The Sultan of Acheh (16th century) is the unnamed Achehnese sultan to whom the early-modern sources attribute both the expansionist campaign against the Sumatran east-coast polities — recorded by Pinto as the Atjeh-Aru war of 1539 — and the legendary opening of relations with the Sultan of Turkey at Stambul that gave rise to the great cannon **[[Lada Sichupa’]|Lada Sichupa’]] and the colony of skilled artisans at Bitay. He is the principal Achehnese actor of the Atjeh-Aroe War (1539) and the figure whose conversion to Islam and whose maritime design mark the formal opening of the Achehnese maritime age.
The two early-modern sources differ on which sultan they describe. De Roo de la Faille does not name the sultan precisely but places him in the political context of 1539; Snouck Hurgronje more cautiously records of the embassy to Turkey that “we know not which” sultan was meant. Both sources accordingly treat the sultan as a composite unnamed figure of the sixteenth century, and the AcehWiki article follows that treatment.
The conversion and the expansion
Pinto, at the opening of his account of the Atjeh-Aru war, records that “Atjeh’s sultan’s transition to Islam was a welcome motive for him to throw himself on his neighbours right and left, in order to bring them by fire and sword to submission and the new faith.” The conversion — which De Roo de la Faille does not date precisely but which the political context of 1539 places in the early sixteenth century — was, on Pinto’s reading, the ideological instrument by which the sultan prosecuted his territorial and maritime design: the closure of the Strait of Malacca to Portuguese shipping, and the absorption of the east-coast Hindu-Javanese commonwealth into the Achehnese sphere.
The 1539 design on Aroe
The war on Aroe was the central act of the sultan’s expansion. The fleet of 130 vessels, under the command of his brother-in-law Alleredin Mahomet — who also held the office of Gouverneur du Royaume de Baarros (governor of the kingdom of Barus) on the Sumatran west coast — was dispatched to take Aroe: “to the possession of Aroe Atjeh was much attached; it was the station by which Atjeh was able to command the Strait of Malacca and to deny Portuguese ships and other traders the passage to Sunda, the Moluccas and China.” The sultan’s strategic purpose was thus not territorial in the first instance but maritime and commercial — the closure of the Strait to Portuguese shipping.
The Puteri Idjo suit
The same sultan — or his immediate successor — is, in the Putri Hijau legend of Deli and Asahan, the Achehnese sultan who pressed a marriage suit on the fairy-tale queen Puteri Idjo of Deli. The queen’s refusal, her illness and death, and the loss of her “glass coffin” at sea on the way to Atjeh are, in De Roo de la Faille’s reading, the bedekte taal (veiled language) record of the sultan’s design on the Deli-Asahan-Aroe cultural zone — a design whose outcome, the legend insists, was frustrated not by war but by the queen’s death.
The embassy to Turkey and the Lada Sichupa’ legend
According to a popular Achehnese tradition preserved by Snouck Hurgronje in The Achehnese Vol. I, in the course of the sixteenth century, when Acheh began to grow powerful, one of the Sultans — “we know not which,” Snouck Hurgronje carefully notes — thought that the time had come to bring his kingdom to the notice of the lord of all believers, the Raja Rom (i.e. the Sultan of Turkey). He caused one of his biggest ships to be laden with pepper, the principal product of the country, as an offering expressive of homage to the supreme lord. Some say that he made the journey himself; according to others he sent an embassy of wealthy chiefs.
On their arrival at Stambul the Achehnese ambassadors found that no one had ever heard of the existence of Acheh. The officials of the Ottoman court refused for a year or two to ask an audience for them, and the envoys were gradually compelled to sell their cargo of pepper to supply themselves with the necessaries of life. At last the Sultan, returning one Friday from the mosque to his palace, espied the Achehnese among the crowd of respectful spectators; struck by their peculiar dress, he enquired whence they came and what had brought them to Constantinople.
The episode gave rise to two enduring monuments of the legendary connexion between Acheh and the Sublime Porte. The first was the great cannon Lada Sichupa’|Lada Sichupa’]] — “a chupa’ of pepper” (a chupa’ being a small measure) — so named from the single measure of pepper which was all that remained of the original cargo when the ambassadors were at last admitted to the Sultan’s presence. The cannon, before the coming of the Dutch, formed part of the defences of the Dalam. The second was the colony of skilled artisans — said to have been drawn from Syria — whom the Sultan sent to instruct the Achehnese in various arts hitherto unknown to them, and who, settling in a gampong (village) close to the Dalam, gave their new home the name of Bitay, the Achehnese pronunciation of Betal, an abbreviation of Betal-makdis (Jerusalem).
The Sultan of Turkey, considering the great length of the journey, declared it unbefitting to bind his new vassal to the regular despatch of embassies or tribute. In place of yearly payments, he enjoined the universal observance of the feast of Mohammad’s birth: “Let there be no village in Acheh where the inhabitants do not publicly hold a Mo’lot feast — that shall be your tribute to the lord of the Faithful.” This legend was long received by the Achehnese as the historical explanation of the strictness with which the Mo’lot (Maulud, the feast of the Prophet’s birth) was observed throughout their country, the headman of a gampong who failed to make provision for the feast being fined by the uleebalang for neglect of duty. The story, though legendary in detail, has a historical core: the Achehnese sultanate of the sixteenth century did in fact exchange embassies with the Ottoman Porte and did in fact receive from Turkey both cannon and instructors in their use.
Significance
For AcehWiki, the Sultan of Acheh (16th century) is the composite unnamed figure to whom the early-modern sources attribute the formal opening of the Achehnese maritime age. His conversion to Islam and the Atjeh-Aru war of 1539 mark the ideological and military onset of that age; his strategic design on the Strait of Malacca and on the Deli-Asahan-Aroe cultural zone is the political frame against which the early-modern history of the Achehnese sultanate is to be measured; and the legendary embassy to the Sultan of Turkey — commemorated in the cannon [[Lada Sichupa’]|Lada Sichupa’]] and in the artisan colony of Bitay — supplies the charter-myth of Acheh’s connexion with the wider Islamic-Ottoman world.
See Also
- Aceh Sultanate
- Atjeh-Aroe War (1539)
- Atjehsche vloot
- Alleredin Mahomet
- Radja of Aroe
- Queen of Aroe
- Puteri Idjo
- Sultan of Turkey (16th century)
- Lada Sichupa’
- Stambul
- Bitay
- Teungku di Bitay
- Maulud
- Dalam
- Mendez Pinto
- P. de Roo de la Faille
- C. Snouck Hurgronje
- Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java
- The Achehnese
Source
Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java, by P. de Roo de la Faille (Den Haag: Maart 1954), chapter “Mendez Pinto op Sumatra”, pp. 7-10, and chapter “Over Sjahroe’n Noewi”, pp. 29-30.
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.