The Radja of Aroe was the ruler of the kingdom of Aru on the east coast of Sumatra who, in 1539, faced the Atjehnese fleet of Alleredin Mahomet, received Mendez Pinto as the envoy of the Portuguese governor of Malacca, and was killed in the fall of his kingdom to Atjeh. His reign is the last documented moment of Aroe as a substantial independent power before its absorption by the Atjehnese sultanate; his death, his widow’s flight, and her subsequent remarriage to the Sultan of Johor are the principal human threads of the Atjeh-Aroe War (1539) as preserved in Pinto’s Peregrinacam.
The Portuguese embassy (October 1539)
When the Atjehnese threat materialised, the Radja of Aroe sent to Pero de Faria in Malacca for armed help. Pinto, dispatched with munitions, anchored in the bay of Aroe on 5 October 1539 and found the radja at work on a trench thrown up against the expected attack from the sea. “Very glad of the letter of the governor of Malacca, the radja embraced his envoy, brought him to his palace, and presented him to his wife — a thing that very rarely took place”, Pinto notes; the radja’s openness was a measure of how much he counted on Portuguese help. He had only 6,000 men under arms; the Atjehsche vloot numbered some 130 vessels. Pinto, the story goes, saw that the end was foreseeable.
The fall of Aroe
Pinto, asked when he wished to depart, begged to leave at once. The radja parted from him with golden arm-bracelets and a message of thanks for the munitions and weapons received. After Pinto’s departure the end came quickly: “Bravely the radja held out, at first with success; but treason by an Atjeh-bribed Cacis opened the gate, which delivered the fortification into the enemy’s hands. The radja fell, and this caused a panic. The case was decided.” De Roo de la Faille’s account adds the gloss that the Cacis — apparently a kadi or religious official — was bribed by Atjeh, and that his treason was the immediate military cause of the kingdom’s fall.
Place in the geopolitics of 1539
The Radja of Aroe’s strategic position, as Pinto recorded it, was that his kingdom was the station by which Atjeh could “command the Strait of Malacca and deny Portuguese ships and other traders the passage to Sunda, the Moluccas and China”. Atjeh’s design on Aroe was thus not territorial in the first instance but maritime and commercial, and the Radja’s fall was the loss not just of a kingdom but of the last independent check on Atjehnese command of the Strait.
Significance
For AcehWiki, the Radja of Aroe is the principal non-Atjehnese actor of the 1539 war — the ruler whose death marks the formal close of Aroe’s independence and the beginning of its absorption into the Atjehnese sphere. His reception of Pinto, his attempt to defend Aroe, and his death in the breach are the only sustained portrait of an east-coast Sumatran ruler from this period preserved in a European eyewitness source.
See Also
- Atjeh-Aroe War (1539)
- Queen of Aroe
- Mendez Pinto
- Alleredin Mahomet
- Aroe
- Aroe-baai
- Poelo Kampi
- Sultan of Atjeh (16th century)
- Straits of Malacca
- 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 “Mendez Pinto op Sumatra”, pp. 9-10.
The Radja of Aroe was the ruler of the kingdom of Aru on the east coast of Sumatra who, in 1539, faced the Atjehnese fleet of Alleredin Mahomet, received Mendez Pinto as the envoy of the Portuguese governor of Malacca, and was killed in the fall of his kingdom to Atjeh. His reign is the last documented moment of Aroe as a substantial independent power before its absorption by the Atjehnese sultanate; his death, his widow’s flight, and her subsequent remarriage to the Sultan of Johor are the principal human threads of the Atjeh-Aroe War (1539) as preserved in Pinto’s Peregrinacam.
The Portuguese embassy (October 1539)
When the Atjehnese threat materialised, the Radja of Aroe sent to Pero de Faria in Malacca for armed help. Pinto, dispatched with munitions, anchored in the bay of Aroe on 5 October 1539 and found the radja at work on a trench thrown up against the expected attack from the sea. “Very glad of the letter of the governor of Malacca, the radja embraced his envoy, brought him to his palace, and presented him to his wife — a thing that very rarely took place”, Pinto notes; the radja’s openness was a measure of how much he counted on Portuguese help. He had only 6,000 men under arms; the Atjehsche vloot numbered some 130 vessels. Pinto, the story goes, saw that the end was foreseeable.
The fall of Aroe
Pinto, asked when he wished to depart, begged to leave at once. The radja parted from him with golden arm-bracelets and a message of thanks for the munitions and weapons received. After Pinto’s departure the end came quickly: “Bravely the radja held out, at first with success; but treason by an Atjeh-bribed Cacis opened the gate, which delivered the fortification into the enemy’s hands. The radja fell, and this caused a panic. The case was decided.” De Roo de la Faille’s account adds the gloss that the Cacis — apparently a kadi or religious official — was bribed by Atjeh, and that his treason was the immediate military cause of the kingdom’s fall.
Place in the geopolitics of 1539
The Radja of Aroe’s strategic position, as Pinto recorded it, was that his kingdom was the station by which Atjeh could “command the Strait of Malacca and deny Portuguese ships and other traders the passage to Sunda, the Moluccas and China”. Atjeh’s design on Aroe was thus not territorial in the first instance but maritime and commercial, and the Radja’s fall was the loss not just of a kingdom but of the last independent check on Atjehnese command of the Strait.
Significance
For AcehWiki, the Radja of Aroe is the principal non-Atjehnese actor of the 1539 war — the ruler whose death marks the formal close of Aroe’s independence and the beginning of its absorption into the Atjehnese sphere. His reception of Pinto, his attempt to defend Aroe, and his death in the breach are the only sustained portrait of an east-coast Sumatran ruler from this period preserved in a European eyewitness source.
See Also
- Atjeh-Aroe War (1539)
- Queen of Aroe
- Mendez Pinto
- Alleredin Mahomet
- Aroe
- Aroe-baai
- Poelo Kampi
- Sultan of Atjeh (16th century)
- Straits of Malacca
- 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 “Mendez Pinto op Sumatra”, pp. 9-10.