The Atjeh bloeitijdperk of 1607–1636 — the “golden age of Atjeh’s past” in J. Kreemer|Kreemer’s phrase — was the reign of Sultan Iskandar Muda (r. 1607–1636), the “Roi soleil” of the Atjehnese sultans, under whom the Acheh|Atjeh sultanate reached the zenith of its military, commercial and cultural power, and during whose court at Banda Acheh|Koetaradja both elephants and buffaloes were deployed as vechtdieren (fighting animals) in spectacles staged before foreign envoys. The period is the high-water mark of pre-colonial Atjehnese statehood and the chronological anchor against which the long decline of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — and, ultimately, the Aceh War|Dutch conquest of the late nineteenth century — was measured.
Kreemer’s account in De Karbouw
J. Kreemer|Kreemer introduces the bloeitijdperk in Kreemer’s De Karbouw (*De Karbouw* (1956) (p. 84), in the chapter on buffalo-fights and buffalo-races, as the chronological frame against which the village buffalo-fights of more recent times are to be understood as a “zwakke weerklank” (faint echo):
“In Atjeh waren die krachtmetingen van buffel tegen buffel een zwakke weerklank uit het bloeitijdperk van Atjeh’s verleden (1607–1636), toen de pracht en de praal van des Soeltan’s hofhouding aan het wonderbaarlijke zouden hebben gegrensd en toen daar ook olifanten als vechtdieren werden gebruikt.” The passage fixes three facts about the bloeitijdperk as it bears on the encyclopedia of buffalo-history. First, the courtly spectacle of buffalo-fights (krachtmetingen van buffel tegen buffel) is an institution of the Iskandar Muda period — its village-level survival in later centuries is, in Kreemer’s reading, a faint echo of the courtly original. Second, the splendour and pomp (pracht en praal) of the Sultan’s court in this period “would have bordered on the marvellous” — a phrase that captures the heroic-historical register in which the bloeitijdperk was remembered. Third, the court of Sultan Iskandar Muda|Iskandar Muda used both elephants and buffaloes as vechtdieren — a pairing that points to the cosmopolitan reach of Atjeh’s courtly culture in this period, when the sultanate’s military, commercial and diplomatic horizons extended across the Indian Ocean.
The 1613 court festival
The single most-cited European eyewitness account of the bloeitijdperk court is that of the English envoy Thomas Best, who visited Banda Acheh|Koetaradja in 1613 and whose journal was edited by William Foster as The Voyage of Thomas Best to the East Indies, 1612-14 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1934). J. Kreemer|Kreemer — drawing on his own Kreemer’s Atjeh (*Atjeh* (vol. I, p. 192) — summarises Best’s account and quotes his description of the buffalo-fight verbatim:
“Thomas Best, Engels gezant in die dagen, geeft in zijn journaal een entousiast verslag van zijn bezoek in 1613 aan het hof van Soeltan Iskandar Moeda, de ‘Roi soleil’ der Atjehse vorsten, toen er te zijner ere een groot feest plaats had. Eén der hoofdmomenten daarvan was een toernooi van olifanten. ‘After them came buffelos, a beast verie fierce and stronge, which maid a worthie feight and gave greatt content to the spectators.’” The juxtaposition of elephant-tournament and buffalo-fight at a single state festival in honour of a foreign envoy is, in Kreemer’s reading, evidence of a courtly culture in which animal combat had been elevated from a village pastime to a spectacle of kingship. The same courtly culture is attested, by analogy, in the persistence of the koeta djaq|buffalo-hide “walking fort” as an Atjehnese siege-engine (already mentioned in the Potjoet Moehammat|mid-eighteenth-century Atjehnese epic Potjoet Moehammat) and in the survival, in much attenuated form, of village buffalo-fights in the archipelago in later centuries.
The wider significance
The bloeitijdperk of 1607–1636 is the period against which all later Atjehnese history is, in some sense, measured. The court institutions, the literary culture, the military posture, and the diplomatic horizons of Sultan Iskandar Muda|Iskandar Muda’s reign furnished the template against which the long decline of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was measured, and against which the Dutch colonial conquest of the Aceh War|late-nineteenth-century Atjeh War was, in its turn, understood. The Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje|Snouck Hurgronje and J. Kreemer|Kreemer ethnographic syntheses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — written, respectively, during and after the Dutch military conquest — look back to the bloeitijdperk as the classic age of Atjehnese statehood, and quote the European eyewitness records (Best, Ibn Battuta|Ibn Battuta for the earlier Pasai period, the later British envoys) as the principal documentary windows onto it.
Significance
The Atjeh bloeitijdperk is significant for the encyclopedia of Acheh history as the chronological anchor of the pre-colonial Atjehnese state. Its dates (1607–1636) define the reign of Sultan Iskandar Muda, the “Roi soleil” of the sultans; its court is the type-locality of the Court buffalo-fight at Sultan Iskandar Muda’s court (court buffalo-fight as a spectacle of kingship; and its military culture is attested by the koeta djaq|buffalo-hide siege engine of Atjehnese warfare. The period is the indispensable chronological frame for entries on court spectacle, military technology, and the early-modern European eyewitness record on Atjeh.
Sources
De Karbouw — Zijn betekenis voor de volken van de Indonesische Archipel, by J. Kreemer (‘s-Gravenhage / Bandung: N.V. Uitgeverij W. van Hoeve, 1956), p. 84.
The Voyage of Thomas Best to the East Indies, 1612-14, edited by William Foster (London: Hakluyt Society, 1934), p. 168. Atjèh, by J. Kreemer, vol. I (1922), p. 192.