One may credit Dr. José Rizal (1861–1896) for being the first to systematically investigate and question the history of colonial Spanish rule in the Philippines as it had been recounted by Spaniards since the time of the conquest. His inquiry opens our own, because it was the first to speculate on the possibility that Spanish rule [dominio] in its overseas frontier colony was, in fact, a fiction. Rizal's original intention (in 1888) was to write a book on Philippine history: lack of resources and time forced him to settle for republishing (with extensive annotations) the first history of the Philippines not written by a religious missionary. The work in question, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas [Historical Events of the Philippine Islands] was originally published in 1609 by colonial high court official [oídor] Antonio de Morga; and dealt with the first thirty-odd years of Spanish rule in the Philippines following the period of conquest and treaties between Admiral Miguel López de Legazpi and various native chiefs throughout the islands. Yet the length, detail, and oftentimes exasperated tone of Rizal's annotations upstage the presentation of the original text: boldly calling into question the truthfulness of colonial histories and documents as a whole. One such annotation by Rizal, which he repeats later in another footnote, serves as the epigraph to this work: