Sultanate of Ternate

Five islands

Drafted from Andaya, The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period (1993)formation

Until Europeans transplanted it in the eighteenth century, the clove tree grew on five small islands off the western coast of Halmahera and nowhere else on earth. Ternate, Tidore, Moti, Makian and Bacan: the whole of them together are smaller than a mid-sized European city.

Cloves reached Rome. They reached Han China, where court officials are described holding them in the mouth before addressing the emperor. They are in the Cairo Geniza and in Venetian ledgers and in the price lists of every long-distance market between the two, and for most of that history nobody at either end of the chain knew where they came from. The commodity travelled through five or six intermediaries, each of whom had an interest in the origin staying vague.

A monopoly is normally something a state adds to a revenue base it already has — a land tax, a customs house, a hinterland that pays. Ternate had none of that to add it to. There is not enough flat ground on a volcanic island of that size to build a fiscal system on, and there did not need to be.

The tree was the fiscal system.

What the sultanate is dated from

The traditions list kolano — kings of Ternate — running back into the thirteenth century. The sultanate proper is dated from 1486 and Zainal Abidin, the first ruler to take the title sultan and to govern by Islamic law, because that is the point from which the polity is documented rather than remembered.

The distinction that matters is whether anything independent survives from before. At Ternate a great deal does — the cloves were reaching China centuries before 1486 — but none of it says a word about who was governing the island. The commodity is documented and the polity is not, which is an unusual way round and the whole difficulty of writing about these islands.

Ternate and Tidore

Drafted from Andaya, The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period (1993)expansion

Tidore is visible from Ternate. The channel between them is about two kilometres wide. They grew the same crop, spoke closely related languages, had courts of the same form, and spent five hundred years in opposition to one another.

Andaya's account of Maluku is built around that opposition, and argues that it was not a rivalry in the ordinary sense of two states that happened to be adjacent — it was the organising structure of the region. Maluku was understood by the people in it as a set of paired and complementary halves with two centres, and every island, every district, every dependency out along the Papuan coast attached itself to one side or the other. A conflict between the two courts was not a breakdown of the system. It was the system running.

That is a genuinely awkward thing to describe, because the ordinary vocabulary of history has little use for it. Tidore did not precede Ternate and did not follow it. It did not conquer Ternate and was not conquered by it. It was not a vassal, an overlord, a colony or an heir. It was the other half, continuously, for five hundred years — and a Ternate without Tidore is not a smaller Ternate but a different kind of object altogether.

What the arrangement produced is dateable, and it starts in 1512. The Portuguese did not force their way into Maluku. They were invited by Ternate, as leverage against Tidore, into a quarrel that was already several centuries old — and when Spain arrived by the other ocean a decade later, Tidore took the Spanish for the same reason. Two European empires spent a century in the north Moluccas as the hired halves of a local dualism, which is close to the inverse of the story usually told about the spice islands. Neither was let in because it was strong. Each was let in because the other side had not got it.

The fort

Drafted from Andaya, The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period (1993)peak

In February 1570 the Portuguese captain at Ternate invited Sultan Hairun into the fort to talk, and had him stabbed as he was leaving.

Fifty-eight years of alliance ended in that room. Whatever the arrangement of 1512 had been — and it had been an alliance, entered into by Ternate, on Ternate's initiative — nothing about it could be argued for afterwards.

Hairun's son Baabullah besieged the fort. It took five years. In July 1575 the garrison surrendered and left the island, and Ternate under Baabullah went on to extend its authority further than it ever had before or would again: across Halmahera, the Sula islands, into eastern Sulawesi, out along the Papuan coast.

How rare that is

Throwing a European power out by force and keeping your own capital afterwards is not something that happened often anywhere.

The Ya'ariba took Muscat from the Portuguese in 1650 and spent the next forty years raiding Portuguese Asia from it. Ethiopia destroyed an Italian army at Adwa in 1896 and kept its independence. Ternate's siege is seventy-five years earlier than the first of those, and by an enormous margin the smallest party to any of them: an island of forty-odd square kilometres, against the empire that had taken Melaka and Hormuz and Goa.

It is worth stating plainly what happened next, because the victory settled less than it looks. Ternate won in 1575 and was a Dutch company's vassal by 1683. The two facts are not in tension. What arrived in the seventeenth century was a different kind of thing from what Baabullah had expelled, and the last chapter is about what the difference was.

The trees

Drafted from Andaya, The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period (1993)end

The Dutch East India Company wanted what the Portuguese had wanted and went about it differently. Where the Portuguese had tried to hold a fort at the source and buy, the company set out to control the supply itself — and the supply, uniquely among the commodities of early modern trade, was small enough to control absolutely.

The method was extirpatie. Clove trees growing anywhere other than the islands the company chose were to be cut down and burnt, and the annual expeditions that did the cutting were Ternatan: the sultan's own kora-kora, crewed by his own dependencies, destroying the crop on islands that owed him tribute, under the company's direction and on the company's schedule.

The treaty of 1683 is where the sultanate ends, and nothing was conquered. The sultan signed, kept his title, kept his palace, and kept his throne for another two hundred and thirty years as an official of somebody else's empire. What he stopped having was a polity.

What became of the clove

The company burned the trees for a century and a half, and then lost them anyway.

The clove was out of Maluku by the 1770s, carried to Mauritius by a French administrator with some seedlings, and from there to Zanzibar — where an Omani sultanate that had moved its capital to East Africa built plantations on it and grew rich in exactly the way Ternate once had.

A monopoly that Ternate had held for centuries without needing to enforce, and that the company enforced at the cost of a whole region, was undone in the end by a man with cuttings in a pot. It was never really a fiscal system. It was a tree that grew in one place, until it did not.

The airport named after him

Drafted from Rahman, Indigenous Populations, Plantations, and Agrarian Conflicts in Rural North Maluku during the Colonial Period from the 17th to the 20th Century (2024)afterlife

The company's vassalage did not end when the company did. The VOC itself dissolved in 1799, bankrupt, and its rights in the clove islands passed directly to the Dutch state, which kept running the same arrangement under a different flag: a sultan who still held his palace and his title, and whose own fleets were still the instrument used to destroy any clove tree growing where the government had not licensed one.

What 1910 actually took

The deeper claim on Ternate's own land came later, and it was more total than tribute or tree-burning had ever been. A "short declaration" imposed on the sultans of Ternate, Tidore and Bacan in 1910 stripped them of their personal land rights outright - the aha kolano, the sultans' own customary holdings across Halmahera and the surrounding islands, converted at a stroke into land the colonial government administered directly. Communities that had lived under a sultan's authority in the interior began moving to the coast, into a system now run from Batavia rather than from Ternate's own palace.

A resistance that outlasted the sultan's own authority to grant it

Ternate's own submission did not mean Halmahera's did. Communities across the island rose against the tightening monopoly repeatedly through the turn of the century - at Jailolo in 1876, at Kao in 1904, at Loloda from 1906 to 1909, at Galela in 1906-07, and at Jailolo again in 1914 - fighting a Dutch administration that had, by then, made the sultan himself as much a functionary of the system as any of his own subjects.

What came back after independence

The claim did not die with the colonial period either. After Suharto's resignation in 1998 loosened decades of enforced quiet, demonstrations in the town of Ternate demanded the return of every piece of land the argument held had been unlawfully taken from the sultanate under Dutch rule - the same land the 1910 declaration had converted from a sultan's customary right into a colonial government's asset, now claimed back from an Indonesian one. In 2006 the argument found a very literal piece of ground to attach itself to: a dispute over four villages surrounding Sultan Baabullah Airport, named for the sixteenth-century sultan whose five-year siege had once driven the Portuguese off the island for good. The runway sits on land the sultanate's own history says was never properly given away in the first place.