Crossbows in the Archipelago?
UPDATE: I’ve put up a new post on the blog about a relief that arguably depicts a crossbow from Candi Mleri in East Java. This post is not entirely up-to-date, therefore, but the arguments are still interesting, I think.
The crossbow was a popular weapon in the Middle Ages. It was particularly common in Europe and in China, developing into a weapon of considerable power and sophistication in both areas, but in fact crossbows are depicted in medieval illustrations from other parts of Afro-Eurasia as well, including Russia, the Middle East, Central Asia, and mainland Southeast Asia.
The weapon is noticeably absent from reliefs from Java, however, and there is no unambiguous word for ‘crossbow’ in any of island Southeast Asia’s medieval languages. The ambiguity of the local Malay and Javanese terminology muddies the waters quite a bit — it’s hard to be sure that the weapons were absent even though there’s no positive evidence for their use — but it does seem that crossbows were not used in island Southeast Asia in the Middle Ages.
I don’t know why that is and I don’t intend to resolve the problem here. Instead, this post is split into two parts: The first part of the post consists of a few pictures of crossbows and archers from across Afro-Eurasia with a small amount of commentary. This is principally intended to demonstrate that the archipelago was anomalous in not making use of the weapon. The second part concerns an interesting case in which a Malay (originally Old Javanese) word for projectile weapons in general, gandi, appears to refer to crossbows specifically in an early sixteenth-century text, perhaps suggesting that the weapon was known in the archipelago before the arrival of the Portuguese (or perhaps not).
1. Crossbows Across Medieval Afro-Eurasia
Figures 1–7 below show crossbows in medieval reliefs and illustrations from different parts of the Afro-Eurasian supercontinent, starting with a Central European playing card and ending with some bas-reliefs from Angkor in Cambodia. These are intended to demonstrate the presence of the weapon in different parts of the medieval world and to give an impression of the variety of forms it could take. This isn’t sophisticated art historical analysis.
Figure 1 shows a rather striking view of a crossbowman in a set of handmade mid-fifteenth-century Austrian playing cards for a trump-taking game (whose exact rules have unfortunately been lost) known as the Ambraser Hofämterspiel. I could have chosen any number of other images of medieval European crossbows — there are thousands of them — but I rather like this one for its unusual perspective:
That crossbows were known in medieval Russia is hardly surprising, but it is confirmed by manuscript illustrations like the one in Figure 2. The short power stroke and iron foot-stirrup evident in such images are typical features of European crossbows:
In Figure 3 you can see a crossbowman shooting from horseback as depicted on a flask made of enamelled glass from Ayyubid-era Syria or Egypt. Crossbows and bolts have been recovered from Mamluk-era sites in Syria and are occasionally described in medieval Arabic and Persian texts, so while we tend to think of crossbows as European weapons they were certainly known and used in the Muslim world as well:
Depictions of crossbows are somewhat rare in Persian and other Central Asian art, but Figure 4 shows two images of crossbows in use on both sides of Timur’s siege of Smyrna/İzmir in 1402, both taken from the same 1467–8 Persian manuscript:
Crossbows have been used in China since at least the early first millennium BCE, and a separate morpheme for ‘crossbow’ is found in Chinese (弩 nŭ), possibly a loanword from a Southeast Asian language. There are plenty of images of Chinese crossbows from the Middle Ages, although archaeological evidence is stronger for the Warring States period (475–221 BCE), when crossbow mechanisms and bolt heads were made of bronze and thus survive in their tens of thousands. I have chosen a mid/late-first-millennium CE image here, taken from a painting looted from Beijing by a British officer during the Boxer Rebellion (Figure 5):
The crossbow may have been invented in northern mainland Southeast Asia and subsequently spread to China (and possibly the rest of the world), which makes its absence from Java particularly remarkable. Crossbows are occasionally encountered in Angkorian reliefs, albeit usually in hunting contexts, and they are known to have been used for at least a couple of millennia in Vietnam. You can see a couple of them in the hands of the fighters in the bottom row of the twelfth-century relief from Angkor Thom in Figure 6. Wooden crossbows with horn triggers are still made and used in mainland Southeast Asia today; perhaps those are the sorts of crossbows we should be imagining here:
The famous ‘double crossbows’ depicted in use by Cham soldiers in a few Khmer reliefs at the Bayon and Banteay-Chhmar, and apparently given to the Chams by the Chinese as military aid, are also rather notable, particularly given the close relationship between Campa and Java (Figure 7):
So: Crossbows were known of across medieval Eurasia from Latin Christian Europe to the Sinosphere and at least as far south as Cambodia. Ayyubid and Mamluk evidence suggests that crossbows were also known and used in Africa, as they certainly have been across tropical Africa in more modern times. They weren’t equally popular across this area — there are relatively few examples from the Middle East, for example — but they were known even where they weren’t common. It is therefore rather interesting to note the weapon’s almost total absence from island Southeast Asia, whose inhabitants had by the late Middle Ages acquired significant links with societies across the Hemisphere.
2. ‘Gandi’
It may be that crossbows were used in Java and elsewhere in the Indo-Malaysian archipelago, but the kind of blunt visual evidence seen above simply isn’t present. Crossbows do not appear in any reliefs in Java and they are not mentioned in foreigners’ accounts — as far as I’m aware, at least. Lists of Malay and Javanese weapons in early modern Portuguese accounts do not speak of crossbows, and no specific term for ‘crossbow’ is known from any of the archipelago’s languages until modern times.
We do, however, find the thoroughly ambiguous word gaṇḍi in a large number of Old Javanese texts. This is a generic term for missile weapons or their projectiles, defined in Zoetmulder’s Old Javanese-English Dictionary (1982) as ‘a particular kind of weapon, probably a projectile thrown with a sling; or: bow (and arrow)?’ (OJED 487:13). It may be that this term was used on occasion to refer to crossbows, a conjecture supported, barely, by the minimal manuscript evidence discussed below.
The Javanist Jiří Jákl argues in a 2017 paper that the Old Javanese term gaṇḍi originally had a fairly broad meaning, encompassing projectiles of several kinds and eventually also the weapons that shot them:
‘In my view, […] the first and usual meaning of gaṇḍi in Old Javanese is “pellet projectile, bullet” while a derived, secondary meaning applies to (diverse) weapons with which such projectiles can be shot.’ (2017:644)
Jákl goes on to argue that gaṇḍi most commonly meant ‘sling’ and ‘slingstone’ in Old Javanese, and it’s hard to disagree with his interpretation in such instances. In one Malay case, however, the word — in the form gandi — should probably be translated as ‘crossbow’, and as this may have some implications for the interpretation of the word in other contexts it is worth looking at in a little detail.
This is a rather late example: The text in which it is found is a letter sent from Sultan Abu Hayat of Ternate to the King (‘Sultan’) of Portugal in 1522 and kept since that time in the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo in Lisbon (Figure 8). This letter is essentially post-medieval, its very existence (and survival!) a result of contact with Europeans in a post-Columbian world. It also happens to be one of the oldest surviving Malay texts written on a perishable writing surface; the only earlier extant manuscripts are another letter from the Sultan to the King, dated 1521, and the Tanjung Tanah manuscript (Nītisārasamuccaya), a text in ink on daluwang (paper mulberry bark) from Kerinci, Sumatra, which has been radiocarbon-dated to c.1380 (Kozok 2016). Full transliterations and English translations of both the 1521 and 1522 letters were first published in Blagden (1930:95–96), and photographs and up-to-date transliterations can be found in Gallop (1994:196).
In the 1522 letter the Sultan of Ternate, Abu Hayat, requests assistance from his ‘father’, the Sultan of Portukal, against Tidore, a rival kingdom based on a neighbouring volcanic cone off the coast of Halmahera (Figure 9) whose king has recently allied himself with Castile (Raja Kastila). Sultan Abu Hayat says that the Castilians have trafficked weapons to Tidore, including guns and gandis, and have promised to do the same again soon.
I have provided a transliteration and translation of the relevant section below. In case you want to follow along with the Jawi, the text starts at the second word from the right on the eighth line from the top of the main body of text (Figure 10):
[…] sekarang ini Raja Kastila memberi Raja Tidore bedil empat
puluh buah bedil gandi tujuh puluh gandi […]
‘At this moment the King of Castile is giving the Raja of Tidore forty guns and seventy gandi…’
This letter was translated into Portuguese by Álvaro Fernandes at Melaka before it was sent on to Portugal, and we are fortunate that both the Malay original and the Portuguese translation survive. The noteworthy point here is that Fernandes translated gandi as bestas ‘crossbows’ (Figure 11):
Deram nos castelhanos
a El Rey de tudoree quarentaa
bombardaas E seasemta bestas
E lhe pormeteram que para estoutro
Anno virem com vimte naos
‘The Castilians gave the King of Tidore forty guns and sixty [sic] crossbows, and promised him that they would come next year with twenty ships.’
Fernandes made some mistakes in his translation, notably translating the Malay tujuh puluh as ‘sixty’ rather than ‘seventy’. It is therefore not impossible that he made an error in the translation of the word gandi, which is after all a fairly uncommon word in the Classical Malay corpus. The text is quite a late one, written some years after the arrival of the Portuguese and, indeed, shortly after the coming of the very first ships from across the Pacific — the Magellan-Elcano expedition. It was written almost 2000 kilometres east of Java and about 2800 from Melaka, and the Malay in the Sultan’s letters is also rather non-standard: there is quite a lot of influence from the Ternate language, rendering some phrases ambiguous.
For these reasons it would be rash to emend any other translations of gandi from ‘sling’ to ‘crossbow’. This brief reference does nonetheless bring up the tantalising if rather remote possibility that crossbows appear disguised in medieval texts from the region.
The absence of the crossbow from medieval island Southeast Asian texts and images certainly doesn’t appear to have been due to lack of technical know-how among Indo-Malaysian artisans. It is worth noting — as Jákl does — that the gaṇḍi, whether sling or arrow or something else, was associated in Old Javanese kakawin with adharma (‘immorality’, ‘unruliness’, ‘neglect of dharma’). It may be this sort of moralising that militated against the crossbow’s use in Java — and in India, where it was similarly uncommon (although there are good reasons to believe crossbows and torsion weapons similar to them were used in India as siege weapons). For obvious reasons weaponry is bound up with moral judgements, and the non-use of a weapon is as indicative of distaste as it is lack of knowledge. In any case, it stretches credulity to suggest that crossbows were simply unknown in medieval Java.
REFERENCES
Blagden, C. Otto. 1930. Two Malay letters from Ternate in the Moluccas, written in 1521 and 1522. Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies. 6:87–101.
Gallop, Annabel Teh. 1994. The legacy of the Malay letter. Warisan warkah Melayu. London: British Library.
Jákl, Jiří. 2017. The sling and the blowgun as combat weapons in pre-Islamic Java. Notes on Old Javanese terms gaṇḍi and tulup. Wacana. 18(3):641–657.
Kozok, Uli. 2016. A 14th century Malay code of laws. The Nītisārasamuccaya. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
Zoetmulder, P. J. 1982. Old Javanese-English Dictionary. ‘s-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff.
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