Sultanate of Melaka

A prince out of Palembang

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

Melaka was a river mouth with a hill behind it, and within a century it was the port whose fall would date the arrival of European power in maritime Asia and the polity through which Islam reached the eastern archipelago.

The founder, in the Sejarah Melayu — the Malay Annals, the court chronicle composed at Johor a century after the city fell — is a prince of Palembang named Parameswara, driven out, moving up the peninsula, and stopping at a river mouth where he saw a mouse-deer turn and face his hunting dogs. He took it as an omen of a place where the weak stand against the strong, and named the settlement after the tree he was standing under.

The chronicle then traces his line back through Palembang to the kings of Srivijaya, and beyond them to Alexander the Great.

The two halves of that genealogy are worth separating. Palembang is a real memory: the founder came from there, and Srivijaya had run the same strait on the same terms seven hundred years earlier. Alexander is not — it is the standard furniture of Malay royal descent, and almost every dynasty that could afford a chronicler acquired some.

What matters is that Melaka claimed it at all. A new settlement with no army and no rice land needed to be somebody, and the somebody it chose was the last power that had made this water pay.

Nanjing

Drafted from Hall, A History of Early Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and Societal Development, 100-1500 (2011)expansion

A new settlement on a strait, with no army and no rice land, between Ayutthaya to the north — which claimed the peninsula — and Majapahit to the south, which had claimed everything.

In 1411 Parameswara sailed to China. He went in person, with his wife and son and a party of several hundred, was received by the Yongle emperor at Nanjing, and came home with recognition as king of Melaka, a seal, a set of robes, and a stone tablet for a hill in his city.

This is Zheng He's system seen from the receiving end, and it is the clearest case anywhere of it working as designed. Melaka got a guarantee that made Ayutthaya's claim unenforceable. The Ming got a secured waypoint at the narrowest point of the route to the Indian Ocean, and the treasure fleets called there repeatedly and used it as a depot.

It is worth noticing what kind of transaction that is. Melaka's ruler did not claim descent from a Chinese line, and the Ming did not administer anything in the strait. What passed between them was recognition: an emperor who had never seen the place declared its ruler a king, and every neighbour who might otherwise have taken the town had to weigh what that meant. The seal was worth more than a garrison, and considerably cheaper.

The arrangement lasted about as long as the fleets did. When the Ming abandoned the voyages within a generation, Melaka kept the title and lost the guarantee, and had to hold the strait on its own terms — which, for another century, it did.

No rice

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

Melaka lived on tolls and on nothing else, because the city had no agricultural hinterland worth the name. The peninsula's west coast at that latitude is mangrove and jungle; the settlement was a river mouth with a hill behind it. Melaka fed itself by importing rice, and most of the rice came from Java.

Majapahit was the exact inverse: a Javanese state with a granary that wanted the straits. The two arrangements faced each other across the Java Sea for a century, and the one without the rice won — because what mattered on this water was not what a polity produced but what passed it.

What Melaka sold was order. Four syahbandars — harbourmasters, one each for the Gujaratis, for the merchants of southern India and Burma, for those of Java and the eastern islands, and for the Chinese — handled the traders of their own communities. Duties were fixed and published. Weights and measures were standardised, debts were enforceable, and a written commercial code, the Undang-Undang Laut Melaka, governed shipping.

The orang laut — the sea peoples of the straits and estuaries — held the rest of it. They attached themselves to Parameswara and raided for Melaka rather than against it.

That is precisely the arrangement Srivijaya had run, with the same people, on the same water, five hundred years earlier. Nothing about it had been written down and handed on; the geography simply produced the same answer twice. A power on this strait cannot garrison the coastline, so it hires the only people who can, and it keeps hiring them for as long as it can pay.

Iskandar Shah

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

Around 1414 the ruler of Melaka married a princess of Pasai in northern Sumatra, converted, and took the name Iskandar Shah. The date and the identity of the ruler are both disputed, but the direction is not.

Islam had been present in the archipelago's ports for centuries, and Pasai itself had been Muslim since about 1267 — the first Muslim throne in Southeast Asia, absorbed by Aceh two centuries after this marriage. What Melaka did was make Islam the religion of the archipelago's dominant court, and then export it along the trade network it already controlled. Melakan merchants carried it. Melakan princesses married into the ruling houses of ports that then converted. Over the following century Islam reached Java's north coast, Brunei, Sulu, the Moluccas and the southern Philippines, and the sequence follows the shipping routes rather than any frontier.

What is remarkable is that it happened without a single campaign of conquest. This was conversion by commerce, and it is rarer than the sheer extent of the result makes it look — the Swahili coast carried Islam the same way and did not carry it nearly as far.

There is a second thing Melaka spread and did not invent. Malay was written here in Jawi, the Arabic script with letters added for sounds Arabic has no signs for, and Melaka made Jawi the standard written form of Malay across the archipelago. It did not create that script; it made it the region's. Four centuries later, a Malay letter from Sulu to Sumatra would still be legible at both ends because a port on this strait had settled how the language was written.

The bendahara

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

Mansur Shah reigned from 1459 to 1477, and under him Melaka's authority extended over most of the peninsula and the Sumatran coast opposite. The Malay Annals treat his court as the model against which everything later is measured, which is what a chronicle written in exile after the fall does.

The figure the chronicle actually turns on is not the sultan. It is the bendahara — the chief minister, an office held for most of the fifteenth century by a single family, and the man the Annals show choosing between claimants, restraining rulers, and in one celebrated episode being executed on a false accusation by a sultan who then regretted it for the rest of his reign.

So how did the throne actually pass? The sultanate was hereditary, and the decisive intervention in at least three successions was the bendahara's. Nobody wrote that down as a rule, and it probably never was one — an office that repeatedly determines who rules, without any right to, is a habit rather than a constitution.

It is a particular kind of unknowable. The sources do not describe chaos here; they describe a man, and describing a man is not the same as describing how a system works. A century of successions turned on the judgement of whoever held one office, and when the fifteenth-century bendahara family lost its footing the sultanate had nothing underneath it.

The lawsuit

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

The Malay Annals put the chapter about the destruction of Melaka's chief minister immediately before the chapter about Albuquerque, and the arrangement is not an accident.

Sultan Mahmud Shah had a grudge against his bendahara, Sri Maharaja. The bendahara had a daughter, Tun Fatimah, of famous beauty, and he had not shown her to the sultan — which in that court was not a private matter but a refusal, and Mahmud took it as one. The bendahara was also enormously rich, which the chronicle notes in the same breath.

Then two merchants fell out. Naina Sura Diwana and Raja Mendaliar had a lawsuit, and it was the bendahara who would hear it. One of them bribed the bendahara. The other, learning of it, bribed the laksamana instead — not to influence the case, but to tell the sultan that the bendahara was planning to seize the throne.

Mahmud had been waiting for exactly this. He ordered the bendahara put to death, and his brother the Sri Nara 'diraja with him.

And then he found out

The chronicle does not spare him. Mahmud learned afterwards that the laksamana's story had been false, was stricken with remorse, and turned on the men who had told it.

None of which brought back the office. The bendahara had been the thing that made Melakan succession work for most of a century — the man who chose between claimants, restrained rulers, and held the court together across reigns. The family that had supplied him was destroyed on the word of a bribed official in a commercial dispute, by a sultan settling a private score.

What was standing when the fleet came

Within a year or two, fifteen Portuguese ships stood off the city.

It is worth resisting the tidy version, in which a decadent court gets what is coming to it — the Annals are a Johor court's account and have their own reasons for showing Mahmud badly. But the sequence is what it is. A state whose entire constitutional ballast sat in one office had removed that office, on a lie, for a reason that had nothing to do with government, at the exact moment when the most dangerous thing that had ever happened to it was sailing up the strait.

1511

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

Afonso de Albuquerque took Melaka in August 1511 with about fifteen ships and twelve hundred men.

He had come for it specifically. Portuguese strategy in Asia was to hold the points at which the spice route passed through a narrows — Hormuz, Goa, Aden, Melaka — and Melaka was the one that mattered most, because everything moving between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea went through the strait. Taking it was supposed to give Portugal the trade.

It gave Portugal a customs house.

The trade did not stop and it did not stay. It went to Aceh in northern Sumatra, to Johor at the tip of the peninsula, to Banten in western Java, to Brunei and to Patani — and the Portuguese spent the following century holding a fortified city on a strait whose commerce had rerouted around them. What Melaka had sold was order, and order was the one thing a garrison could not seize.

The dynasty was not extinguished either. Mahmud Shah withdrew up the peninsula and died on Bintan; in 1528 his son established himself on the Johor river with the Melakan regalia and the Melakan court offices, and the claim that this was the same sultanate in a different place.

That court then commissioned the Sejarah Melayu, the chronicle that supplies the founding story of Melaka — written a century after the city fell, by the successor, to prove that it was one.

The line held for another hundred and seventy-one years. It ended in 1699, when Johor's own nobles killed the last man of Melaka's dynasty on his way to the mosque, three hundred years after a prince out of Palembang stopped under a tree at a river mouth.

The court at Bentan

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

On the night before the Portuguese assault, the young nobles of Melaka sent to Sultan Ahmad asking for the Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiah to be read to them, so that they might take courage from it.

Ahmad sent back the Hikayat Amir Hamzah instead, with a message: we would give you the story of Muhammad Hanafiah, did we not fear that the bravery of the gentlemen of our court falls short of the bravery of Muhammad Hanafiah — but it may be that their bravery is such as was the bravery of Hamzah.

The nobles were silent. Then Tun Isak Berakah answered: tell the ruler he has spoken amiss. If he will be as Muhammad Hanafiah, we will be as war-chief Bania'. The message went back. The king smiled, and sent them the story of Muhammad Hanafiah after all.

That is a court negotiating, on the last night it existed, over which epic it deserved.

The day

The Franks landed at dawn. Ahmad mounted his elephant Juru Demang, the Sri Awadana on the elephant's head, Tun 'Ali Hati steadying the king on the packsaddle. The Portuguese onslaught broke the Malay line and left the king isolated on his elephant, fighting pike to pike, and he was wounded through the palm of the hand.

He held it up. "See this, Malays!" — and the war-chiefs came back and fought.

Tun Salehu'd-din was struck in the chest and killed, and twenty of the leading war-chiefs with him. The Sri Awadana was wounded in the groin, and the elephant was made to kneel so he could be carried off; a doctor probed the wound with the point of a sireh leaf and said it could be treated, but that half a rice grain deeper would have killed him.

And Melaka fell.

What the dynasty did next

Ahmad fled to Pahang and then to Bentan, with his father. His conduct in exile offended Mahmud, who had him murdered and resumed the throne himself — the son who had fought on the elephant, killed by the father who had abdicated to let him do it.

Mahmud then set up a new administration at Bentan and named as his successor his son by Tun Fatimah — the daughter of the bendahara he had executed, whom he had taken after the execution. The son he displaced to do it was Raja Muzaffar Shah.

The empire dissolving

What follows in the chronicle is a court with a claim and no city, watching its vassals work out that the claim was all it had.

Sultan Abdullah of Kampar refused to appear before Mahmud at Bentan or to acknowledge him any longer, and — fearing what would follow — asked the Portuguese at Melaka for protection. They gave it. Mahmud sent a fleet against Kampar and the Portuguese beat it, and the Malays took refuge up the Indragiri river.

The end of that story is the shape of the whole century in one sentence: Abdullah was taken prisoner by the Portuguese, and sent first to Goa and then to Portugal.

Mahmud died on Bentan. In 1528 his second son established himself on the Johor river with the regalia and the court offices, and the line held another hundred and seventy-one years — long enough to commission the Sejarah Melayu itself, written to argue that nothing had ended at all.