Antonio de Morga Sánchez Garay (November 29, 1559 – July 21, 1636) was a Spanish soldier, lawyer and a high-ranking colonial official for 43 years, in the Philippines (1594 to 1604), New Spain and Peru, where he was president of the Real Audiencia for 20 years. He was also a historian. After being reassigned to Mexico, he published the book Sucesos de las islas Filipinas in 1609, considered one of the most important works on the early history of the Spanish colonization of the Philippines.[1] As Deputy Governor in the Philippines, he restored the audencia. He took over the function of judge or oidor. He also took command of Spanish ships in a 1600 naval battle against Dutch corsairs, but suffered defeat and barely survived.
His history was first published in English in 1868; numerous editions have been published in English, including 1907. It has also been reprinted in Spanish and other languages. TO the Filipinos: In Noli Me Tangere I started to sketch the present state of our native land. But the effect which my effort produced made me realize that, before attempting to unroll before your eyes the other pictures which were to follow, it was necessary first to post you on the past. So only can you fairly judge the present and estimate how much progress has been made during the three centuries (of Spanish rule). 1890.)
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.
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 be, we can all pass to the study of the future.
JOSE RIZAL, Europe, 1889. Governor Antonio de Morga was not only the first to write but also the first to publish a Philippine history. This statement has regard to the concise and concrete form in which our author has treated the matter. Father Chirino's work, printed at Rome in 1604, is rather a chronicle of the Missions than a history of the Philippines; still it contains a great deal of valuable material on usages and customs. The worthy Jesuit in fact admits that he abandoned writing a political history because Morga had already done so, so one must infer that he had seen the work in manuscript before leaving the Islands.
By the Christian religion, Doctor Morga appears to mean the Roman Catholic which by fire and sword he would preserve in its purity in the Philippines. Nevertheless in other lands, notably in Flanders, these means were ineffective to keep the church unchanged, or to maintain its supremacy, or even to hold its subjects.
