1641

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tagsyear, timeline, voc, treaty, colonial, dutch, achehnese, malay
aliasesthe year 1641, 1641, MDCXLI

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The year in which Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī is found, together with a number of high functionaries of the Achehnese court, taking part in the ceremony of erecting the tombstone for Sultan Iskandar II. Iskandar Thani’s death in 1641 brought to the throne his widow Ṣalīyatu’d-Dīn (Taj al-Ālam), under whose reign Raniri continued to enjoy royal favour. The accession of the first sultana inaugurated the celebrated Female Rule of Acheh (1641–1699) and continued the project of orthodox reform that Raniri had begun under Iskandar II: the composition of the *Tibjān* and the *Ḥujjat aṣ-ṣiddīq* falls within the joint reigns of Iskandar II and Taj al-Ālam. aliases: [the year 1641, 1641 in Atjeh, 1641 — female rule begins, 1641 — Soury embassy, 1641 — conquest of Malakka] tags: [year, timeline, voc, treaty, colonial, atjehnese, dutch, female-rule, soury, sultana, portuguese] The year 1641 was a watershed year in the history of Atjeh: the year of the death of Sultan Iskandar II (in some renderings Iskander Tsani), of the accession of his widow as the first Sultana of Atjeh — inaugurating the celebrated Female Rule of Acheh (1641–1699) — of the joint VOC–Atjeh–Djohor conquest of Portuguese Malakka, and of Pieter Soury’s VOC embassy to the new Sultana with its spectacular ceremonial audience of 1 July 1641. It is also the year in which Raniri is found, together with a number of high functionaries of the Achehnese court, taking part in the ceremony of erecting the tombstone for Sultan Iskandar II. The composition of the *Tibjān* and the *Ḥujjat aṣ-ṣiddīq* falls within the joint reigns of Iskandar II and Taj al-Ālam.

The death of Iskandar Thani and the accession of the Sultana

When Sultan Iskander Tsani (also Iskandar II) died in 1641, the Rijksgrooten (great officers of the realm) chose his widow as his successor. The same widow, at about forty years of age, “wilde … een Nederlander tot Prinsgemaal verheffen” — wished to elevate a Dutchman to the rank of prince-consort — a proposal over which both the Rijksgrooten and the Hooge Regeering at Batavia placed their veto. She became Sultana in her own right under the title Sultan — “Sultane beteekent slechts eerste vrouw van een Sultan,” Godee Molsbergen insists — opening the long era of female rule in seventeenth-century Atjeh. See Sultana of Atjeh (1641).

The conquest of Portuguese Malakka, January 1641

The year 1641 saw two major events in close succession: the VOC’s conquest of Malakka from the Portuguese in January, and — shortly after the accession of the Sultana to the throne of Acheh — a treaty signed with the VOC envoy Joost Schouten (the Justus Schouten of the Godee Molsbergen account) in February granting the Company trade concessions on the West Coast of Sumatra. The conquest of Malakka greatly enhanced the VOC’s regional power, which may have influenced the new sultana’s decision to negotiate favourable terms with the Company. The treaty of February 1641 established Dutch trade privileges in the pepper ports of Tikoe, Priaman, Padang, and Indrapoera, and excluded other European nations. This treaty laid the groundwork for the more comprehensive agreements of 1649 and 1650.

The conquest closed more than a century of Atjeh-Portuguese conflict. The Portuguese nobleman Francisco de Souza de Castro was at the time of the conquest a prisoner in Atjeh.

The Soury embassy and the audience of 1 July 1641

The Hooge Regeering at Batavia dispatched Commissaris Pieter Soury — its Secretaris the young Jan van Riebeeck — to congratulate the new Sultana on her accession and to deliver the late Sultan Iskander Tsani’s outstanding order of jewels cut to Atjeh-style. The full ceremonial of the audience of 1 July 1641 is one of the most fully documented European diplomatic ceremonies at the Atjeh court. Its highlights include:

  • A great elephant procession: fifty-five Moorish koelies (porters), spread out at large intervals for greater display, walked in procession behind the colossal beast that carried the missive in a golden dish.
  • The Sultana came outside the palace to greet the ambassador in spite of the rainy weather — “een buitengewone eer, nooit tevoren aan iemand bewezen.”
  • The Sultana’s gift to the legation of an Atjehsch gewaad (Atjeh ceremonial robe) with three golden rings on the collar, “zooals nog nimmer tevoren aan een ambassade was gezonden.”
  • The Sultana offered Soury her own golden beteldoos (betel-box) to prepare a sirih-quid.

The most protracted business of the embassy was the disposal of the late Sultan’s outstanding jewel-order. The Sultana was not liable for the order placed by her late husband, and the treasury would not authorise the 15,000 tayl (= 5,000 guilders) it would have cost. After long lobbying of the Orangkaja’s by Secretaris Van Riebeeck, a price was agreed for the greater part of the parcel, but for the future the import of jewels by the Company was forbidden in Atjeh.

The “maidens as ransom” request

At an audience attended by the Panglima’s of Pedir and Deli and many other Atjeh nobles, the chiefs asked whether the Dutch had brought “Portugeesche jonge dochterkens” — Portuguese maidens — to be delivered as losprijs (ransom). Soury answered that there were none to be had at Batavia. See Maagden als losprijs.

The pleasure-garden feast of 14 July 1641

On 14 July 1641 the Sultana invited the legation to her lusthof (pleasure-garden), where songs in honour of Iskander Muda were sung — moving the Atjeh hearers to tears — and the recently-deceased Sultan Iskander Tsani was passed over in complete silence.

The hand-over at the Dutch lodge and Riebeeck’s promotion

The Soury embassy was also the occasion of a formal hand-over of the lodge’s Opperhoofd post from Compostel to Willemz. Van Riebeeck’s role as Secretaris earned him promotion to Onderkoopman — the rank with which he would shortly be selected to command the Cape settlement.

Earlier 1641 events: Schouten’s jewel sale

Schouten had sold jewels in Atjeh in 1641 to the value of ƒ28,000 with 61% profit — and even then had not managed to dispose of the entire parcel, “daar er reeds te veel diamanten in Atjeh waren.” The Schouten sale was thus also in Atjehsche mode, and its partial success — and the saturation of the Atjeh diamond market — was the immediate background against which the Soury mission’s failure must be understood.

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Significance

1641 thus marks both the beginning of the female rule of Acheh under the Sultana and the opening of more than a decade of VOC commercial diplomacy with the Achehnese court, following swiftly on the Company’s decisive strategic gain at Malakka. In Godee Molsbergen’s account the year is also the high-point of Dutch-Atjeh diplomatic ceremony in the early VOC period — the choreographed encounter between a queen who had wanted a Dutch prince-consort and a Company that preferred to keep its presents and its distance. For Jan van Riebeeck personally, the Soury mission was the making of his early career, and the apprenticeship in flexible diplomacy that he would carry to the Cape.

Account from Stapel’s De Koloniën (1931)

1641 was the year of the fall of Malakka to the Compagnie on 14 January 1641 and of the accession of the sultane of Atjeh in February — two events that, in combination, opened a new phase in the Dutch-Acehnese relationship and produced the Schouten treaty of 15 February 1641. In Dr. F. W. Stapel’s Geschiedkundige Atlas van Nederland it is the pivot year of the mid-seventeenth-century Dutch-Acehnese story, the moment at which the long Acehnese-Portuguese alignment ended and the Compagnie and Atjeh faced each other as the two principal powers of the Straits.

The fall of Malakka

The conquest of Portuguese Malakka was the work of the 1640–1641 siege conducted by G.G. Van Diemen. “On 2 August 1640 began the actual siege, which would last more than 5 months and would cost the Compagnie about 1000 men. After a bombardment, both from the sea and the land side, commandant Minne Willemsz. Kaartekoe did on 10 January 1641 the last summons. When this remained unanswered, on the 14th a powerful storming took place, and the Portuguese surrendered, after heroic defence” (2 Augustus 1640 begon het eigenlijke beleg, dat ruim 5 maanden duren zou en de Compagnie op ongeveer 1000 man kwam te staan. Na een beschieting, zoowel van de zee-, als de landzijde, deed commandant Minne Willemsz. Kaartekoe den 10den Januari 1641 de laatste opeisching. Toen deze onbeantwoord bleef, had den 14den een krachtige bestorming plaats, en gaven de Portugeezen zich, na heldhaftige verdediging, over).

The first Dutch Governor of Malacca was Johan van Twist. On 15 August 1641 he concluded an agreement with the neighbouring Naning “and the surrounding villages” (ende d’omliggende dorpen), by which the chiefs recognised Dutch supremacy in place of the former Portuguese.

The accession of the sultane of Atjeh

The sultane’s accession in February 1641 — daughter of Iskandar Muda, who had died in 1636 — produced an immediate opportunity for the Compagnie to regularise its Westkust position. “In 1641 a sultane came to power in Atjeh, daughter of Iskander Moeda; she concluded, still in the first month of her reign — February — an agreement with the Compagnie’s envoy Joost Schouten” (In 1641 kwam in Atjeh een sultane aan het bewind, dochter van Iskander Moeda; zij sloot, nog in de eerste maand van haar regeering — Februari — een overeenkomst met den gezant der Compagnie, Joost Schouten).

The Schouten treaty

The Schouten treaty of 15 February 1641 gave the Compagnie “concessions on the tolls in the pepper ports Tikoe, Priaman, Padang and Indrapoera, and [the sultane] promised to admit no other European traders there” (zij de Nederlanders concessies deed op het gebied der tollen in de peperhavens Tikoe, Priaman, Padang en Indrapoera, en beloofde, daar geen andere Europeesche handelaars toe te laten). The careful restriction of the exclusion to European traders left the Atjehers’ own rights on the Westkust intact — a pattern that would recur in every subsequent Acehnese-Dutch treaty.

Palembang and the Malay states

The fall of Malakka also produced Compagnie treaties with Palembang and Djambi. “On 21 July 1641 and 20 October 1642 two agreements came about, by which the Compagnie received the right to build a fortified lodge and to place there eight pieces of gun, so-called for protection against Portuguese or pirates” (21 Juli 1641 en 20 October 1642 kwamen een tweetal overeenkomsten tot stand, waarbij de Compagnie recht kreeg een versterkte loge te bouwen en daar acht stukken geschut te plaatsen, z.g. ter bescherming tegen Portugeezen of zeeroovers).

Significance

1641 is the pivot year of the mid-seventeenth-century Dutch-Acehnese story. The fall of Malakka ends 130 years of Portuguese power in the Straits; the accession of the sultane opens the era of structured Dutch-Acehnese treaty relations; the Schouten treaty lays the foundation of the Westkust system. The disappearance of the common Portuguese enemy also removes the principal brake on Dutch-Acehnese tension, and the 1656 blockade is the eventual consequence. The 1641 moment is therefore both the opening of a new co-operative phase and the seed of the conflicts that would close it.

See Also

Sources

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Twee Maleise geschriften van Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī: in facsimile uitgegeven met aantekeningen door P. Voorhoeve. Uitgaven van de Stichting De Goeje, No. 16. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1955.

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.

Geschiedkundige Atlas van Nederland: De Archipel en het Maleische Schiereiland in 1619 – Idem in 1650 – De Compagnie buiten den Archipel in 1650, by Dr. F. W. Stapel (‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1928), pp. 30–31.

Tijdens de O.I. Compagnie, by Dr. E. C. Godee Molsbergen, Oud-Hoogleeraar, Landsarchivaris te Batavia (Amsterdam: N.V. Swets & Zeitlinger Boekhandel en Uitgevers Mij., 1932), chapters XI–XII (“Atjehsche ambassade. Inlandsche feesten. Maagden als losprijs”; “Juweelenhandel. Heeren Zeventien. Familieregeering”), pp. 39–47 of the numbered-letter sequence.

De Koloniën, by Dr. F. W. Stapel, in Geschiedkundige Atlas van Nederland (‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1931), kaart 19, blz. 25–26, 30–32 (tekst bij de bladen 2 en 3: De Archipel en het Maleische Schiereiland in 1650, Kantoren op andere plaatsen — Sumatra).

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