The Sultanate of Melaka (or Malacca)
This piece appeared on my Patreon account way back in 2022. I thought I’d move it here so that it would be more accessible.
I‘VE WRITTEN SEVERAL TIMES ABOUT MELAKA on here, but I’ve never really recapped the history of the place. The city-state was perhaps the most important polity in maritime Southeast Asia in the fifteenth century in terms of its commercial and cultural impact; after its rulers converted to Islam at some point early in the century, Melaka was instrumental in the spread of the faith throughout the Indo-Malaysian archipelago, just as it was in the propagation of Malay, the language used by the city’s natives. It’s an interesting place for other reasons as well, so I thought I’d just go over a little of what we know about Melaka before its conquest by the Portuguese conquistador Afonso de Albuquerque in 1511.
Melaka was and is located on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, facing the Strait of Malacca (named for the city), and was thus well placed to take advantage of trade across the Indian Ocean and through the archipelago (Figure 1). The city’s favourable topography — a ‘defensible hill close against a mangrove-free shore dominat[ing] a sheltered estuary’ (Wheatley 1966:308) — made it an ideal entrepôt, as did the low duties imposed by Melaka’s government, and in the early fifteenth-century the city was also granted favoured status by the Chinese. This all gave Melaka a leg up over its rivals, among them the city of Pasai on the north coast of Sumatra. At the same time, Melaka probably imported most of its food from elsewhere, as there was little agricultural hinterland to exploit — although the outskirts are said to have abounded in orchards and private estates (Malay dusun, transcribed by Portuguese writers as duções, singular dução), most owned by resident traders.
Questions remain regarding a few important issues in Melaka’s political history, particularly the nature and timing of the rulers’ conversion to Islam, but a brief outline can be sketched all the same. It appears from all sources that Melaka was founded in around 1400 AD/CE. Melaka isn’t mentioned in any travellers’ accounts, in any Old Javanese texts, or in any inscriptions until the early fifteenth century. It doesn’t appear in the list of Malay polities in Mpu Prapañca’s kakawin Deśawarṇana, written in Old Javanese in 1365, and the sources on which we must rely for the city’s early history all suggest that Melaka had been founded fairly recently before the conquest in 1511.
The most important of these sources are the Chinese accounts of the overseas voyages led by the early fifteenth-century admiral Zhèng Hé (鄭和), particularly Yíngyá Shènglǎn (瀛涯勝覽 — c.1451) by the translator Mǎ Huān (馬歡); Tomé Pires’s A Suma Oriental, written in Melaka in or before 1515, which includes a summary history of the city up to the time of the conquest; and the Classical Malay Sulalat al-salāṭīn, also known as the Sejarah Melayu or Malay Annals, most of which is devoted to recounting the history of Melaka in the fifteenth century. The latter was put together quite some time after 1511 and has a complicated textual history: The oldest surviving manuscript dates to 1799; the supposed final form of the text came together in 1612; and there are numerous European loanwords in it, including some Dutch ones (like senapan ‘firearm, weapon’, from Dutch snaphaan).
It is perhaps not surprising that Melaka’s history is somewhat murky when we’re dealing with sources like these. Fortunately, and rarely for this part of the world, there is also some numismatic evidence from the Melaka Sultanate period (summarised in Shaw and Mohammad 1970:2–4). By around 1450, the rulers of Melaka, who had taken Arabic names and styled themselves sulṭān (سلطان), were minting coins bearing Arabic inscriptions. The coin in Figure 2 is inscribed with the name of Muẓaffar Shāh (مظفر شاه) ‘the Sultan’ (al-sulṭān, السلظان), who ruled from 1445/6 to 1459. The reverse of other coins of his reign call Muẓaffar Shāh ‘Helper of the World and of the Faith (i.e. Islam)’ (ناصر الدنيا والدين).
Clearly, by the middle of the fifteenth century, Melaka was a sultanate and its rulers were Muslims. But they hadn’t started out that way: Melaka’s founder was a half-Javanese nobleman from Palembang in Sumatra who had previously attempted to establish himself at Temasik/Singapore before moving up the coast in around 1400. This chap is normally referred to as as Parameswara (Paramiçura in the Suma Oriental), the name coming from the Sanskrit Parameśvara ‘supreme lord’ — a noble title, probably, rather than a personal name, and indicative of adherence to some kind of Hinduism rather than Islam.
There is some controversy surrounding Parameswara — specifically whether he converted to Islam and took the name ‘Iskandar Shah’ upon his conversion or whether one of his descendants did. This conversion is supposed to have happened in 1414. It seems to me that this is a somewhat uninteresting controversy because it appears unanswerable given the information that we have. Regardless, Parameswara’s family ruled Melaka until Albuquerque turned up, and from some early point in the fifteenth century they were Muslims. The later sultans even claimed descent from the Quranic Iskandar Dhū ‘l-Qarnayn (Malay: Iskandar Zulkarnain) — that is to say, Alexander the Great.
More interesting than these points of dynastic history, I’d say, is the impact Melaka had on the late-medieval world. The city appears by name in quite a few fifteenth-century texts, including of course the aforementioned Chinese ones, where it is known as 滿剌加 (pinyin: Mǎnlájiā) (Figure 3). In fifteenth-century sources from the Indo-Malaysian archipelago, like Bujangga Manik (Figure 4), the city was known as Malaka, as it still can be in Indonesian today. The Omani navigator Aḥmad ibn Mājid, writing in around 1489, referred to the city as Malāqa (ملاقة), and in the earliest Portuguese sources, beginning with the Cantino planisphere in 1502 (Figure 5), we find Malaqua and Malaqa, seemingly derived from the Arabic name. In Italian ones — like Amerigo Vespucci’s letter of 1504 and Ludovico di Varthema’s 1510 account of travelling around Asia — the city is usually named Melaccha. These all came from the Malay Melaka (ملاك), a species of myrobalan (Phyllanthus emblica) after which the city was named.
Melaka emerges from these sources as an extremely wealthy and unusually diverse port-city/sultanate. Alongside local Malays, merchants from across the hemisphere dwelt there, including Hindus and Muslims but also Christians and Jews — like the moneylender Khoja Azedim, apparently living in the city at the time of the conquest (Thomaz 1993:82; see also Wheatley 1966:307–325). In 1511, Melaka’s military was being run by a Javanese mercenary, and the ruling family had extensive links with Java, particularly the Muslim-dominated cities on the north coast through which Islam made inroads into the Javanese interior. (Among other things, Java was an important source of imported rice.) There were separate barrios for Thais, Persians, Armenians, and traders from the Philippine island of Luzon, among others. Ludovico di Varthema, mentioned above, said of Melaka (Melacha) that
‘… Et veramẽte credo che qui arri-
uano piu nauili che in terra del mõdo & maxĩe che
qui vẽgono tutte le sorte de specie & altre mercãntie
assaissime’ (Varthema 1535[1510], f.65r).‘… truly I believe that more ships arrive there than at any other land on Earth, and especially that there come every type of spice and huge amounts of other merchandise.’
This sentiment is echoed on the Cantino planisphere, as we have already seen, as well as in Amerigo Vespucci’s 1504 letter. Post-conquest Portuguese sources make similar claims. No account books or descriptions of customs duties survive from the sultanate period, so it’s hard to be sure of the quantities of the various commodities that one could find at Melaka before the conquest, but there’s every reason to suspect they were large and that the range of commodities on sale was unparalleled in Southeast Asia. By the time of the conquest, these commodities included porcelain from China, silks and cottons from India, diamonds from Borneo, spices from eastern Indonesia, rosewater and oak gall powder (manjakani) from Persia and the Levant, and even glass beads manufactured on the island of Murano in Venice.
Foreign travellers often found the city unsafe, however, and Muslim visitors like Ibn Mājid found Melakan Islam rather un-Islamic, with wine sold in the markets and non-halal food consumed by local Muslims (Thomaz 1993:79). There’s also a suggestion in one Portuguese source, written by Albuquerque’s son, that some criminals were condemned to be eaten by cannibals in punishment for their crimes — although that penalty notably does not appear in the Undang-undang Melaka, the supposed legal code of the Sultanate (preserved in much later manuscripts and full of post-1511 revisions.)
These facts sit uncomfortably beside the mythologising of the sultanate that has gone on in Malaysia in more recent times; Melaka doesn’t appear to have been quite as nice nor its denizens quite as pious as modern Malays might like. It is an undeniably interesting place, though. A recent article on Melaka/Malacca in The New York Times appears to suggest that the city only became truly significant after the Portuguese conquest, when it ‘link[ed] east and west’, but it should be clear from the above that Melaka was already a fascinating and important place decades before Albuquerque arrived.
A. J. West — Leiden, 2022 (posted here 2024).
References
Shaw, William and Mohammad, Kassim Haji Ali. 1970. Malacca coins. Kuala Lumpur: Departments of Museums Malaysia.
Thomaz, Luis Felipe F. R. 1993. The Malay sultanate of Melaka. In Anthony Reid (ed). Southeast Asia in the early modern era. 69–90. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Varthema, Ludovico di. 1535 [1510]. Itinerario de Ludouico de Varthema Bolognese nello Egitto (etc.). Venice: Alessandro Bindone & Mapheo Pasini.
Wheatley, Paul. 1966 [1961]. The golden khersonese. Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press.
