and other articles of gold. Foreign recognition of nobility The Spanish colonizers who came in the 1500s acknowledged the nobility of the aristocratic class within early Philippine societies. Morga, for example, referred to them as "principalities". Once the Spanish colonial government had been established, the Spanish continued to recognize the descendants of pre-colonial datus as nobles, assigning them positions such as Cabeza de Barangay. Spanish monarchs recognized their noble nature and origin. Popular portrayal as "monarchs" Early misidentifications of pre-colonial polities in Luzon When travelers – whether traders or colonizers – came to the Philippines from cultures which were under a sovereign monarch, these travelers often initially referred to the rulers of Philippine polities as "monarchs", implying recognition of their powers as sovereigns. Some early examples were the Song dynasty traders who came to the Philippines and referred to the ruler of Ma-i as a "huang", meaning "king" – an appellation later adopted by the Ming dynasty courts when dealing with the Philippine archipelago cultures of their own time, such as Botuan and Luzon. Later, the Spanish expeditions of Ferdinand Magellan (in the 1520s) and Miguel López de Legazpi (in the 1570s) initially referred to paramount datus (lakans, rajahs, sultans, etc.) as "kings", although the Spanish stopped using this term when the Spanish under the command of Martin de Goiti first forayed out towards the polities in Bulacan and Pampanga in late 1571 and realized that these Kapampanan datus had a choice not to obey the wishes of the paramount datus of Tondo (Lakandula) and Maynila (Rajahs Matanda and Sulayman), leading Lakandula and Sulayman to explain that there was "no single king over these lands", and that the influence of Tondo and Maynila over the Kapampangan polities did not include either territorial claim or absolute command. Junker and Scott note that this misconception was natural, because both the Chinese and the Spanish came from cultures which had autocratic and imperial political structures. It was a function of language, since their respective sinocentric and hispanocentric vocabularies were organized around worldviews which asserted the divine right of monarchs. As a result, they tended to project their beliefs into the peoples they encountered during trade and conquest. The concept of a sovereign monarchy was not unknown among the various early polities of the Philippine archipelago, since many of these settlements had rich maritime cultures and traditions and traveled widely as sailors and traders.