Note 9 — EVENTS IN FILIPINAS, 1739–1762

The Jesuits had been urging our Catholic monarch Phelipe V, and constrained him to the inglorious act of writing to the kings of Joló and Mindanao; the governor sent ambassadors to deliver his letters and make an alliance with the Moros.9 Those petty kings were greatly delighted at the honor thus done them by a king so great as that of España, and, in order to gratify him by complying with his requests to them, consented to receive missionaries into their countries. A Jesuit father went to Mindanao, but, seeing that the chiefs were restless and the king had little power to restrain them, he feared that they would take his life, and abandoned his mission; and he fled for refuge to the fort of Zamboanga. In Joló two Jesuits began to sow the seed of the gospel,10 but gathered little fruit because the panditas of the Moro religion raised a fierce opposition to them, and the leading men of the kingdom were not willing that the missionaries should preach a different faith from that which they had inherited from their ancestors. In these circumstances the king of Joló, Mahomad Alimudin, desired to go to visit the governor of Manila; but the Jesuit fathers were displeased at this resolution, because they feared that the king’s brother Bantilan, an enemy to the Christians, would be left in command. From this resulted jealousies and disturbances in the court, and the minds of men became so inflamed that some one gave the sultan, or king, a lance-thrust.11 Affairs were thrown into so bad condition that the fathers of the Society, not considering themselves safe in Joló, precipitately retreated to Zamboanga. The sultan Alimudin likewise fled from his kingdom in order to go to Manila, to seek aid from the governor in order to punish the rebels who had given him the lance-thrust and conspired against his person.12 He reached Zamboanga,13 and there the Spaniards furnished him with means to proceed to Manila; he entered that city with a retinue of seventy persons, with whom he was lodged in a house in the suburb of Binondo, which was kept at his disposal at the cost of the royal treasury. Afterward he made his public entry [into Manila], and was received with great ostentation; the leading persons in Manila visited him, and presented to him gold chains, robes, diamond rings, sashes, and gold-headed canes—so that he was astonished at so much magnificence, and at the generosity of the Spaniards, for whatever he needed for the support of his household was supplied to him from the royal treasury.14