Pati Oenoes’s attack on Malacca in January 1513 was the great Javanese naval expedition, dispatched from Japara by the lord Pati Oenoes — whom De Roo de la Faille identifies with Raden Sahid/Soenan Kalidjaga — against Portuguese Malacca, in the first Muslim attempt to retake the city from the Portuguese. The attack failed; Pati Oenoes saved himself and his fighting-junk by a hurried return to Japara, where — as a memorial of his bold deed — he had the junk placed under a shed on the beach, “as large as a Portuguese ship of 500 tons, caulked with seven layers of a mixture of lime and oil”. The fame of the deed was so great, Castanheda noted, that the Javanese made him king of Demak on account of it.
Background
Tome Pires’s Suma Oriental (~1515) records that Pati Oenoes’s father had been a working man in the islands of Lawé (Borneo) who had come to Malacca with little means, married there, and had a son — Pati Oenoes’s father — who traded to Java and cunningly killed the pate of Japara (then weak, with 90 or 100 inhabitants), seized Japara and the island of Tidunan, brought Bengka-lis (“the vanished Bangka”) and Tanjungpura under his jurisdiction, and made his country great. Pati Oenoes, his son, “wanted to put together what remained of his father’s wealth and what wealth Pate Rodim [of Demak] had, and decided to take Malacca from the then king of Malacca, because he had taken offence because they had not done honour in Malacca to the captain of a junk of his as had hoped”.
The attack
In January 1513 Pati Oenoes led a great Javanese fleet against Portuguese Malacca. The attack failed; Pati Oenoes saved himself and his fighting-junk by a hurried return to Japara. There, De Roo de la Faille records, citing Castanheda, “as a memorial of his bold deed he had this junk placed under a shed on the beach”, a vessel “as large as a Portuguese ship of 500 tons, caulked with seven layers of a mixture of lime and oil — probably the tough substance used for caulking junks, which, plastered on the seams from outside, becomes as hard as glass”. The fame of the deed was, Castanheda noted, so great “that the Javanese even now [sc. before 1552] speak of this deed, and on account of it made him king of a city called Demak”.
Significance
For AcehWiki, Pati Oenoes’s 1513 attack on Malacca is the first Muslim attempt to retake the city from the Portuguese — a strategic echo of the Atjehnese sultanate’s own war on Aroe of 1539, and a token of the same Islamic-commercial coalition that the Atjehnese sultanate would lead in the following decades. Pati Oenoes’s later marriage of his sister to the Paseier Faletahan (~1523–1524) — and his identification, by De Roo de la Faille, with Raden Sahid of the Babad Tanah Djawi — also mark him as the Javanese link in the Pasej–Atjeh–Java triangle of the early sixteenth century.
See Also
- Pati Oenoes
- Soenan Kalidjaga
- Faletahan
- Japara
- Demak
- Malacca
- Tome Pires
- Castanheda
- Atjeh-Aroe War (1539)
- Aceh Sultanate
- Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java
Source
Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java, by P. de Roo de la Faille (Den Haag: Maart 1954), chapter “Over Soenan Kalidjaga”, pp. 50-58. Citing Castanheda and Tome Pires’s Suma Oriental (~1515).