What was the original name of the Philippines before the Spanish era?

It didn’t have any, aside from the names of individual trading cities as well as the general name for the Southeast Asian islands by Chinese, Indian, and Arab traders.

Like Indonesia and Malaysia, the Philippines was composed of hundreds of independent polities. Virtually every single ethnic group had its own political identity. Ranging from small independent chiefdoms to conglomerations of various ethnic groups allied to each other.

There are so many that none of the maps I have seen so far trying to document Philippine “civilizations” are even remotely accurate. Not helped by the fact that there are so many self-aggrandizing claims of past “empires” that it honestly disgusts me why teachers don’t focus more on dispelling these myths.

You see, unlike how we’ve classically viewed “kingdoms”, the indigenous political system of the Philippines were closer to Ancient Greece than to Medieval Europe. For the most part, each city was an independent political unit. A city-state. Each city-state had its own network of alliances and enemies that then form a nation based on ethnicity and language. Each nation, in turn, then had its own network of alliances and enemies.

Thus each nation wasn’t measured in territory. Rather it was measured in allegiances.

These networks are quite diverse, such that they never ran out of enemies. A common cultural theme among all the precolonial Philippine societies were seasonal raids into enemy territory. Usually termed “magayaw”, these were ways of gaining prestige and loot, then recorded among the natives by tattoos. Similar traditions exist throughout the entire territory of other Austronesian peoples. From Hawaii to New Zealand to the Moluccas to Madagascar. These raids can range from coastal attacks on enemy villages to headhunting expeditions in the interior highlands.

The largest and most powerful such networks were the trading thalassocracies. They include the Sultanate of Sulu, the Rajahnate of Butuan, the Rajahnate of Cebu, the Rajahnate of Manila, etc. All of them have vast reach in terms of alliances, but their power is usually only coastal. They seldom ever had any power inland.

This is why maps like the one below are WRONG.

Notice how the Maguindanao Sultanate for example is depicted as straddling half of the island of Mindanao? This is laughably untrue. The true extent of the Maguindanao Sultanate only extended as far as their people settled. Which is not far at all. They were the people of the floodplains of the Rio Grande de Mindanao river, and their territory only extended to the coastal side of those floodplains:

They did not ever dominate areas outside those because they were surrounded by other political entities. Some of them hostile. The traditional enemies of the Maguindanao for example, are the Blaan people. A large highlander ethnic group concentrated in the mountains bordering the floodplains of Maguindanao and the rest of the interior. Not to mention various other tribal groups that were at times hostile or allied or indifferent to them. From the Tiboli to the Manuvu, Teduray, and Maranao, and so on. None of them ever fell under Maguindanao sovereignty and to this day still occupy the same territories they did before.

Most of these other groups were animists who resisted the Islamic conversion of the western coast of Mindanao, and were the main reasons why the vast majority of Mindanao never became Muslim. Similar to how the interiors of Borneo and Sulawesi also remained animist (and later Christian), despite being surrounded by Hindu-Buddhist and Muslim thalassocracies in the coastlines for centuries.

Another example of thes grandiose myths in the map above is the Tondo “Empire” which claims to extend into territories that are not even Tagalog. True Tondo was merely a federation of ethnically Tagalog chiefdoms in the villages surrounding the fortified trading city-state of Manila. Its historical range did not even extend to nearby Laguna Lake.

The point being that these while these polities (and the rest) did exist, they were not “kingdoms” in the European sense. Nor did they hold territory in the same way as European kingdoms.

So as far as the historical endonym of the Philippines goes, ask the locals what ethnic groups are native for each region, and that is the historical name for it. From the territories of the Kankana-ey Igorot to the territories of the Sugboanon to the territories of the Ivatan and so on.

Like I said in the beginning, Like Indonesia and Malaysia, the country and its borders is an artificial creation of colonial rule. It was not historically united.