The year 1511 was the year of the Portuguese conquest of Malaka — 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. In 1511, Governor of Portuguese India Affonso d’Albuquerque sailed from Cochin on 2 May 1511 with a fleet of nineteen ships, called at the Atjeh pepper ports of Pedir and Pasei on the way, anchored before Malaka in mid-June 1511, and took the city after assaults on 25 July 1511 and 10 August 1511.
The conquest
The full account of the conquest is given in the entry on the conquest itself. In summary: Albuquerque sailed from Cochin on 2 May 1511 with nineteen ships, having received a letter from the captive Portuguese factor Ruy d’Aranjo urging that the trade of the city could only be secured by force. He called at the Atjeh pepper ports of Pedir and Pasei on the way, where he alarmed the rulers by seizing Muslim merchant vessels. He anchored before Malaka in mid-June 1511, demanded the surrender of the prisoners and compensation for the damaged goods of the Sequeira mission of 1509, and added the demand that he be allowed to build a fort. 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.
Albuquerque immediately built the Fortaleza de Malaca with materials from the royal tombs and from demolished mosques, introduced a Portuguese administration and a new coinage, and seized the tin mines as crown property. In Europe, Pope Leo X ordered a general thanksgiving with a procession to the Roman churches of Santa Maria del Popolo and Sant’Agostino.
The strategic consequence
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 sultans of Atjeh — pressing from the west along the north Sumatran coast — became the most dangerous Muslim rivals of the Portuguese. The great Achehnese siege of Malaka of 1-17 February 1575 nearly succeeded; 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 that Albuquerque’s conquest had inaugurated.
Significance
The year 1511 is, in Van der Woude’s narrative, the foundational year 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. The conquest of August 1511 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.
Account from Over Maleise Literatuur (1947) — 1511
In Hooykaas’s survey of Malay literature, the 1511 Portuguese conquest of Malacca is the foundational event of the Portuguese empire in the Malay-Indonesian archipelago and the proximate cause of the rise of Atjeh as the chief Muslim commercial rival of the Portuguese in the Strait of Malacca. Hooykaas, in his Toelichting tot de Sadjarah Malajoe, records the Portuguese arrival at the Atjeh pepper ports on the way to Malacca: “Eerst zette hij koers naar Pedir (Pidie) op Noord-Sumatra. Daar trof hij een Portugees aan, een van SEQUEIRA’S ontsnapt was en wist mee te delen, dat te Pasai nog meer Portugese vluchtelingen waren” (First he set course for Pedir (Pidie) on North Sumatra. There he found a Portuguese, one of SEQUEIRA’s who had escaped, and learned that there were more Portuguese refugees at Pasai).
The 1511 conquest thus directly involved the Atjeh pepper ports of Pedir and Pasei — the same ports that, in the early seventeenth century, would be conquered by Iskandar Muda of Atjeh. The Atjeh pepper ports were, in 1511, already part of the Portuguese-Atjehnese-Malay triangle that would dominate the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Source: Over Maleise Literatuur, by Dr. C. Hooykaas, Hoogleraarte Batavia; Tweede Druk (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1947), Toelichting tot de Sadjarah Malajoe, aantekening bij 34/5-6, p. 264.
See Also
- Portuguese conquest of Malaka (1511)
- Affonso d’Albuquerque
- Diogo Lopez de Sequeira
- Malaka
- Acheh
- Djohor
- Pedir
- Pasei
- 1509
- 1575
- 1587
- 1599
- 1641
- Pasai
- Pidie
- Over Maleise Literatuur (1947)
- Dr. C. Hooykaas
Account from Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu
Portuguese conquered Malakka, made it their ‘stapelpplaats’ (entrepot) for the Far East. Began collisions with Atjeh; Portuguese attempts to settle on mainland North Sumatra fruitless from start.
Source: J. Jongejans, Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu (Baarn: Hollandia Drukkerij N.V., c. 1938), pp. 27.
Sources
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 (pp. 134-137). Over Maleise Literatuur, by Dr. C. Hooykaas, Hoogleraarte Batavia; Tweede Druk (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1947).
Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu, by J. Jongejans, Oud-Resident van het Gewest Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden, with a foreword by Dr. H. Colijn (Baarn: Hollandia Drukkerij N.V., c. 1938), pp. 27.