In Part 5 of this chronological review on why Mazaua got displaced by Limasawa as the site of the first Holy Mass in the Philippine archipelago, I returned to the year 1522 when the Magellanic Expedition completed the very first circumnavigation of the globe. I did this to verify troubling variances and assertions in printed narratives that started coming out about the voyage barely 45 days after the lone returning ship Victoria reached Seville with 18 survivors, among them the chronicler Antonio Pigafetta.
Pigafetta had promptly presented to the Roman Emperor King Charles V a copy of his vividly detailed draft narratives about the Magellanic Expedition. But with no copyright yet for his planned book to ward off plagiarists, Pigafetta was swiftly overtaken by a very well-connected and much more ambitious writer who set his goal to be the very first to publish a book about that record-setting voyage.
The first edition in Latin of De Moluccis Insulis (1523) and its author Maximilianus Transylvanus (1490-1538). The Roman Emperor King Charles V’s enterprising courtier got his book’s first-person manuscript ready within 45 days upon chronicler Antonio Pigafetta's return to Spain as Magellanic
voyage survivor, getting it published less than four months later.
That man was Maximilianus Transylvanus, a wealthy courtier of the Roman Emperor. The year before, he had married a niece of the Lisbon merchant Cristóbal de Haro, Magellan’s friend and financial backer. Transylvanus had no previous experience in history writing, but had written Latin poetry and published a work in Latin describing the reception nominating King Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519.
Transylvanus started by interviewing three of Magellan’s surviving crewmembers. Their testimony of having harvested rice in adjoining Butuan in 1521 during the fleet’s Mazaua stopover gave greater credibility to Transylvanus’ highly assertive first-person narrative,
“De Moluccis Insulis.” He first presented the tract in letter form on September 8, 1522 to the Cardinal-Archbishop Matthäus Lang von Wellenburg of Salzburg, then had it printed in Cologne just three months after.
With Transylvanus’ astute promotion,
“De Moluccis Insulis” became a bestseller. It came out with a second edition in Paris in July 1523 and with a third in Rome in November that same year, followed by translations in Italian and other languages in 1563 and 1588 all the way to 1606 and 1613.
But did Transylvanus prove to be a reliable narrator of his first-person book about the Magellanic voyage? Was he faithful to Pigafetta’s eyewitness testimony at least about the Magellanic fleet’s sojourn in the Philippine archipelago?
Unfortunately, Transylvanus’ narrative fumbled right off after the fleet had crossed the Pacific Ocean:
“After sailing for three months and twenty days with good fortune over this ocean, and having traversed a distance almost too long to estimate, having had a strong wind aft almost the whole of the time... (o)ur men took in water at
Acacan (Homonhon), and then sailed towards
Selani (Suluan), but a storm caught them so that they could not land there, but they were driven to another island called
Massana (Mazaua), where the king of three islands resides. From this island they sailed to
Subuth (Cebu), a very large island, and well supplied, where having come to a friendly arrangement with the chief they immediately landed to celebrate divine worship according to Christian usage…”
(Italicization mine)From other duly verified accounts of the Magellan’s sojourn, the only evidence of Transylvanus’ grasp of its historiography was that he correctly identified Massana as the island where the fleet anchored after a storm blew them off course. Presumably, Transylvanus had at least remembered the place name “Massana” from the draft narrative that Pigafetta had presented to the Roman emperor. But after mentioning Massana, everything in Transylvanus’ hurried retelling of the Magellanic sojourn got seriously garbled.
By chopping off more or less 5,000 words in Pigafetta’s rambling narrative in French, Transylvanus made it appear that Magellan’s fleet did absolutely nothing in Mazaua. They translocated instantly to Cebu, where Ferdinand Magellan ordered the celebration of Holy Mass, then precipitated a feud among the local chieftains that led to his being slain in the Battle of Mactan on April 27, 1521.
(Next:
Getting our history right after 500 years – Part 7) May 7, 2021
Read this article online in
The Manila Times:
“Getting our history right after 500 years - 6”To listen to the audio version of this article, click the encircled double triangle logo in its online posting in
The Manila Times.
ALL PARTS OF THIS HISTORY SERIES:1.
Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - Part 12.
Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - Part 23.
Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - Part 3 4.
Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - Part 45.
Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - Part 5 6.
Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - Part 6 THIS POST
PART 7 TO FOLLOW MAY 6, 2021 
