Two kings, two manuscripts

IN my column last week (“Humabon: Quintessential Filipino pulitiko,” May 8, 2021), I wrote that Rajah Colambu was the King of Mazawa. This might confuse some readers because in some history books, this king who figured prominently in the Philippine part in the story of the first circumnavigation of the world in 1521 was identified as the King of Butuan-Calaghan and not of Mazawa.

What I failed to write in my column, since it was not about the Butuan issue anyway, was that there is still confusion about which king was which. Although my column usually avoids trivialities and only wants to find meaning in history, in the interest of readers, I will go at some length to explain why there is such a confusion and to illustrate how wrong it is to think that deciphering history from primary sources if you are a nonspecialist is easy, especially if they were written in the days of old.

That is what I realized when in 2018-2019, I began to actually read the translations of the primary account by Antonio Pigafetta of the Magellan

expedition. Although detailed and comprehensive in describing the culture of our ancestors, the very first European account to do so, the sentences can be flowery and reading them can be tricky. This was the prevalent style in Europe at that time.

Worse, I found out that there is no extant manuscript of Pigafetta from his time and no contemporaneous printed version that exists today. Two of the four earliest manuscripts of the account are the Ambrosiana Manuscript and the Nancy Codex.

The Italian version is found in the Ambrosiana Library and was transcribed from an earlier manuscript by Carlo Amoretti in 1800 (from which was based the most accessible English translation by James Alexander Robertson, of “Blair and Robertson” fame for Filipino historians). It can be assumed that since Pigafetta was a Venetian nobleman, the original manuscript was in Italian.

Yet what complicates things is that there are French versions of Pigafetta, two of them at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the earliest one (earlier even than the Ambrosiana) is an illuminated manuscript gifted to a bishop (also known as the Nancy Codex, by no means related to the good senator from Makati) now stored in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. (This was translated into English by Raleigh Ashlin Skelton and is also known as the Yale-Beinecke manuscript.)

It is said that Pigafetta spoke both Italian and French, and therefore it is possible that he wrote in both languages during his lifetime, but this is hard to prove yet. Still, both the Ambrosiana Manuscript and the Nancy Codex are held by scholars in equal regard to be faithful to the original having been adjudged as very similar to each other apart from some slight nuances. But one of those slight differences concerns the names of the two brother kings who went to meet the Magellan expedition in Mazaua.

The way I understand it, the Robertson translation of the Italian talked about the first king who welcomed the Magellan expedition and then about a second one, a brother from another island. Then it describes the land of the second king and goes on to talk about how fine-looking he was. He was painted and that his land was called Butuan-Calaghan (Caraga). Then it says, “The name of the first king is Raia Colambu, and the second Raia Siaui.” Therefore, the first king from Mazaua was Colambu and the King of Butuan was the handsome Siaui.

But in the Skelton translation of the French, they talk about the same things, but the paragraph ends with “the aforementioned painted one is named Raia Calambu (sic) and the other Raia Siaui,” which makes the painted rajah just mentioned to be Calambu, the King of Butuan, and the “other,” Siaui now becomes the King of Mazaua. Notice that the problem