The Sultanate of Gowa

A vassal of Siang

Drafted from Andaya, Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 91 (1981)formation

Gowa began as somebody else's dependency, and the somebody has been more or less forgotten.

A sixteenth-century Portuguese account has Gowa subjugated by Tallo, and Tallo in turn acknowledging a third kingdom, Siang, further up the west coast, as larger and more powerful than itself. Siang dominated that coast between roughly the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Manoel Pinto put its population at about forty thousand in 1545, and its ruler was confident enough of his resources to offer to supply the entire food requirements of Melaka.

Antonio de Paiva, a Portuguese trader who called in 1542 and again in 1544, found Gowa a large city — one which, he noted, "had once been a vassal of Siang, but not any longer."

Something had changed in between, and the Gowa chronicle says what.

Tumapa'risi' Kallonna

The ninth Karaeng of Gowa came to the throne early in the sixteenth century, and a Portuguese visitor at about that moment observed that "the region which particularly bears the name Makassar is very small."

He reorganised it. The chronicle credits him with turning a loose confederation of communities into a single state: a formal union with Tallo, sealed by an oath that anyone who set the two against each other would be punished by the god; a promulgated code of law and of rules for warfare; and a system of taxes and customs dues collected under a syahbandar.

That last item is the port. Everything Makassar later became — the open harbour, the toll, the argument with the Dutch about the freedom of the sea — begins with a harbourmaster and a published tariff, instituted by a king whose reign the chronicle praises in the conventional formula for a good one: the harvests were good and the fish-catch was plentiful.

He then went to war with his neighbours and won, and Gowa's rulers spent the next century and a half doing the same. His successor Tunipalangga carried it much further, and the chronicle lists his conquests in a paragraph that runs to twenty place-names.

What became of Siang

An alliance of Gowa and Tallo — the two kingdoms Siang had once outranked — broke it, some time late in the sixteenth century.

The word Andaya uses is oblivion. Siang had been the commercial and probably the political centre of the west coast for two hundred years, and it left almost nothing: a mention on a Portuguese map of about 1540, a few travellers' remarks, some archaeology, and a local tradition around Pangkajene that still remembers having been the senior party.

The Gowa chronicle records the victory over it in a sentence, in the same flat tone it uses for everything else.

The open port

Drafted from Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680. Volume One: The Lands below the Winds (1988)expansion

The Dutch East India Company's whole strategy in the eastern archipelago was to be the only buyer. At the production end that meant clove trees cut down and burned everywhere except the islands the company chose, by expeditions the company made the sultan of Ternate supply.

Makassar was the hole in it.

The port on the south-west arm of Sulawesi took a toll and asked no questions. Portuguese expelled from Melaka went there and formed a community of several thousand. The English had a factory. So did the Danes. Chinese, Gujarati, Malay, Javanese and Bugis shipping called, and what they bought was largely cloves and nutmeg from Maluku that had reached Makassar in small boats through a coastline of islands nobody could patrol.

The company complained about this for fifty years, blockaded it, and eventually destroyed it.

Why it could be there

Makassar lived on tolls and on rice, and the rice is why the tolls could be levied on those terms.

The south-west arm of Sulawesi grows a surplus. A free port has to feed the people who come to it and the people who run it, and a polity that imports its food cannot afford to annoy whoever controls the sea. Melaka had been in exactly that position, buying its rice from Java. Makassar had a hinterland behind it, so it could take a position and hold it.

The sea belongs to nobody

The position is on the record because a Dutch envoy wrote it down. Told that the company had a right to exclude others from the Moluccas trade, the Makassar court answered that God had made the earth and the sea, had divided the earth among mankind and given the sea in common, and that it had never been heard that anyone should be forbidden to sail it.

That is 1615 or thereabouts. Grotius had published Mare Liberum in Latin in Leiden six years earlier, arguing the freedom of the seas against the Portuguese, on behalf of the same Dutch company — which by the time it reached Sulawesi was arguing the opposite.

A toll meant something different here from what it meant at Melaka or Srivijaya. There it was the price of protection on a route the polity controlled. At Makassar it was the price of admission to a market that was open on principle — and the principle had been put in writing, to the people who had come to close it.

The Islamic wars

Drafted from Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680. Volume One: The Lands below the Winds (1988)peak

Islam had been present on the coasts of South Sulawesi for generations before Gowa ever took it up. Malay and other Muslim traders had used Makassar's own port for decades, and the neighbouring Bugis states had had their own contact with Muslim missionaries and merchants long before 1605. What made Gowa's conversion that year different was not that it happened first, but what happened immediately after: the ruler of Tallo converted, took the title Sultan Alauddin, and Gowa followed him into the new religion as a single political act rather than a private one.

A conversion that came with an army behind it

Elsewhere in the archipelago, Islam had spread the way it had at Melaka and Pasai - through marriage, trade and the slow drift of a court's own example. Makassar's neighbours did not get that choice. Over the following six years Gowa turned its own conversion into a campaign, bringing the interior Bugis kingdoms of the peninsula into Islam one by one by force rather than waiting for them to arrive at it on their own terms.

Why the Bugis kingdoms resisted, and what breaking them meant

The three main targets were not politically insignificant: Bone, Soppeng and Wajo were established kingdoms in their own right, with their own courts and their own reasons to resent a rising coastal neighbour's demand that they adopt its religion on its schedule. Their resistance made the campaign a real war rather than a formality, and their eventual submission by 1611 left Gowa the unrivalled dominant power of the whole South Sulawesi peninsula, not merely of its own coastline.

What the conquest planted

The victory was not permanent in the way it looked at the time. Bone in particular never fully accepted the subordination the Islamic wars had imposed on it, and the resentment the campaign left behind among the Bugis kingdoms it had forced into submission would resurface two generations later, when a Bugis prince of Bone found Dutch company allies willing to help him settle the account Gowa's own religious wars had opened.

A telescope

Drafted from Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680. Volume One: The Lands below the Winds (1988)peak

Karaeng Pattingalloang was chancellor of Makassar from the 1630s until his death in 1654, and he read Latin, Spanish and Portuguese.

He had Blaeu's globe. He ordered a telescope from the Netherlands and books to go with it, corresponded about mathematics and astronomy, kept a library that visitors described at length, and questioned every European who arrived about the geography, the politics and the technology of wherever they had come from. A Jesuit who met him wrote that he could have discussed the fine points of European science with anyone in Europe.

A Jesuit who met him wrote that he could have discussed the fine points of European science with anyone in Europe.

What a chancellor was doing with a telescope

It is tempting to file this as a curiosity, and it is not one. Pattingalloang was the chief minister of a state whose entire position rested on knowing more than the people it dealt with.

Makassar's argument with the Dutch company was about law, geography and the limits of a monopoly. Its port handled Portuguese, English, Danish, Chinese, Gujarati, Malay and Bugis shipping simultaneously, in several languages, under competing legal claims. Its defences were being redesigned around European artillery. A chancellor who read three European languages, collected treatises on fortification, and interrogated every arriving captain about the politics of wherever he had come from was not indulging a hobby. He was doing the job.

The library is also the clearest available evidence against a habit of mind that still shapes how this region gets written about — in which European knowledge arrives and local courts receive it. At Makassar the traffic went the other way round: the court sent to Europe for the instruments it wanted, chose the books, and put the questions.

Two kingdoms, and two peoples

Drafted from Andaya, Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 91 (1981)aside?What aside means

"Makassar" is a convenience, and so is "the Sultanate of Gowa". The polity was two kingdoms.

Gowa and Tallo occupied adjoining stretches of the same coast, and from the early sixteenth century they operated as one: Gowa supplying the ruler, and Tallo supplying, for most of the period that matters, the chancellor. The formula in the sources is that they were two kings but one people. The conversion of 1605 came through Tallo's ruler first. Karaeng Pattingalloang — the chancellor who kept the library, ordered the telescope and read Latin, Spanish and Portuguese — was Tallo's.

It is a partnership rather than a merger, and it held for a century and a half without either half absorbing the other. Ternate and Tidore, a few hundred miles east, show what the alternative looked like: two courts on two islands that defined themselves against each other, and never stopped.

And the other distinction

South Sulawesi is Makasar country and Bugis country — two related but distinct peoples with distinct languages — and Gowa-Tallo is the Makasar power.

The Bugis kingdoms are Bone, Soppeng and Wajo. They are the ones Makassar fought into accepting Islam between 1608 and 1611, and Bone is the one that came back with a Dutch fleet in 1667.

That is the most important thing about how Makassar ended, and it is the part most often left out. The war of 1666–69 is usually filed as a Dutch conquest, and the Dutch company was certainly in it. But Andaya's book is written around Arung Palakka, the Bugis prince who led it, and its argument is that the war was a Bugis war against Makasar overlordship, sixty years in the making, which a European company joined.

A trading company with a fleet did not arrive and take South Sulawesi. It was recruited into somebody else's quarrel, and the quarrel had been going since the conversions were imposed at spear-point.

Sombaopu

Drafted from Andaya, Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 91 (1981)contraction

The wall of Sombaopu was made of fired brick, and at the base it was something over three metres thick. The Dutch could not breach it with ship's guns and took it in 1669 by mining.

There was a line of them: Sombaopu, Ujung Pandang, Panakkukang, Barombong and others, strung along a few kilometres of coast, with the ruler's residence inside the largest. Makassar had cannon of its own, cast locally and bought from the Portuguese community, and Karaeng Pattingalloang — who ordered a telescope from the Netherlands — collected European treatises on fortification.

What that means about the sixteenth century

It means the polities of the archipelago were adopting European military technology about as fast as it arrived, and that the outcome of the wars is not explained by a technology gap.

Aceh sent an embassy to Istanbul in the 1560s and came back with cannon, founders who could cast more, and gunners. Patani cast its own artillery, and the pieces were famous enough that its chronicle names them individually. Demak built ships in 1513 that Portuguese accounts describe as larger and better-planked than their own.

What the Dutch company had was not better guns. It was capital, a permanent organisation that outlived its own personnel, the ability to blockade for years on end, and — in nearly every case in these waters — a local ally with a grievance of its own.

And what a fort is for

Sombaopu was also a customs house, a warehouse district and the ruler's residence. Fortifying a trading capital is what a polity does when its revenue is its port and its port can be reached by anybody.

The alternative is instructive. Kilwa, on the East African coast, had no army in its sources at all and nothing in the excavated town designed to be defended — a palace, a mosque, warehouses. For five hundred years it did not need any, because an enemy arriving by sea still had to stop somewhere. Then the Portuguese arrived, who did not, and took it in a morning.

Makassar built four metres of brick and had to be mined out over months. Both were taken. The walls bought time and did not change the answer.

1669

Drafted from Andaya, Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 91 (1981)end

Sombaopu, the fortress at Makassar, fell on 12 June 1669. Its walls were four metres thick and had to be mined rather than breached.

The treaty of Bongaya had been signed twenty months earlier and had not ended the war. Its terms removed every foreign trader except the Dutch company, stripped Makassar of its dependencies, required the demolition of its forts, and installed Arung Palakka's Bone as the paramount power in South Sulawesi. Hasanuddin signed it, and then went on fighting.

Whose war it was

The usual shorthand — the Dutch destroyed Makassar — is not so much wrong as badly incomplete.

Andaya's account is written around Arung Palakka, a Bugis prince from Bone whose people Makassar had conquered and set to forced labour, who escaped, spent years in Batavia, and came back with a company fleet to destroy the polity that had held his country down. On that reading 1669 is a South Sulawesi war which the company joined, not a colonial conquest that Sulawesi suffered.

Both descriptions are true and they weigh differently. The company supplied ships, siege engineering and money. Bone supplied the war, and the reason for it, and most of the men. What was settled in 1669 was not who would govern South Sulawesi from Amsterdam but which of two South Sulawesi powers would be on top — and the answer held for the next century.

The diaspora

What left Makassar after 1669 mattered more than what stayed.

The Makasar and Bugis who would not accept the settlement went to sea — as mercenaries, traders, and freebooters, from Siam to Sumatra to the Java Sea — and they turn up all over the archipelago for the next hundred years.

The Bugis who took power at Riau after 1699, and made themselves the real authority behind Johor's throne, came out of this diaspora. So did the Makasar allies of Trunajaya, whose rebellion of 1677 dragged the Dutch company into Javanese succession politics for the first time and kept it there for two hundred years.

Makassar's most consequential export turned out to be its own defeated.

Sixteen men

Drafted from Andaya, Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 91 (1981)afterlife

Gowa was not abolished in 1669. There was still a sultan, still a court, still a kingdom on the map. What it no longer had was anybody who had to come when it called.

Some years after the war, Sultan Abdul Jalil sent out the bila-bila — the summons that told the warriors of Gowa when and where to assemble — because the Company had asked for troops against the Makassar exiles fighting in Java.

Sixteen people appeared. Seven of them were nobles.

The rest had gone over to a rival claimant living under Dutch protection at Fort Rotterdam, a few kilometres up the same shore, or had left South Sulawesi entirely.

The arrangement that replaced it

What governed South Sulawesi after 1669 was a partnership, and it worked unusually well for the people who ran it.

Arung Palakka took the internal affairs and the Company took the external ones. He became ruler of Bone and, over the following quarter-century, the effective overlord of every state on the peninsula; the Dutch held the fort that had been Gowa's own — Ujung Pandang, renamed Fort Rotterdam after the birthplace of the admiral who had taken it — and controlled what left the coast by sea.

It was efficient enough to close off the ordinary ways a South Sulawesi society had of registering dissent. There was no longer a rival power to defect to, no neighbouring court to appeal against your own, no war anybody could win. So people left instead.

The outflow

They left in numbers that alarmed everybody, including the winners.

By the middle of 1679 the Dutch counted some six hundred Makassar nobles living in the shadow of Fort Rotterdam alone, three hundred of whom had fought against them, and reckoned about three thousand Makassar people in the settlement all told — men, women, children and slaves. The Dutch believed most of them would leave for Java as soon as they could find boats.

Those who had already gone were the ones who mattered. Makasar and Bugis fighting men turned up as mercenaries, traders and freebooters from Siam to Sumatra to the Java Sea, and they were formidable enough to threaten not only weak kingdoms elsewhere in the archipelago but the settlement at home. Their defeat in Java in 1679 ended the last serious challenge to the joint overlordship Arung Palakka and the Company had built.

The rest of Arung Palakka's life

He spent it making sure the arrangement outlived him, and he was not gentle about it.

He had one of his staunchest supporters, Arung Bakké Todani, assassinated on suspicion of standing too well with the Dutch. He used persuasion, intimidation and, when they did not answer, force, until no ruler in South Sulawesi would contest him. Less than a year before he died the assembled armies of the peninsula turned out to demonstrate their unity and their respect for him, which is the sort of display a man arranges when he wants his heir to see it.

He died in 1696. His successor La Patau ruled unchallenged.

Gowa's sultans went on reigning through all of it. They just no longer had a kingdom that answered the summons.