History of the Philippines (1521–1898)
The history of the Philippines from 1521 to 1898, also known as the Spanish colonial period, was a period during which Spain controlled the Philippine islands as the Captaincy General of the Philippines, initially under New Spain until Mexican independence in 1821, which gave Madrid direct control over the area. It was also known as Spanish East Indies to the colonialists. It started with the arrival in 1521 of European explorer Ferdinand Magellan sailing for Spain, which heralded the period when the Philippines was a colony of the Spanish Empire, and ended with the outbreak of the Philippine Revolution in 1898, which marked the beginning of the American colonial era of Philippine history.
History of the Philippines
Over the next several decades, other Spanish expeditions were dispatched to the islands. In 1543, Ruy López de Villalobos led an expedition to the islands and gave the name Las Islas Filipinas (after Philip II of Spain) to the islands of Samar and Leyte. The name was then extended to the entire archipelago later on in the Spanish era.
European colonization began in earnest when Spanish explorer Miguel López de Legazpi arrived from Mexico in 1565 and formed the first European settlements in Cebu. Beginning with just five ships and five hundred men accompanied by Augustinian monks, and further strengthened in 1567 by two hundred soldiers, he was able to repel the Portuguese and create the foundations for the colonization of the Archipelago. In 1571, the Spanish, their Latin-American recruits and their Filipino (Visayan) allies, commanded by able conquistadors such as Mexico-born Juan de Salcedo, attacked and occupied the kingdom of Tondo as well as Maynila, a vassal-state of the Brunei Sultanate, establishing Manila as the capital of the Spanish East Indies.