The Philippines’ second island is a land of lakes by name
Mindanao is the Philippines’ second-largest island after Luzon and the world’s seventh-most populous. The 2020 census counted 26,252,442 people on the main island and more across its group, including the Sulu Archipelago, making it the country’s major breadbasket.
Six regions administer the south: Zamboanga Peninsula, Northern Mindanao, Caraga, Davao, Soccsksargen, and autonomous Bangsamoro. Davao City led 2020 urban counts with 1,776,949 residents, ahead of Zamboanga, Cagayan de Oro, General Santos, and Butuan. Roughly two-thirds of residents identify as Christian; Islam is the largest minority, variously reported around 15–25 percent and concentrated among ethnic groups that dominate the national Muslim population.
Maguindanao etymology glues min (past-tense verb prefix) to danao (lake), yielding “land where lakes are found,” tied to the old Sultanate of Maguindanao. Archaeology indicates human activity about ten thousand years ago; Austronesians spread around 1500 BC. Subanon settlement on Zamboanga is placed in the Neolithic circa 4500–2000 BC. From about 900 AD Hindu–Buddhist currents brought Kawi and baybayin scripts; the Butuan Rajahnate appears as a tenth-century Chinese tributary.
Islam arrived in the fourteenth century via Malay Archipelago merchants; the Philippines’ first mosque rose mid-century at Simunul, Tawi-Tawi. Sulu, Lanao, and Maguindanao sultanates crystallised around the sixteenth century. Pigafetta wrote of “Maingdano” in 1521; Ruy López de Villalobos reached the island on 2 February 1543 and dubbed it Caesarea Caroli. Spanish forts later ringed the coasts while sultanates resisted inland. Zamboanga City, garrisoned by soldiers from Peru and Mexico, became the most heavily fortified outpost, while Ternate in the Moluccas sent fighters to help the Mindanao sultanates against Manila.
Spain sold the whole archipelago to the United States for $20 million under the 1898 Treaty of Paris. In 1910 an American envoy in Copenhagen, Maurice Francis Egan, even floated a swap in which Denmark would receive Mindanao and Palawan while Washington took Greenland and the Danish Caribbean islands, a scheme that died when the First World War broke out. Japanese troops invaded in April 1942 and burned towns from Davao to Butuan before the Battle of Mindanao ended the occupation.
Source: Mindanao
