Before Blumentritt, our Hapsburg past

2026 marks the 80th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the Philippines and Austria. Curiously, it is older—by a year—than our formal diplomatic relations with Spain, which count only 79 years despite our 333 years under Spanish colonial rule. Long before the Philippines became an independent republic, countries like Japan, Germany, Austria, and England maintained consulates in Manila to oversee their commercial interests and protect their citizens. All these ongoing and forthcoming commemorations offer a great reason for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Filipino historians to collaborate on cultural and public diplomacy.

It helps that our national hero, José Rizal, traveled and wrote extensively. Every place he visited and every foreign national he befriended or corresponded with provides a historical link to the host countries where Filipino diplomats are posted today. When Ambassador Evangelina Lourdes Bernas invited me to speak on early Philippine-Austrian relations, I thought it would be a piece of cake: the friendship between Rizal and Ferdinand Blumentritt would be more than enough. However, I like a challenge.

France traces its historic links to the Philippines all the way back to the French crew members of the Magellan expedition—and, as one former ambassador playfully suggested, there might even have been early fruits of Philippine-French relations in 1521 Cebu. Unfortunately, there were no Austrians on Magellan’s ships.

Undaunted, I consulted the two-volume index of the 55-volume compilation of translated Spanish documents dating from 1492 to 1898—known to Filipino historians simply as “Blair & Robertson.” I found three pages of references on the Dutch, about half a page on the French, a third of a page on the English, and only three very brief references to Austria. Surely, there had to be more somewhere.

It is not well-known that the first book on the Philippines was published in 1523 in Cologne, Germany, known to bibliophiles and historians as “De Moluccis Insulis.” It contains an account of the first circumnavigation of the globe, including Magellan’s death in Mactan in 1521. Maximilianus Transylvanus, secretary to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, interviewed the survivors of the Victoria and shared it in a letter to the Cardinal-Archbishop of Salzburg. That letter was later published as “De Moluccis Insulis” and can be considered one of the earliest historic links between Austria and the Philippines.

Textbook history tells us that Magellan named the islands “Islas de San Lázaro” because they were first sighted on March 16, 1521—the feast day of St. Lazarus. The name “Felipenas” or “Filipinas” was bestowed by Ruy López de Villalobos in 1543. He named the islands of Leyte and Samar “Filipinas” in honor of Philip, Prince of Asturias and son of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (who was also Charles I, or “Carlos Primero,” of Spain—not the brandy label). Villalobos named Mindanao “Caesarea Caroli” for Charles V, but that name didn’t catch on the way “Filipinas” did, eventually expanding from Leyte and Samar to encompass the entire archipelago. Through Charles V and Philip II, the Philippines and Austria share a Habsburg past.

At first glance, all this seems like clutching at straws, but searching for historical connections is second nature to me. Aside from the Habsburgs, Austria and the Philippines share another early connection through two Jesuits: Georg Joseph Kamel (1661–1706), who arrived in the Philippines in 1688, and Pavel Klein (1652–1717), who arrived in 1682 and served as Jesuit provincial superior from 1708 to 1712. In recognition of Kamel’s work documenting Philippine flora and fauna, the Camellia flower was named after him. His reports, illustrated with his own drawings, are preserved in the Natural History Museum in London. These drawings are fascinating: he supplied the earliest known depiction of the tarsier, and in one illustration of a beetle, he provided both the Latin scientific nomenclature and the local Tagalog name, “Hoang.” Kamel worked at the Jesuit pharmacy in Intramuros, where he dispensed medicines not just to walk-in patients in Manila but also sent them as far as the Visayas.

When former Czech Ambassador Jaroslav Olša asked me for references to “Pavel Klein,” I couldn’t find him in the Spanish sources because in them he became “Pablo Clain!” This Jesuit left a lasting mark on Philippine linguistics and medicine. Clain’s research on Tagalog was later utilized by the Jesuits Juan de Noceda and Pedro de Sanlucar in their landmark “Vocabulario de la lengua tagala” (1754). He also translated devotional texts into Tagalog and published a manual of “simple remedies for various ailments” in 1712. In this work, he listed local terms across three Philippine languages. For instance, for “Aurius sordes unctuose”—or earwax (cerilla del oído)—he provided “Antotoli” (Tagalog), “Aioli” (Bikol), and “Luga” (Pampango).

See Also

Why postpone the BSKE again?

There are so many historical facts, figures, and oddities I knew nothing about until I started digging into early Philippine-Austrian relations. Seek and you will find.

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