Princess Kandarapa

Kandarapa was a native Filipina princess of the Kingdom of Tondo in the island of Luzon during the 16th century Spanish conquest of the Philippines, and the wife of the Spanish conquistador Juan de Salcedo. She was described as a beautiful young woman who came from a tribal royal family. Kandarapa was the niece of Rajah Lakandula, the king of Tondo, and the daughter of Bunao Lakandula's sister, Princess Salanta, who became a widow at a young age.^[1] She was named after the native Filipino Kandarapa bird (known as the Philippine nightjar), a lark that frequently stayed amongst the rice padies, whose songs she imitated with her beautiful voice.^[1] Her uncle, the king, resisted conversion to Islam and remained to his native Filipino (Hindu-Malay) religion of his forebears and although Tondo was an older kingdom, it ceded power to Manila which was established as a satellite state subservient to the Sultanate of Brunei after a Bruneian settlement of Luzon. Islam was brought to the islands by preachers that had travelled from the islands of Borneo and Indonesia. During this period, Islam had slowly began converting the native tribes of Luzon. Lakandula, desirous of forging an alliance with the much more powerful Rajah of Macabebe, Tariq Sulayman, betrothed her niece to the Rajah of Macabebe, an arrangement Princess Kandarapa disapproved because he already had multiple wives from previous marriages as a result of his Islamic tradition.^[2] Had the Spaniards arrived a century later, the Philippines would have been an Islamic country.

Afterwards, the balance of power between the state of Manila and the kingdom of Tondo came to a change with the arrival of the Spaniards, that had sailed from Mexico, who were firmly against Muslim interests as Christian Spain had freshly finished the Reconquista in their homeland, expelling the Arab settlements of the Emirate of Granada upon their invasion of the Christian Spanish kingdom in the 8th century.^[3]

When Kandarapa was bathing in the Pasig River with a retinue of her servant-maidens was when she encountered the Mexican-born Spanish soldier Juan de Salcedo. While the rest of her entourage fled in fear of the man, she froze there staring at the erstwhile Spaniard, while the conquistador, in kind, stood there too, "appreciating' her feminine figure, after briefly beholding her, he politely excused himself to do an errand.^[1]