forces of Rajah Sulayman and burned the town. In May 1571 Legazpi arrived in Manila and founded the Spanish city on the site of the Muslim town, making it the capital of the colony. Rajah Sulayman was killed in a battle at Bangkusay in June 1571. The Muslim communities of Luzon were absorbed into the Spanish colony and converted to Christianity over the following decades, and Islam in the Philippines came to be confined to the southern islands.

V. The Castilian War

The sultanate of Brunei, whose ruling family was related to the Muslim chiefs of Manila, was the most powerful Muslim state in the region in the sixteenth century. In 1578 the governor of the Philippines, Francisco de Sande, sent an expedition against Brunei, which the Spanish called Borneo. Sande demanded that the sultan, Saiful Rijal, should allow Christian missionaries to preach in his kingdom, cease the propagation of Islam in the Philippines, and become a vassal of the king of Spain. When the sultan refused, the Spanish captured the city in April 1578.

Sande's letters to Philip II show that he regarded the war as a continuation of the war against Islam. He ordered that the mosque of Brunei be burned and he proposed a plan for the conquest of China, which the king rejected. The Spanish occupation of Brunei lasted only a few weeks. An epidemic of dysentery or cholera broke out among the Spanish troops, and they withdrew to Manila. The war, known in Malay histories as the Castilian War, did not result in a lasting Spanish presence in Borneo, but it ended Brunei's influence in Luzon.

VI. The Sultanates of the South

The sultanates of Sulu and Maguindanao were organised according to Islamic law and local custom, the adat. The sultan was the head of the state and the religious community, and he ruled with the advice of a council of nobles, the datus, who controlled their own followers and lands. The sultanates had a written legal code, the Luwaran in Maguindanao, compiled from Arabic legal texts of the Shafii school, and religious scholars taught the Quran in Arabic.

The economies of the sultanates depended on trade. Sulu was a centre of trade in pearls, sea cucumbers, birds' nests and other products sought by Chinese merchants, and it had commercial ties with Borneo, the Moluccas and the Malay world. Maguindanao controlled the trade of the Pulangi valley and its rice and forest products. Both sultanates were also involved in the capture and sale of slaves, who were used as labourers, divers, rowers and soldiers, and as an object of trade.

The Spanish attempt to conquer the islands brought them into conflict with these states. The Spanish claimed sovereignty over the whole archipelago and sought to convert its peoples to Christianity, while the sultans sought to preserve their independence and their religion. The conflict was also commercial, since the Spanish sought to divert the trade of the region to Manila.

VII. The Raiding Seasons

From the late sixteenth century the Muslims of the south began to raid the coasts of the Visayas and Luzon. The raiders came in fleets of fast boats, called joangas, garays and vintas, and attacked the Christian villages that had grown up around the Spanish missions, taking captives and burning churches. The raids were most frequent in the season of the southwest monsoon, and they continued into the nineteenth century.

The first major raid came in 1599, when a fleet from Maguindanao and Sulu attacked the coasts of Panay and Negros and carried off several hundred captives. In the following decades the raids grew in scale, and the Spanish responded with punitive expeditions. The historian James Francis Warren has estimated that between two and three hundred thousand people were captured by raiders from the Sulu zone between 1770 and 1870, though the figures are uncertain.

The raids had religious as well as economic motives. The raiders sometimes described their attacks as a holy war against the Spanish and their Christian subjects, and they targeted churches and friars. Yet most historians, including Warren, emphasise the economic and political causes of the raiding, which was linked to the demand for labour in the expanding commercial economy of the Sulu sultanate and to the trade with China and the European powers. The Visayan and Luzon peoples who had converted to Christianity bore the brunt of the raids.

The captives were sold in the markets of Jolo and elsewhere, and many of them were put to work in the fisheries and the households of the datus. The practice of man-stealing was condemned in the Mosaic law in Exodus 21:16, and in the Greek Scriptures Paul includes kidnappers among the lawless in 1 Timothy 1:9-10. The Christian friars in the Philippines often cited such passages in their condemnations of the raids, while the Spanish themselves enslaved Moro captives taken in war until the practice was restricted by the Crown.

VIII. The Watchtowers and the Churches

To defend the coasts against the raids, the Spanish and the friars built stone watchtowers, called baluartes or bantayan, and fortified churches throughout the Visayas and the coasts of Luzon. The churches of the period were built with thick walls of coral stone and served as refuges for the population during raids. Many of these churches, such as those at Miagao on Panay, Baclayon on Bohol and Oslob on Cebu, survive to this day.

The friars also organised the defence of the villages. Some of them led their parishioners in battle against the raiders, and several were killed or captured. The Jesuits, who had missions in the Visayas and on the northern coast of Mindanao, were especially exposed to the raids, and their chronicles describe the burning of their missions and the capture of their converts.

IX. Corcuera's Campaigns

The most famous Spanish campaigns against the Moros of the seventeenth century were led by Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera, governor of the Philippines from 1635 to 1644. In 1637 Corcuera led an expedition against Sultan Muhammad Dipatuan Kudarat of Maguindanao, the most powerful ruler of Mindanao, who had united much of the island under his authority and had resisted the Spanish for many years. Corcuera captured Kudarat's fortress at Lamitan in March 1637, and the sultan retreated into the interior.

In 1638 Corcuera led a second expedition against Jolo, the capital of the sultanate of Sulu. After a siege of more than three months the Spanish captured the town, and the sultan fled. The Spanish established a garrison at Jolo, but they were unable to hold it, and they withdrew in 1646 after a treaty with the sultan.

On his return to Manila, Corcuera held a triumphal procession, and the Jesuits staged a play, written by the Jesuit Jerónimo Pérez, celebrating his victory. The campaigns of Corcuera became the subject of a genre of popular drama in the Philippines, the moro-moro or comedia, which depicted battles between Christians and Moros, usually ending with the victory of the Christians and the conversion of the Muslim characters. The moro-moro drew on the tradition of the plays of Moors and Christians performed in Spain since the late Middle Ages.

X. Kudarat

Sultan Kudarat, who ruled Maguindanao from about 1619 to 1671, is remembered as one of the most important figures in the history of the Muslim Philippines. Spanish chronicles record a speech in which Kudarat urged the datus of Lanao to resist the Spanish, warning them that the Spanish would make them slaves and take their lands, as they had done to the peoples of the north. The speech, as preserved in the Jesuit chronicle of Francisco Combés, may have been reworked by the chronicler, but it reflects the view of the conflict held by the Muslim rulers.

Kudarat recovered from the defeat of 1637, and in 1645 he made a treaty with the Spanish that recognised his authority over much of Mindanao and allowed the Jesuits to preach in his territory. He remained the dominant power on the island until his death. In the modern Philippines he is regarded as a national hero for his resistance to colonial rule, and a province and a city bear his name.

XI. The Fort at Zamboanga

In 1635, under Corcuera's predecessor Juan Cerezo de Salamanca, the Spanish built a fortress at Zamboanga, at the southwestern tip of Mindanao, to control the passage between the Sulu sea and the Celebes sea and to defend the Visayas against raiders. The fortress, the Real Fuerza de San José, was designed by the Jesuit engineer Melchor de Vera and was garrisoned by Spanish and Filipino soldiers. The Jesuits established a mission at Zamboanga, which became a base for their missions on Mindanao.

In 1662 the Chinese warlord Zheng Chenggong, known to Europeans as Koxinga, who had taken Taiwan from the Dutch, threatened to invade Manila. The Spanish withdrew the garrison of Zamboanga in 1663 to defend the capital, and the fort was abandoned for more than half a century. Its abandonment was followed by a period of relative peace in the south, during which the sultanates grew in power and wealth.

The Spanish rebuilt the fortress in 1718 under the governor Fernando Manuel de Bustillo Bustamante, and dedicated it to Our Lady of the Pillar, Nuestra Señora del Pilar. The rebuilt fort, known as Fort Pilar, was besieged by a large Moro army under the datu Dalasi of Bulig in 1720, but it held out. The shrine of Our Lady of the Pillar in the fort became a centre of devotion for the Christian population of Zamboanga, and it remains so today.

The city of Zamboanga that grew up around the fort developed a distinctive culture. Its inhabitants, drawn from the Visayas, Luzon, Mexico and Spain, came to speak Chavacano, a Spanish-based creole language that is still spoken in the city, and the population remained largely Christian in a region where Muslims formed the majority. The fort became a symbol of the Spanish and Christian presence in the south.

XII. Prayer and War

Both sides understood the conflict in religious terms, though neither was solely motivated by religion. For the Spanish the war against the Moros was a war against the enemies of the faith, and the friars preached that the soldiers who died in it were martyrs. The chronicles of the friars interpreted the victories of the Spanish as signs of divine favour and the defeats as punishments for sin, in a manner that drew on the historical books of the Hebrew Scriptures, such as the account of Israel's defeat at Ai in Joshua 7:10-12.

For the Muslims of the south, the war against the Spanish could be understood as a jihad, a struggle in defence of Islam. The religious scholars of the sultanates taught that it was the duty of Muslims to resist the unbelievers who sought to destroy their religion, and some of the raiders took vows to fight to the death. Yet the sultans also made treaties with the Spanish, traded with them, and allied with them against their rivals, and the relations between the two sides were shaped as much by politics and commerce as by religion.

Some friars questioned the methods of the war. The Jesuit Francisco Combés, in his History of Mindanao and Jolo published in 1667, described the cruelty of both sides and argued that the conversion of the Moros should be pursued by persuasion and example. He cited the instruction of Jesus to Peter to return his sword to its place, in Matthew 26:52, and the counsel to live at peace with all people as far as it depends on us, in Romans 12:18. These arguments echoed the debates over the conquest of the Americas.

XIII. The Baptism of a Sultan

In the eighteenth century the Spanish attempted to extend their influence in the south by diplomacy and missionary work. In 1748 Sultan Azim ud-Din I of Sulu, who had been deposed by his brother Bantilan, came to Manila seeking Spanish support. In 1750 he was baptised in the town of Paniqui in Pangasinan, taking the name Fernando I, with the governor-general, the bishop-elect José de Arandía and the Spanish authorities as witnesses.

The baptism of the sultan was celebrated in Manila as a triumph of the faith, but it was viewed with suspicion by many Spaniards, who doubted his sincerity, and it was regarded as an apostasy by many of his own subjects. In 1751 the Spanish arrested Azim ud-Din on suspicion of treachery, after letters were intercepted that appeared to show him plotting with the Moros. He was imprisoned in Manila until the British occupied the city in 1762 during the Seven Years' War, and he was restored to the throne of Sulu by the British in 1764. He reverted to Islam on his return.

The episode illustrates the difficulty of conversion in a context of war. The Christian Scriptures present the gospel as a message to be accepted freely, as in the words of Jesus that he stands at the door and knocks, in Revelation 3:20, and the friars themselves debated whether a conversion obtained under political pressure could be genuine. The case of Azim ud-Din became a cautionary example in Spanish discussions of missionary policy in the south.

XIV. The British and the Sulu Sultanate

The British occupation of Manila from 1762 to 1764 revealed the weakness of Spanish power in the islands. The British East India Company sought to establish a trading post in the Sulu zone, and in 1763 the sultan of Sulu ceded to the British the island of Balambangan, off the northern tip of Borneo, where the company established a settlement in 1773. The settlement was attacked and destroyed by Sulu forces in 1775.

The growth of the British country trade with China in the late eighteenth century increased the demand for the products of the Sulu zone, such as sea cucumbers and birds' nests, which were sold in Canton. The sultanate of Sulu prospered, and the demand for labour to collect these products fuelled the raiding of the Philippine coasts. The raids reached their greatest extent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the Iranun and Balangingi Samal raiders from the islands of the Sulu zone attacked not only the Philippines but also the coasts of Borneo, Sulawesi, Java and the Malay peninsula.

XV. The Steam Gunboats

The balance of power in the south was changed in the nineteenth century by the introduction of steam warships. In 1848 the governor-general Narciso Clavería led an expedition with three steam gunboats, purchased in Britain, against the island of Balangingi, the main base of the Samal raiders. The Spanish captured the fortifications after fierce fighting. Several hundred defenders were killed, and the survivors were deported to the Cagayan valley in northern Luzon.

In 1851 a Spanish expedition under Antonio de Urbiztondo attacked Jolo and captured the town. The sultan signed a treaty recognising Spanish sovereignty, though the Sulu understanding of the treaty differed from the Spanish one, and the Spanish did not establish a garrison. The raids continued on a smaller scale, and in 1876 a large expedition under the governor-general José Malcampo captured Jolo and established a permanent Spanish garrison there. The Spanish built a walled town at Jolo, and it remained a Spanish post until 1899.

The Protocol of Sulu of 1885, signed by Spain, Britain and Germany, recognised Spanish sovereignty over the Sulu archipelago, while Spain renounced its claims to northern Borneo, which had been leased by the sultan of Sulu to a British syndicate in 1878. The status of this territory, now the Malaysian state of Sabah, remains the subject of a dispute between the Philippines and Malaysia.

XVI. The Juramentados

In the later nineteenth century the Spanish garrisons in the south faced a form of attack that they called juramentado, from the Spanish word for one who has taken an oath. A Muslim man, having taken a vow before a religious leader, would prepare himself by ritual washing and prayer, and then attack Christians with a blade until he was killed. The Tausug term was parang sabil, war in the path of God. The attacks were a response to the Spanish occupation of Jolo and to the defeat of the sultanate in open war.

The Spanish responded with harsh measures, including the public display and burial of the bodies of juramentados with the carcasses of pigs, intended to deter attackers who believed that they would enter paradise. These measures were also used by the American forces after 1899. The phenomenon has been studied by historians and anthropologists, such as Thomas Kiefer, as a form of resistance to colonial rule shaped by Islamic and local traditions.

XVII. The Missions on Mindanao

The Spanish missions on Mindanao were largely confined to the northern and eastern coasts and the Zamboanga peninsula. The Jesuits, who had been expelled from the Spanish dominions in 1768, returned to the Philippines in 1859 and were given charge of the missions of Mindanao. They established missions among the non-Muslim peoples of the island, such as the Manobo, Bagobo and Subanen, and founded towns along the coasts. Their missionaries, such as Pablo Pastells, wrote detailed accounts of the peoples and the geography of the island.

The conversion of the Muslim population made little progress. The Jesuits reported few conversions among the Maguindanao, Maranao and Tausug, and their efforts were directed mainly at the non-Muslim peoples of the interior. The Muslims of the south remained Muslim, and the boundary between Christian and Muslim communities that had been established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries persisted until the end of Spanish rule.

XVIII. The Campaigns in Lanao and the Pulangi

In the second half of the nineteenth century the Spanish extended their military presence into the interior of Mindanao. They established a post at Cotabato on the lower Pulangi in 1861, reducing the sultanate of Maguindanao to a client of the Spanish government, and they built a line of forts along the river. The datu Uto of Buayan, the most powerful ruler of the upper valley, resisted Spanish expansion in the 1870s and 1880s, and the Spanish under the governor-general Emilio Terrero mounted an expedition against him in 1886–1887.

The Maranao people of the Lake Lanao region, who had never been subject to the sultans of Maguindanao, resisted the Spanish most fiercely. In 1891 the governor-general Valeriano Weyler, who later became notorious for his methods in Cuba, led an expedition of about twelve hundred men from Iligan which took and destroyed the stronghold of Marawi in August 1891, but the Spanish withdrew after the Maranao under Amai Pakpak regrouped. In March 1895 a larger force under Ramón Blanco, with about five thousand troops, took Marawi again after heavy fighting in which Amai Pakpak was killed, and transported gunboats overland in pieces to the lake. The Maranao continued to resist, and the Spanish presence in the region remained limited until the end of their rule.

These campaigns were fought with modern rifles and artillery against warriors armed largely with blades and a few firearms, and they caused heavy losses among the Maranao and Maguindanao. The Jesuits who accompanied the expeditions hoped to open the region to missionary work, and they founded a few missions in the interior, but the conversions remained few.

XIX. The Scriptures in the Philippines

The Spanish friars translated catechisms, prayers and devotional works into the languages of the Philippines from the sixteenth century. The first book printed in the Philippines, the Doctrina Christiana of 1593, contained prayers and the Ten Commandments in Spanish and Tagalog, the Tagalog printed in both Latin letters and the native baybayin script. Yet, as in the Americas, the friars did not produce complete translations of the Bible into Philippine languages, in keeping with the restrictions on vernacular Scripture after the Council of Trent.

The first translations of parts of the Bible into Philippine languages were made in the nineteenth century. The Gospel of Luke was translated into Pangasinan and Ilocano by the former Dominican Alonso Lallave, whose work was published by the British and Foreign Bible Society, and Lallave was arrested and expelled by the Spanish authorities. Complete Bibles in Tagalog and other Philippine languages were published by Protestant Bible societies in the early twentieth century, after the end of Spanish rule. The history of these translations is part of the wider history of the Bible in the Iberian world, discussed in The Bible in the Atlantic Colonies.

The Muslims of the south used the Quran in Arabic and religious texts in the local languages written in Arabic script, known as jawi. They also knew the figures of the Hebrew Scriptures, such as Abraham, Moses and David, through the Quran and the Islamic traditions about the prophets. In the Sulu tarsilas and the oral literature of the Maguindanao and Maranao, these figures appear alongside the heroes of local legend.

XX. The End of Spanish Rule

The Philippine Revolution against Spain broke out in 1896, and in 1898, during the Spanish–American War, the United States destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. By the Treaty of Paris of December 1898, Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States. The Spanish garrisons in the south were withdrawn in 1899, and the American army occupied Jolo and Zamboanga.

The Americans signed a treaty with the sultan of Sulu, the Bates Agreement of 1899, which recognised the sultan's authority over internal affairs in return for his acceptance of American sovereignty, but the agreement was abrogated in 1904. The Americans then fought a series of campaigns in the south, including the battles of Bud Dajo in 1906 and Bud Bagsak in 1913, in which many Muslim men, women and children were killed. The conflict between the central government and the Muslims of the south has continued in different forms into the modern period.

XXI. The Moro Wars in Historical Memory

The Spanish–Moro wars have been remembered differently by Christians and Muslims in the Philippines. In the Christian north the moro-moro plays and the devotions associated with the fortress churches preserved the memory of the raids and of the victories of the Spanish. In the Muslim south the wars were remembered as a struggle for independence and faith, and figures such as Kudarat became symbols of resistance.

Modern historians, such as Cesar Adib Majul in his Muslims in the Philippines of 1973, have emphasised the political and religious continuity of the Muslim resistance to colonial rule, while others, such as James Francis Warren, have emphasised the economic dimensions of the raiding and its connections with the world economy. The study of the conflict has also been shaped by the contemporary relations between the Muslim south and the Philippine state, and by efforts to reach a lasting peace.

The wars show the continuity between the religious conflicts of the Iberian peninsula and the conflicts of the Iberian empires overseas. The same language of Moors and Christians, crusade and conversion, was carried from Granada to Mexico and from Mexico to Manila. The parallel conflicts in Japan, where Spanish and Portuguese missionaries met a very different response, are described in The Shimabara Rebellion.

XXII. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.