The Sultanate of Tidore

The other island

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

Tidore is the island you can see from Ternate. The channel between them is about two kilometres wide, and the two sultanates spent five hundred years arranged against each other.

Almost everything about them is the same. The same crop, closely related languages, courts of the same form, and a shared understanding of Maluku as a place with two halves. What differed was which half you were, and that turned out to be the most consequential fact about either of them.

Where this account starts

1521, and the arrival of the Victoria — the last surviving ship of Magellan's expedition, which reached Maluku eight months after Magellan was killed in the Philippines, and loaded cloves here.

The sultanate is older than that. Its king list, like Ternate's, is not securely datable, and a sultanate whose own beginnings are remembered rather than documented has to be dated from the point where somebody outside it started writing things down. Here that somebody was a Spanish crew with eighteen survivors, on the last leg of the first voyage around the world, who had come looking for exactly these islands and found them.

Andaya, The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period (1993) · Abraham Ortelius · Public domain

The Papuan coast

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

Ternate's half of Maluku ran west and south: Halmahera, the Sula islands, the eastern arm of Sulawesi. Tidore's ran east, and it ran a very long way.

The Raja Ampat — four island groups off the western tip of New Guinea, whose rulers held titles from Tidore. The Onin and Kowiai coasts of what is now Papua. Seram Laut and the islands used as exchange points for the trade beyond them.

What came back along that network was not cloves. It was massoi bark, tortoise shell, bird of paradise plumes, ambergris, sago, and slaves — and the plumes in particular went from western New Guinea through Tidore into a trade that reached China and, eventually, European hat-makers.

The hongi

The instrument was the hongi: a fleet of kora-kora, the long oared war craft of the northern Moluccas, sailing east in season to collect tribute, enforce the titles, and take what was owed from anybody who had not sent it.

Both sultanates ran them. The Dutch company later turned the institution to its own purpose — the clove extirpation voyages, in which Malukan fleets destroyed the crop on Malukan islands to the company's schedule — but the fleets and the obligation long predate the company, and this is what they had been for.

Two islands, two Islams

The obvious assumption is that Islam reached the north Moluccas once and spread from there, and that Ternate and Tidore are two names for the same event. They are not.

Islam went west and south with Ternate's fleets, into Halmahera and the Sula islands and the eastern arm of Sulawesi. It went east with Tidore's, into the Raja Ampat and along the coasts of western New Guinea, carried by the same titles and the same tribute voyages described above.

Those coasts are the eastern limit of Islam's spread in the archipelago before the modern period, and it got there because a small sultanate on a volcanic island had a network running six hundred miles in the one direction its rival did not.

1663

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

Spain pulled its garrisons out of Maluku in 1663 to concentrate on defending Manila, and Tidore was left facing the Dutch company without the ally it had held for a hundred and forty-two years.

Andaya, The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period (1993) · Leiden University Libraries · CC BY 4.0

It should have been the end. It was the best thing that happened to the sultanate in the seventeenth century.

Why the company gave better terms

By 1663 Ternate had been a company dependency in all but name for a generation; its formal end came with a treaty in 1683, and the substance had gone long before the document. A company that had reduced one of the two Malukan centres did not want the other reduced too. It wanted a counterweight: a second court with enough standing to keep Ternate's ambitions in check and enough dependence to be manageable.

So Tidore negotiated, and got recognition of its eastern dependencies, a lighter version of the extirpation obligation, and a standing the company took care not to erode. Saifuddin reigned thirty years on that footing, and it is the strongest position the sultanate ever held.

What it proves about the dualism

The opposition between the two islands is usually explained as something Europeans made or at least sharpened — two spice powers set against each other by Portuguese and Spanish backing.

The best evidence against that is negative, and it is here. By 1663 both Europeans were out of the arrangement: the Portuguese expelled from Ternate in 1575, the Spanish withdrawn from Tidore in 1663. The dualism kept working anyway — and a Dutch company with no interest whatever in preserving it found that it had to.

A structure that outlives the outsiders it recruited, and then obliges a third outsider to maintain it, was not produced by outsiders.

The trees, from this side

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Andaya, The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period (1993)

Extirpatie — the Dutch company's programme of cutting and burning clove trees everywhere except the islands it chose — was carried out by Malukan fleets against Malukan dependencies, on the company's orders. Ternate, whose entire revenue was that one crop, was made to destroy it wherever the company could not watch it grow.

The same was done to Tidore. The difference is what Tidore had besides.

Two revenues, one destroyed

The clove monopoly was the value that could be taken away, and it was. What could not be taken as easily was the tribute — the massoi bark, the plumes, the shell and the sago coming west along a chain of dependencies running six hundred miles into New Guinea, through waters the company had no interest in patrolling and no capacity to.

That is a large part of why Tidore outlasted Ternate by a hundred and twenty-two years. A polity reduced to one commodity the company controlled had nothing left when the commodity went. A polity with a second network in territory nobody else wanted had somewhere to be.

It is also where Nuku's fleet came from, seventeen years of it, which is the subject of the last chapter.

Three ways to break a monopoly

Aceh and Banten both held crown monopolies on pepper, and both were broken the same way: a company that could buy upcountry from the growers, without calling at the capital, turned the monopoly from a mechanism into a claim.

Ternate's clove monopoly was broken the opposite way — not by competition but by destruction, because cloves grew in a small enough area that eliminating the supply was cheaper than controlling the trade.

Tidore had the same monopoly destroyed and did not stop, because a second revenue existed in a direction nobody was looking. That is not resilience in any planned sense. It is an accident of where the islands are.

Nuku

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

Tidore outlasted Ternate by a hundred and twenty-two years, and the reason has a name.

Nuku had been fighting the Dutch from the sea since 1780, with a fleet drawn from the Papuan coasts and the Raja Ampat islands — Tidore's own dependencies, the eastern end of its half of the dualism — and with British help when it suited both of them. In 1797 he took Tidore itself. He held the sultanate as an independent power until he died in 1805.

Andaya, The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period (1993) · Achmad Rabin Taim · CC BY 2.0

Seventeen years of insurgency, then eight years of a state.

A different kind of win

Throwing a European power out and keeping your capital happened rarely enough to count on one hand — the Ya'ariba took Muscat from the Portuguese in 1650, Ethiopia destroyed an Italian army at Adwa in 1896, and Ternate's five-year siege put the Portuguese garrison off the island in 1575.

Nuku's is a different shape from any of those. Tidore had already been absorbed: company treaties, a resident, a sultan installed and deposed at the company's convenience. There was nothing left to expel. What Nuku did was take the sultanate back from the inside, with a fleet raised from the Papuan coasts and the Raja Ampat — the eastern half of the network the previous chapter describes, which was the one asset the company had never bothered to take.

Not an expulsion, then, but a recovery, by a polity that on any ordinary measure had stopped being one.

What he recovered did not survive him. He died in 1805 and the sultanate went back under Dutch authority, which is why the story ends there rather than at 1797. But those eight years are the reason Tidore's history runs a century past Ternate's, and they were paid for by seventeen years at sea.

A title the land still answers to

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

Nuku's death in 1805 ended the independence he had spent seventeen years fighting to recover, but not the sultanate itself. Dutch authority resumed over Tidore much as it had before him, and when the bankrupt VOC handed its Asian possessions to the Dutch state in 1799, the arrangement simply continued under a government rather than a company - a sultan kept in his palace, his eastern dependencies in the Raja Ampat and along the Papuan coast still nominally his, and the actual power to grant or withhold land increasingly somebody else's.

Rahman, Indigenous Populations, Plantations, and Agrarian Conflicts in Rural North Maluku during the Colonial Period from the 17th to the 20th Century (2024) · Ana Ainina · CC BY 4.0

The declaration that took the land without taking the title

That process reached its formal conclusion in 1910, when a "short declaration" imposed on Tidore alongside Ternate and Bacan stripped all three sultans of their personal customary land rights outright. What had been the sultan's own to grant, tax and inherit became land the colonial government administered directly - the last practical difference between a sultan who ruled and a sultan who merely presided disappearing in a single document.

What the title still carries

The sultanate survived that stripping the way it had survived every earlier reduction: as an office without the substance that had once come with it. Tidore's ceremonial line continues in Indonesia today, and the eastern network of tribute and titulature that Nuku had once mobilised into an army - the Raja Ampat islands, the coastal chiefdoms of western New Guinea - passed first to the colonial state and then, at independence, to Indonesia itself. It is the documentary basis Jakarta has since pointed to for its own claim over West Papua: a sovereignty question in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries still tracing its paper trail back to a network of island tribute relationships an early modern sultanate built to keep itself solvent.