The Portuguese conquest of Malaka of August 1511 — the capture of the city of Malaka by a fleet of nineteen ships and a substantial landing force under the Governor of Portuguese India, Affonso d’Albuquerque, who had sailed from Cochin on 2 May 1511 and attacked the city on 25 July 1511 and again on 10 August 1511, taking it after a few days of fighting — is the foundational event of the Portuguese empire in the Malay-Indonesian archipelago and the proximate cause of the rise of Acheh as the chief Muslim commercial rival of the Portuguese in the Strait of Malaka for the next hundred and thirty years. The conquest is the opening episode of Johan van der Woude’s chapter “Atjeh. Djohor. Malaka.” in his Van der Woude (1948).
Background: the Sequeira mission (1509)
The conquest of Malaka was preceded by the reconnaissance mission of Diogo Lopez de Sequeira, who left Cochin in August 1509 with five ships under instructions from King Manuel I of Portugal to call at Madagascar, sail to Malaka, demand tribute and load spices. Sequeira called at the pepper ports of Pedir and Pasei on the north coast of Sumatra — the first European visit to the Atjeh coast — where he obtained permission to trade but took on no cargo, and proceeded to Malaka. The sultan of Malaka received the Portuguese civilly and granted them leave to set up a factory; but two months later, alarmed by reports of Portuguese behaviour elsewhere in the East and pressed by his Muslim merchant community, he prepared to attack the fleet. The plot failed, but several Portuguese were killed on shore and others taken prisoner in the factory, including the factor Ruy d’Aranjo. The ships withdrew, taking reprisals on Malay craft they encountered on the way home.
Albuquerque’s expedition (1511)
Affonso d’Albuquerque, Governor of Portuguese India since 5 November 1509, resolved on the conquest of Malaka. He was strengthened in his purpose by a letter from the captive Ruy d’Aranjo, who wrote from prison that the trade of Malaka could only be secured by force and that a strong power would be needed. Albuquerque sailed from Cochin on 2 May 1511 with a fleet of nineteen ships. On the way he made prizes of several Muslim merchant vessels, alarming the rulers of Pedir and Pasei and damaging the relations he might have cultivated. He anchored before Malaka in mid-June 1511, demanded the surrender of the prisoners and compensation for the damaged goods, and added the demand that he be allowed to build a fort — a demand the sultan resisted while playing for time. The first assault on 25 July 1511 failed; the second, renewed on 10 August 1511, took the city after a few days of street fighting. The Portuguese captured substantial booty.
The Portuguese fort and the Catholic mission
Albuquerque at once built a fortress — the Fortaleza de Malaca — using materials from the royal tombs and from demolished mosques, a desecration that, as Van der Woude notes, “allerminst bevorderlijk was voor een goede verstandhouding”. He introduced a Portuguese administration, a new coinage, and the seizure of the tin mines as crown property. By these acts Malaka became a Portuguese colony, not merely a Portuguese factory. In Europe, Pope Leo X ordered a general thanksgiving with a procession to the churches of Santa Maria del Popolo and Sant’Agostino in Rome, and the King of Portugal was lauded in an oratio in the papal chapel. In 1559 Pope Paul IV raised Malaka to a bishopric. The conquest thus had the character of a crusading as well as a commercial enterprise, and its ideological frame — the Padroado Real by which the Portuguese crown claimed ecclesiastical jurisdiction over its conquests — was the same ideology that the Franciscan monk at the court of the sultan of Atjeh in 1600 would still represent.
The rise of Atjeh and the long siege (1511-1641)
The conquest’s chief political consequence was the rise of Acheh. The deposed sultan of Malaka retired to Bintang and later to Djohor, from where he and his successors harassed Portuguese shipping and blockaded Malaka in turn. The Portuguese, for their part, sent punitive expeditions against Bintang, Djohor and the east coast of Sumatra. As the Malay siege of Malaka developed, the sultans of Atjeh — pressing from the west along the north Sumatran coast — became the most dangerous Muslim rivals of the Portuguese. Van der Woude notes that “in plaats dat dit leidde tot een verbond tusschen de inlandsche vorsten, dwongen de veroveringen van Atjeh Djohor in 1536 tot vrede met de Portugeezen” — that Achehnese expansion against Portuguese Malaka paradoxically forced Djohor into a separate peace with the Portuguese in 1536. Three years later Atjeh recaptured the wingewest of Aru from Djohor. The great Achehnese siege of Malaka of 1-17 February 1575 nearly succeeded; the 150 Portuguese defenders, ill-supplied and short of ammunition, considered it a miracle when the Achehnese withdrew. The 1587 treaty between Atjeh and the Portuguese, by which Aru was again assigned to Djohor, opened a generation of relative peace; the Dutch arrival at Atjeh in 1599 reopened the strategic contest.
Significance
The Portuguese conquest of Malaka is, in Van der Woude’s narrative, the principal instance of the foundational event of the European presence in the Malay-Indonesian archipelago and the proximate cause of the rise of Acheh as the chief Muslim commercial rival of the Portuguese in the Strait of Malaka. The conquest established the strategic framework within which all subsequent Malay-Portuguese and Malay-Dutch relations unfolded: the Portuguese held the central chokepoint of the Strait, the Malay sultans of Malaka’s successor states (first Bintang, then Djohor) sought to recover it, and the sultans of Atjeh sought to inherit its commerce. The arrival of the Dutch at Atjeh in 1599 — the event that opens Van der Woude’s chapter — was thus a continuation by new hands of the Muslim-Christian contest that Albuquerque’s conquest had inaugurated. The eventual fall of Malaka to the Dutch and their Djohor allies in 1641 would close the cycle that Albuquerque had opened in 1511, and transfer the commercial contest from the Portuguese to the VOC.
See Also
- Affonso d’Albuquerque
- Diogo Lopez de Sequeira
- Malaka
- Acheh
- Djohor
- Bintang
- Aru
- Pedir
- Pasei
- Sultan of Atjeh (1589-1604)
- Matelieff’s Malaka campaign (1606)
- Verhoeff’s Malaka expedition (1608)
- 1511
- 1575
- 1587
- 1599
Source
Coen, Koopman van Heeren Zeventien. Geschiedenis van den Hollandshen Handel in Indië (1598-1614), by Johan van der Woude (Amsterdam: C.V. Uitgeverij v/h C. De Boer Jr., 1948), Hoofdstuk V “Voorgangers, Hollanders en mededingers tot 1614. Atjeh. Djohor. Malaka.” (pp. 134-137).