The conquest of Pidië and Pasè — in Kreemer’s history, the subjugation by Sultan Ali Mughayat Shah (Raja Ibrahim) of the north-coast kingdoms of Pidië (Pedir) and Pasè in approximately 1524 — was the decisive act by which the Atjèh sultanate succeeded to the commercial and political position of the older Muslim kingdom of Samudra-Pasè and became the dominant power on the north coast of Sumatra. The conquest was accompanied by the expulsion of the Portuguese, established at Malaka since 1511, from Pasè.
Atjèh as a vassal of Pidië
Kreemer records that, before Ali Mughayat Shah’s rise, Atjèh was itself “een leenroerigheid van Pidië” — “a fief of Pidië” — and that the whole of the north coast with its hinterland was “van Pasè afhankelijk” — “dependent on Pasè.” The Portuguese monopoly policy — “Hun monopoliepolitiek, vooral ter wille van de peper en de zijde” — “their monopoly policy, especially for the sake of pepper and silk” — had driven trade away from Pasè to other harbours, in this case Atjèh. Atjèh then freed itself from Pidië and subjugated Pasè in turn: “Het gevolg was, dat de handel, in plaats van Pasè andere havens zocht: in dit geval Atjèh, dat zich van Pidië onafhankelijk maakte en ook Pasè onderwierp, waaruit in 1524 de Portugeezen door Atjèh werden verdreven” — “The consequence was that trade, instead of Pasè, sought other harbours: in this case Atjèh, which made itself independent of Pidië and also subjugated Pasè, from which in 1524 the Portuguese were expelled by Atjèh.”
The independence of the sultanate
The conquest of Pidië and Pasè coincided with Atjèh’s emergence from vassalage into full sovereignty. “Werd Atjèh, tijdens het een onderhoorigheid van Pidië was, door stedehouders van den vorst van dit rijkje bestuurd, na zijn onafhankelijkheid (omstreeks 1520) kreeg het zijn eigen Havenkoningen of Soeltan’s” — “While Atjèh, when it was a dependency of Pidië, was governed by lieutenants of the prince of that little kingdom, after its independence (around 1520) it got its own Harbour-Kings or Sultans.” Ali Mughayat Shah was the first of these independent sultans.
Significance
In Kreemer’s periodisation, the conquest of Pidië and Pasè marks the transition of Atjèh from a minor harbour-state to a sultanate — the political successor to Samudra-Pasè and the commercial successor to the Portuguese-thwarted trade of the north coast. The expulsion of the Portuguese from Pasè in 1524 is the first direct military encounter between Atjèh and the Portuguese recorded in Kreemer’s history; it foreshadows the long naval contest between Atjèh and Portuguese Malaka that would define the next century of Strait politics.
Account from Vijftig jaren economische staatkunde in Atjeh (1923)
The Acehnese expulsion of the Portuguese from Pasè — accomplished at the opening of the sixteenth century and consolidated in 1524, when the Sultan of Atjeh, after the driving-out of the Portuguese from Pasè, assumed the supremacy over land and people — was for author Joh. Langhout the beginning of Atjeh’s “self-government”, the starting point of the story his first chapter tells: “Atjeh onder ‘zelfbestuur’” (“Atjeh under self-rule”).
The freeing of Atjeh
At the beginning of the 1500s the “self-government” of Atjeh began with Pidië making itself independent and with the expulsion of the Portuguese, who for years running had maintained as administrator of the mighty Pasè one of their mightiest subjects. Whether that expulsion of all that was Portuguese from the coastal strips and the interior of Atjeh was a consequence of an actual oppression of the one people by the other; whether the “freeing” of Atjeh must be regarded as an escape from the yoke of Portuguese servitude — from a kind of slave-service applied by the Portuguese of Malakka to the inhabitants of the Atjeh of those days — or whether already then the idea of national solidarity had so penetrated the people of Atjeh that it wished to free itself from foreign domination: “the answers to these questions can only be guessed”, Langhout writes.
The expansion of the sultanate
What is certainly known, and mentioned by the historians even with a certain emphasis, is that from 1524 onward Atjeh expanded at the cost of the surrounding countries — so much that not a hundred years later, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, not only a great part of the island of Sumatra and the island of Nias, but even a part of the peninsula of Malakka was subjected to the realm of the Prince of Atjeh. This expansion the realm owed, for the greatest part, to one of the army-commanders of the reigning Sultan, who for his time “must have been an extraordinary strategist”. Beside the happy extent, however, a rapidly spreading demoralization of the Atjehnese people became noticeable, and the number of sea-robbers and “waterschuimers” who made the coasts of Sumatra unsafe far around grew alarmingly, especially at the end of the sixteenth century — the condition under which the Dutch first appeared in Atjeh in 1599, where they made acquaintance with that commander who governed both the realm of Atjeh and the nearby island of Nias and a part of Malakka.
Significance
For Langhout’s argument the year 1524 opens the three and a half centuries of Atjehnese “self-government” which — written down through internal feuds, exploitative chiefs, sea-robbery and plundering — would stand as the foil to the fifty years (1873–1923) of Dutch “economic statecraft” that his book records, answering his own question: “Atjeh onder Zelfbestuur? Of: Atjeh als Wingewest?”
See Also
- Acheh
- Sultan Ali Mughayat Shah
- Pidië
- Pasei
- Portuguese conquest of Malaka (1511)
- Malaka
- 1524
- De Houtman brothers’ voyage to Atjeh (1599-1600)
- Sea robbery on the Atjeh coast
- Zelfbestuur and Wingewest
Source
Atjèh. Algemeen samenvattend overzicht van land en volk van Atjèh en onderhoorigheden, door J. Kreemer, Archivaris van het Atjèh Instituut. Eerste Deel. Leiden: N.V. Boekhandel en Drukkerij voorheen E.J. Brill, 1922. Hoofdstuk I, A (“Oudste geschiedenis tot 1824”), blz. 3–4.
Vijftig jaren economische staatkunde in Atjeh, by Joh. Langhout (The Hague: N.V. Boekhandel v/h W. P. van Stockum & Zoon, 1923), pp. 8–10.