The Philippines was home to various complex societies well before European contact. The larger societies centered on entrepots such as Manila in Luzon, Cebu in the Visayas, Butuan and Cotobato in Mindanao, and Jolo in the Sulu Archipelago where trade could be funneled and directed. They weren't kingdoms in the European or Chinese sense; more like federations of settlements (barangay) that banded together for mutual defense and commerce. And because the population was sparse, it was manpower, not territory, that was considered highly valuable. Raiding other settlements (pangangayaw) for captives was typical of many of these societies.
Initially, Hindu-Buddhist beliefs reached the Philippines from Indianized states in what's now Indonesia and Malaysia. The first written record about the Philippines in the 900s CE is in fact worded in a mix of Old Tagalog, Old Malay, and Sanskrit. But through deepening interactions with Muslim traders, Islam was adopted by some ethnolinguistic groups leading to the creation of sultanates in the Southern Philippines starting in the 1400s. Two of these - Sulu and Maguindanao - still operate as ceremonial institutions today.
Many of these polities participated within the Nanhai or South China Sea network. Records from the Song and Yuan dynasties of China mention dealings with the people of Ma-i in either modern Mindoro or Laguna; as well as trade missions by Butuan and Sulu to gain favor with the emperor. By the 1500s Manila, then a Muslim-ruled, Tagalog-speaking port, would rise to prominence as a wholesale buyer of Chinese porcelain, lacquerware, silks and other prestige goods which it would retail throughout the islands. Around the same time, the Portugese remark of a 500-strong community of 'Luzones' - people from Luzon - doing business in Malacca.
Manila's activities would persist and be subsumed into Spain's wider trans-Pacific galleon trade where Chinese products would be shipped to the Americas and Europe. Meanwhile significant parts of the Philippines would never experience direct Spanish rule at all such as the peoples of the Cordilleran highlands in Luzon, the Muslims of Mindanao previously mentioned, and various indigenous groups that dwelled in the hinterlands.
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