Chapter 27
The City
Manila and Laguna de Bay
Legazpi gave Manila the title of a Spanish city on 3 June 1571, and on 24 June, St John’s Day, named its first city council: two alcaldes, a chief constable and twelve councillors. 24 June is kept as the date of Manila’s founding.
When was Manila founded?
As a Spanish city, in June 1571. Miguel López de Legazpi gave Manila the title of city on 3 June 1571 and appointed its first city council on 24 June 1571, which is celebrated as Manila Day. Maynila itself was much older: a fortified Muslim trading town, ruled by Rajah Sulayman, that traded with China, Borneo and Japan long before the Spaniards came.
24 June 1571
On 3 June 1571, the day of the battle, Legazpi gives Manila the title of a city. On 24 June, St John’s Day, he names its first city council: two *alcaldes*, or magistrates, a chief constable, and twelve *regidores*, or councillors. The next day he names a notary for the council and two more for the courts.
A week after landing he had already promised land and *repartimientos*, grants of the tribute of the people, to every Spaniard who would settle as a citizen. Captains, soldiers and gentlemen all sign up. A year later, one of them wrote, “there are very few who have *repartimientos* or even homesteads.”
The Spanish city rises on the ashes of Sulayman’s town, at the mouth of the Pasig River, where Intramuros, the walled city, stands today.
August 1571
Up the Pasig River, a town called Cainta, of about a thousand people, sits behind a wall and thick groves of bamboo, with the river looping round it. Its chiefs come down to Manila to make friends, then change their minds and send word that they would rather fight. If the Spaniards come up the river, they say, they will see how the people of Cainta throw them out.
On 15 August Juan de Salcedo goes up the river with a hundred soldiers and three heavy guns. He waits three days, asking them to make peace. They answer that on the day of battle it will be seen whose god is stronger. On the third day the Spaniards break in. Three of them are killed. Four hundred people of Cainta, men and women, are killed.
After Cainta, the towns around the great lake of Laguna de Bay make peace. Salcedo crosses the mountains to the gold mines of Paracale, on the far coast of Luzon, and comes back through the rains.
April 1572
In April 1572 one of the Spaniards in Manila writes an account of these years, and he takes care to correct the stories told in Mexico. The Muslims of Luzon are not like the Moors of Barbary, he says; most of them know little of Islam beyond not eating pork. Mexico had heard that Maynila held eighty thousand people: subtract seventy-eight thousand, he writes, and you have the truth.
He describes the people as he sees them. A village may have five or ten chiefs, each with his own followers and slaves; besides them are the *timawa*, free men, who follow a chief in war but owe him little else. The richest man is the greatest. He asks how the people of Luzon learned to cast cannon. They say it was from two captives of the first fleets, a Fleming and a Basque. He thinks it more likely they learned it from the traders of Borneo.
Ships from China are coming to Manila more often now, and with richer goods.