The Significance of the Portuguese Conquest of Melaka: Rebutting a Reviewer’s Argument
By: Medieval Indonesia
Tags: Trade, History, Portuguese, Melaka, Islam

The Portuguese Conquest

The Portuguese conquest of Melaka in 1511 was far more consequential — not just in hindsight but in terms of its immediate effects. There are five points I wish to make here:

The Portuguese invaders served as the chief conduit for the Columbian Exchange in island Southeast Asia. The importance of this literally cannot be overstated. I will go into more detail on this point below. Post-conquest expeditions to other islands led to radical changes in the nature of the spice trade (broadly conceived); for the first time, nutmeg (e.g.) could be transported from Banda to Europe, or almost anywhere else on the planet, in one go. The model of goods being transshipped at multiple ports around the Ocean en route to India, Arabia, Africa, or Europe began to be superseded. The Portuguese conquest of Melaka was the longest-distance imperial conquest in human history up to that point: never before had an army taken territory so far from home (Figure 2, below). The capture of Melaka showed that European-led armies could theoretically capture coastal cities almost anywhere on Earth. The distance alone was unprecedented. The conquest also seems to have led to a new militancy among Muslims in the archipelago. Before 1511 Islam seems to have been propagated peacefully, for the most part. Afterwards there were a number of rapid military conquests by Muslim-led polities, particularly in Java. In some cases these were preemptive assaults intended to prevent alliances between the Portuguese and local rulers (as in Sunda in the 1520s). The nature of the sources on the archipelago changes after the conquest. We are suddenly confronted by an abundance of texts discussing court cases or describing regions undocumented in detailed writing before that point (in eastern Indonesia, for instance). The nature of sixteenth-century historiography is wholly different to that of earlier eras, just as it is in the Americas and parts of tropical Africa.

Fig. 2 — A little map showing the distance between Melaka and Belém in Portugal: 11,670 kilometres as the crow flies.

I’d like to focus on the first two points below, but I would say, simply, that the Portuguese conquest of Melaka was militarily, culturally, historiographically, and commercially revolutionary. I am baffled by the idea that a king’s entirely precedented religious conversion could be considered as important as all this. When one bears in mind just how much of a change the Columbian Exchange alone was and is, it seems a little like comparing a molehill with a mountain. And the mountain is Everest.

The Columbian Exchange

In my view ‘the Middle Ages’ can be defined simply as ‘the millennium (or so) before the Columbian Exchange in Afro-Eurasia’. I have described this position in detail elsewhere — here, here, and here — but it bears repeating, particularly as this reviewer’s eyes seem to have glazed over while reading my description of the process in the thesis. (The pandemic took a toll on all of us. I can’t entirely blame them.)

Before 1492 there were enormous differences in what could be found in the Americas and in Afro-Eurasia. People in the Americas grew and traded maize, potatoes, quinoa, manioc, tomatoes, peppers, chilis, common beans (Phaseolus spp.), squash, peanuts, chocolate, and tobacco, among other things. None of these were known anywhere in Afro-Eurasia before 1492 at the very earliest. American communities outside the Andes had few-to-no draught animals and wheeled transport was effectively unknown (although wheels themselves can be found on some pre-Columbian American toys). Obsidian was worked into points and artworks, but artificial glass was not manufactured (nor otherwise present, with the remarkable exception of a small number of Venetian glass beads recently discovered at a site in Alaska C14-dated to the middle of the fifteenth century, probably brought across from Siberia some decades before Columbus’ first voyage). Steel was not forged, nor were alcohol or rosewater distilled. Gunpowder was unknown. Because few large animals were raised for their meat or milk or for pulling ploughs or carts, zoonotic diseases that afflicted Afro-Eurasian populations — plague, smallpox, measles, influenza, and others — were largely absent.

In Afro-Eurasia by the fifteenth century, by contrast, glass and steel were commonplace between Indonesia and Ireland and beyond. Some foods were more or less ubiquitous, including rice, which could be found in Europe as well as Asia and Africa from an early period and which was, of course, completely unknown in the Americas. Rosewater, sesame, and dates seem to have been popular all over the place and can be found as readily in English cookbooks of the period as in Chinese or Arabic ones. (They’re mentioned in fifteenth-century Southeast Asian texts as well, and both rosewater and sesame are mentioned in Bujangga Manik.) Indo-Malaysian commodities like cloves, cubebs, and camphor were consumed from Japan to Denmark and the Sahel. Horses were raised almost throughout the supercontinent, including in Java. Gunpowder appears to have been quite normal in Southeast Asia by this point, just as it was in Europe, India, China, North Africa, and so on. Playing cards started to be made in Flanders and Egypt as well as Central Asia and China. (There is one reference to playing cards in Melaka in a Chinese text written — coincidentally — in 1492.) I also noted in my thesis that the Arabic language was extremely widespread across the hemisphere before the Columbian Exchange, and one might have been able to find speakers of Arabic anywhere from eastern Indonesia to China, Russia, Mali, and England. There were no Arabic speakers in the Americas until Columbus’ first voyage. (At least one accompanied the expedition.)

When the fleet of historical arch-villain Christopher Columbus sailed to the Caribbean in 1492, it brought these two largely non-interacting hemispheres into constant contact for the first time — and that inaugurated a new era in human history. This new era can rightly be called ‘modernity’. It involved the mingling of each hemisphere’s products in a sustained way for the first time, and it led to the still-ongoing genocide of indigenous Americans and the attempted destruction of their societies and civilizations by incoming Europeans. (This genocide is practically the hallmark of modernity itself.) This process was as consequential for Southeast Asia as it was for anywhere else in Afro-Eurasia. And it was the Portuguese who inflicted the Columbian Exchange on the region.

The route Portuguese ships took to the Indian Ocean — the route pioneered by Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama — veered close to the coast of Brazil, and it is notable that the oldest surviving description of any place in South America, the letter of Pêro Vaz de Caminha, was written in 1500 after a Portuguese expedition to Asia was blown off-course (Figure 3). It is even more notable when you bear in mind that its author was killed in India later the same year.

Fig. 3 — The first page of the letter sent by Pêro Vaz de Caminha to Manuel I of Portugal (here addressed ‘Senhor’ at the top of the page) in 1500. The letter is the oldest surviving written account of a society in mainland South America in any language.

The first people to have visited both the Americas and Asia east of the Levant were Portuguese. The first ships to come to the Indo-Malaysian archipelago from the east, across the Pacific from South America, were piloted by Spanish and Portuguese navigators. The people who first planted manioc in Africa were probably Portuguese, or enslaved by them, as were, in all probability, the first people to bring maize to Maluku (attested by the 1540s), among other such similar events.

Before the Portuguese conquered Melaka in 1511, the effects of the Columbian Exchange were likely barely felt in island Southeast Asia. Afterwards, these effects are integral to the region’s history (and culture and cuisine, etc.) and — importantly, from my philological perspective — must be taken into account when interpreting texts written either side of the divide. This is why I felt it necessary to explain this issue so thoroughly in the introduction to my text of Bujangga Manik, a work written in Java in the late fifteenth century, and thus before the Portuguese conquest of Melaka and the inchoate impact of the Columbian Exchange in the Indo-Malaysian archipelago. It is this context that makes the text important.

In sum: Any periodisation that does not take account of the Columbian Exchange is weak and outdated. To my mind it is as simple as that.

Trade

But that’s not all. Look at the routes taken by travellers to the archipelago in the fifteenth century or earlier: Marco Polo, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, and Niccolò de’ Conti all got to and from the area by stopping at various ports around the Indian Ocean, whether in Arabia, India, or mainland Southeast Asia. By all accounts this was how commodities were traded as well. Cloves purchased in Europe before the 1510s, and certainly before Vasco da Gama’s voyage in 1498, would have been grown and harvested on one of the five clove-producing islands in North Maluku. Most would have been brought to Java (probably) in local Moluccan ships, perhaps by way of Banda, and then transshipped in one of Java’s ports. From there they could be shipped up the Strait of Malacca, perhaps being sold in Melaka itself, and then taken in the hold of an ocean-going ship to any number of ports between Melaka and Cairo (Pasai, Kochi, Calicut, Khambhat, Aden, Jiddah, Mecca, etc.), before being transported overland to Alexandria, whence they could be taken to Venice or another city in southern Europe.

Look at later routes, though, and you’ll see something very different. The routes taken by the first and second successful circumnavigations of the world are good examples of the possibilities opened up by the events of 1498 and 1511 — the first the Magellan-Elcano expedition (1519–1522) financed by Spain and the second an English expedition under the command of Francis Drake (1577–1580). Both expeditions involved crossing the Pacific from east to west, and both involved stops in eastern Indonesia to buy cloves and other commodities. After these expeditions left the archipelago (departing from Timor in Elcano’s case, Java in Drake’s), they didn’t go to Sri Lanka, India, or Arabia. They didn’t transship their cargo or stop to sell it before reaching Europe. Instead, both expeditions went straight across the Indian Ocean to the Cape of Good Hope. After Java, the next significant stop on the Drake voyage was Sierra Leone, and that was the last stop before England.

This route wasn’t even conceivable before the very end of the fifteenth century. After the Portuguese took Melaka it became a normal route for vessels from Southeast Asia bound for Europe. Europeans were able to bypass middlemen in the Indian Ocean and sell their goods at high prices in Antwerp (etc.). This represented a radical change in the nature of the trade in luxury goods from Africa and Asia. Until the nineteenth the quantities of these goods were really rather small, and probably didn’t change much between the Middle Ages and early modernity, but the way these products came onto markets worldwide changed radically as a result of the Portuguese (and later European) conquests in the Indo-Malaysian archipelago. I don’t think the same can be said of the effects of the Islamisation of Melaka in the fifteenth century.