The Sultanate of Johor

The dynasty without the city

Drafted from Brown, Oxford in Asia Historical Reprints (1970)formation

Johor is what happened to Melaka's dynasty after it lost Melaka.

Alauddin Riayat Shah II was the second son of Mahmud Shah, the sultan who lost Melaka to Albuquerque in 1511. His father had withdrawn up the peninsula and died on Bintan; in 1528 Alauddin established himself on the Johor river with the Melakan regalia, the Melakan court offices — bendahara, laksamana, temenggung, in the same order — and the claim that this was the same sultanate in a different place.

And with a chronicle. The Sejarah Melayu, the Malay Annals, was composed here, at this court, a century after the city fell, to make exactly that argument. It is the successor's own account of the thing it says it is continuing — elegy written by the survivors, and a legal brief.

A line, and nothing else

Most dynasties argue their right to rule from more than one direction. Johor could argue it from exactly one.

There was no caliphal grant, no Ming seal, no Ottoman guns, no distinctive religious authority of the kind Aceh built up the coast out of the ulama and the pilgrimage traffic. What Johor had was a line of descent, and the line was the whole argument. The whole seventeenth-century politics of the strait — who could command the orang laut, who could summon the Malay lords, whose daughter was worth marrying — ran on where a claimant stood relative to Melaka's dynasty.

Which is why the last chapter here is what it is.

Batu Sawar

Drafted from Borschberg, Urban Impermanence on the Southern Malay Peninsula: The Case of Batu Sawar Johor (1587-c.1615) (2021)formation

Johor's court did not sit still. In its first two centuries the capital moved along the Johor River more than half a dozen times, almost always in response to an attack: Sayong Pinang from the founding in 1528, Johor Lama from 1535, and then, after the Portuguese burned Johor Lama in 1587, a new seat thirty-five kilometres upriver at Batu Sawar - too far from the coast for a Portuguese warship to reach with its heavy guns, and close enough to the tide that trading vessels could still ride the current in and out.

What a Dutch admiral found there

When the Dutch admiral Cornelis Matelieff visited in 1606, he found a walled town of roughly four thousand fighting men, houses built on stilts along the river, and a second settlement, Kota Seberang, on the opposite bank. He also found a capital he judged badly exposed: its defensive works stood on ground that flooded at every spring tide, and Johor's own nobles, though they had promised to build the bulwarks he recommended, let the work lapse the moment his fleet sailed on.

A court divided between two patrons

The vulnerability was not only physical. Sultan Ali Jalla bin Abdul Jalil had died around 1597 leaving four sons to share power - a nominal Yang di-Pertuan, and his brothers Raja Siak, Raja Laut and Raja Bongsu - and the court split between them into factions backing, respectively, the Portuguese at Melaka and the newly arrived Dutch. Portugal answered Johor's part in the 1603 seizure of the Portuguese carrack Santa Catarina with a riverine blockade that dragged into 1604, and imposed another for most of a year from 1609 to 1610. Each time, trade that would have passed through Johor went instead to Patani. Peace was finally struck with Portugal in October 1610 - a victory for the pro-Portuguese faction at court, and a defeat for Raja Bongsu, the one brother the Dutch themselves regarded as reliable.

What Aceh took while everyone was looking at Melaka

That peace was the pretext, or perhaps only the occasion, for what followed. At the end of June 1613 Sultan Iskandar Muda of Aceh, ambitious for dominance on both shores of the strait and unsettled by an arrangement between his two rivals, launched a seaborne assault on Johor with a fleet whose numbers overwhelmed the town's defences. Singapore, base of Johor's own navy, and Batu Sawar itself were burned. The Dutch factory's own losses alone were reckoned at 45,000 guilders in pepper, cloth, gold and cash. The old Yang di-Pertuan was carried off and is said to have died either a captive in Aceh or a broken man on the island of Bintan.

Raja Bongsu - the pro-Dutch brother, and by Matelieff's account the only one of the four with any credit left - was married to a sister of Iskandar Muda and sent back to rule Johor as an Acehnese client under the name Sultan Abdul Hammayat Shah. He rebuilt Batu Sawar, invited the Dutch in 1614 to scout a site for a fort of their own, and spent his first years trying to pull the kingdom back together. It did not last: in November 1615 the Acehnese burned the rebuilt capital a second time. Winstedt's verdict, that the fall of Batu Sawar closed one chapter of Johor's history just as the fall of Johor Lama had closed the one before it, is the judgement the Dutch factors on the spot reached in real time - they shut their own Batu Sawar factory for good not long after, and moved their business to Banten, Jambi, Aceh and, for a few more years, Patani. Sultan Abdullah spent the rest of his reign moving from island to island and died on Tambelan Besar in 1623, the last king of a capital that no longer existed.

1641

Drafted from Andaya, The Kingdom of Johor, 1641-1728: Economic and Political Developments (1975)expansion

In January 1641 Portuguese Melaka fell to a Dutch company siege, after a hundred and thirty years.

Johor supplied ships, men and the blockade. The dynasty that had been driven out of that city in 1511 helped take it back — and did not get it. The company kept Melaka, and then set tariffs and enforcement that drove the traffic away from it, and much of that traffic went to Johor.

It is about as close as any polity in these waters came to recovering what a European power had taken from it — and what was recovered was a share of the trade rather than the place.

What Albuquerque had taken in 1511 was a customs house rather than a trade, and the commerce had dispersed to Aceh, Johor, Banten, Brunei and Patani. The same thing now happened to the Dutch. They took the city, the trade left again, and the polity that received it the second time was the one that had helped them take it.

The orang laut, for the third time

Johor's fighting strength at sea was the orang laut — the sea peoples of the straits, estuaries and islands.

They had served Srivijaya. They had served Melaka. They served Johor. A thousand years on the same water, the same arrangement each time: the strait was safe because the people who could have made it unsafe were attached to whoever was claiming it.

Very little in these centuries persists like that. Institutions of this kind normally last a dynasty and are replaced; this one outlasted the polity it belonged to twice, transferring each time to whoever held the Melakan line.

That is not a metaphor about loyalty. Andaya's account makes it a specific and fragile arrangement, and the next chapter is about what happened when the thing they were attached to stopped existing.

Jambi

Drafted from Andaya, The Kingdom of Johor, 1641-1728: Economic and Political Developments (1975)contraction

In 1673 Jambi, a Malay polity on the Sumatran side of the strait, sacked Johor Lama. The court fled and re-established itself in the Riau islands.

It is worth stopping on, because it does not fit the story usually told about this century.

The seventeenth-century strait is generally narrated as Asians and Europeans — Portuguese Melaka, then Dutch Melaka, then the company's monopolies, with the Malay states arranged around them. In the middle of the decade that had been Johor's recovery, it was nearly destroyed by a neighbour of its own kind, over a quarrel about precedence and trade in which no European had any part.

The same holds a few hundred miles north. Aceh spent the sixteenth century besieging Melaka and fighting other Sumatran ports for the pepper coast, and its worst single defeat, in 1629, came at Portuguese hands only because Aceh had chosen to attack them.

A chronology organised around European arrival misses most of what these states were actually doing, which was competing with each other.

Riau

The court moved twice: Johor Lama from 1540, the Riau islands from 1673.

The second move matters for what comes after. The islands at the mouth of the strait were better placed for the trade than a river town up the Johor, and the second half of the sultanate's life is the more prosperous one. The court that was killed in 1699 was richer than the court that was sacked in 1673.

1699

Drafted from Andaya, The Kingdom of Johor, 1641-1728: Economic and Political Developments (1975)end

Mahmud Shah II was killed by his own nobles in 1699, on his way to the mosque, and the bendahara — the chief minister — took the throne.

The Melaka royal line, unbroken since about 1400, stopped in a road outside the capital.

Nothing was conquered. What replaced the dynasty was its own chief minister's family, ruling under the same name, in the same place, with the same regalia — and claiming, as the men who had just killed the last sultan, to be continuing what they had ended.

Why a killing was a rupture

The previous chapter's institution is the answer.

Andaya's argument is that the orang laut were attached to the Melaka line personally rather than to the office of sultan — to a specific descent, which was the whole of Johor's claim on them. When the nobles killed the last man in that line, the fleets that had made Johor enforceable at sea went away, and the bendahara sultans could not get them back.

So an arrangement that had survived the fall of Srivijaya and the fall of Melaka, transferring intact across a thousand years and three polities, ended because a dynasty did. It had never really been an institution of the state. It was a personal attachment to a family, and it died with the family.

What the century afterwards argued about

Everything. Johor's own bendahara sultans, the Bugis who took power at Riau, Selangor, Perak, Pahang, Terengganu, and Raja Kecil of Siak — who claimed to be Mahmud's posthumous son and took Johor on the strength of it in 1718 — all argued their standing in terms of a line that had stopped in 1699.

The name Johor continues for another century and a quarter after that, across three unrelated dynasties and a partition, and it is a different object under the same word. What ends in 1699 is the older thing: a line that began at a river mouth on the far side of the peninsula around 1400 and ran three hundred years and two capitals before its own ministers ended it in a road.

A name three dynasties shared

Drafted from Andaya, The Kingdom of Johor, 1641-1728: Economic and Political Developments (1975)afterlife

The bendahara who took the throne in 1699 kept everything he could of what he had just ended: the name Johor, the capital's regalia, the court offices his own family had filled for generations under the sultans he served. What he could not keep was the one thing that had made those things worth having — a line whose descent nobody could dispute.

A posthumous son, real or not

Within twenty years a challenger arrived who understood exactly where the new dynasty was weakest. Raja Kecil of Siak claimed to be the posthumous son of Mahmud Shah II, the sultan killed in 1699, and pressed that claim with an army rather than a genealogy: he took Johor outright in 1718. Whether his birth story was true or invented, it worked because it was aimed at the one vulnerability the bendahara line could never fully answer — that it was not, whatever else it was, the blood that had made Johor's throne legitimate for three hundred years.

Newcomers who did not bother with the claim at all

The bendahara family recovered the throne from Raja Kecil, but the fight had shown every ambitious neighbour that Johor's kingship was now negotiable by force rather than settled by descent. Bugis adventurers from Sulawesi, already established as soldiers and traders throughout the strait, moved into that opening directly. Rather than manufacture a genealogy of their own, they made themselves the real power behind the throne at Riau, holding the office of viceroy and running the state's actual affairs while a nominal sultan reigned over what the Bugis allowed him to.

What the name covered by the end

By the early nineteenth century "Johor" named a loose confederation split between a Malay court largely ceremonial in its authority and a Bugis leadership that actually governed, spread across the peninsula's southern tip and the Riau-Lingga archipelago beyond it. In 1824 an Anglo-Dutch treaty settled a colonial rivalry that had nothing to do with any Malay court's own wishes, drawing a line through waters the sultanate had once claimed as a single connected world and assigning each side to a different European sphere. What had been one contested inheritance became, on paper, two countries' worth of provinces — modern Johor in Malaysia and the Riau Islands in Indonesia, both still carrying pieces of a name that had first meant the Melaka dynasty in exile.