The conquest of Portuguese Malakka in 1641 was the joint VOC–Atjeh–Djohor capture of the city of Malakka from the Portuguese, ending 130 years of Portuguese rule over the strategic Strait port. The conquest was the immediate political background to Pieter Soury’s mission to Atjeh of the same year: in Godee Molsbergen’s account, “Atjeh, dat een jaar te voren met Djohor bij de Compagnie had samengewerkt, om de Portugeezen uit Malakka te jagen” — Atjeh, which the year before had cooperated with Djohor and the Company to drive the Portuguese from Malakka.
The long Atjeh-Portuguese conflict
The conquest of 1641 closed more than a century of Atjeh-Portuguese conflict. Since the early sixteenth century, Atjeh had been “de groote vijand der Portugeezen in die gewesten” — the great enemy of the Portuguese in those parts — and “een voortdurende bedreiging voor Malakka” — a constant threat to Malakka. The sultanate’s naval power and its alliance with other Malay powers had repeatedly brought Portuguese Malakka to the edge of collapse; the great cannon of Atjeh was the most famous single artefact of that contest.
The Portuguese, for their part, had repeatedly tried to contain Atjeh — by naval expeditions (such as the André Furtado de Mendonça armada of 1601), by diplomatic interventions (such as the Portuguese monk who sabotaged the 1600 pigskin-letter embassy), and by alliances with Atjeh’s Malay rivals (especially Djohor).
The VOC-Atjeh-Djohor alliance of 1640
By the late 1630s the strategic situation had shifted. The Dutch-Portuguese truce of 1641 (following Portugal’s liberation from Spain in 1640) complicated but did not prevent the joint VOC–Atjeh–Djohor attack on Portuguese Malakka. The truce was a European diplomatic fact; in Asian waters, the contest continued. The three powers — the VOC, Atjeh and Djohor — found a common interest in driving the Portuguese from the Strait, and cooperated to that end in 1640–1641.
The fall of Malakka, 1641
The joint attack succeeded: Portuguese Malakka fell in 1641. The fall of the city ended 130 years of Portuguese rule (since the city’s capture by Afonso de Albuquerque in 1511) and opened a new era in the Strait’s commercial and political geography. The Portuguese nobleman Francisco de Souza de Castro, held prisoner in Atjeh at the time of the fall, was one of the human residues of the long conflict.
The Soury embassy and the conquest
The Soury embassy of 1641 was sent in the immediate aftermath of the conquest — Commissaris Soury travelled via Malakka to Atjeh, and the fall of the city was the political fact that framed the new Sultana’s diplomacy. The “maidens as ransom” request put to Soury at his audience — see Maagden als losprijs — and the Atjeh court’s interest in the fate of the Portuguese prisoner De Castro both reflect the immediate context of the Malakka conquest: the sultanate was consolidating its gains and seeking to extract further advantage from the Portuguese defeat.
The Soury embassy’s diplomatic clarification — that Portugal in 1640 had been freed from Spain, was no longer the Republic’s mortal enemy, and that the Republic had concluded a ten-year truce with Portugal the following year — was also a clarification about the meaning of the Malakka conquest. The Dutch were now, formally, at truce with Portugal in Europe; in Asia, the truce complicated but did not undo the joint VOC–Atjeh–Djohor victory.
Significance
For Atjeh’s history, the conquest of Portuguese Malakka in 1641 is the closing episode of the long Atjeh-Portuguese conflict that had defined the sultanate’s external relations since the early sixteenth century. The joint VOC–Atjeh–Djohor victory was the high-point of Atjeh’s seventeenth-century partnership with the Dutch — a partnership that the Soury embassy of 1641 was sent to formalise and consolidate. The conquest also marked the beginning of the end of Atjeh’s strategic centrality in the Strait: with Portuguese Malakka gone, the VOC became the dominant European power in the region, and the Atjeh sultanate’s room for diplomatic manoeuvre narrowed.
See Also
- Pieter Soury’s mission to Atjeh (1641)
- Maagden als losprijs
- Francisco de Souza de Castro
- Great cannon of Atjeh
- Andrea Furtado de Mendoça
- Pigskin parchment letter incident at Atjeh (1600)
- Johor
- Malakka
- Acheh
- Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie
- 1641
Source
Tijdens de O.I. Compagnie, by Dr. E. C. Godee Molsbergen, Oud-Hoogleeraar, Landsarchivaris te Batavia (Amsterdam: N.V. Swets & Zeitlinger Boekhandel en Uitgevers Mij., 1932), chapters XI, XXIII, XXXIII, pp. 39–43, 81, 118–121 of the numbered-letter sequence.