The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Bearing in mind that other small-scale discoveries of pottery, glass and metalwork have been made on the flat ground below Fort Canning Hill, now occupied by buildings of the colonial era and by the new parliament house, it becomes clear that Singapore was a place of note, with a palace on a hill and trading quarters down below by the river exit. Its rulers ably took advantage of its excellent position astride the trade routes and – remembering Wang’s slightly obscure words – Singapore seems to have started life as a pirate base and then to have transformed itself into an honest trading settlement. As it grew it attracted the envy of powerful neighbours in Java and Siam, while the Ming ban on foreign trade had a dampening effect on its fortunes.

  VI

  The sixteenth-century Portuguese writer and traveller Tomé Pires described in his Suma Oriental the foundation of Melaka by ‘Paramjçura king of Palembang’, or Parameśvara. The word means ‘Supreme Lord’ in Sanskrit, and was an epithet frequently attached to the Hindu god Siva, though there was also a god called Parameśvara, and the name was often used by royalty.48 Really it was not so much a name as a title, one that expressed the link between a royal prince on earth and the Hindu gods in heaven. Stories linking Palembang, Singapore and the new foundation at Melaka, which Parameśvara ruled in succession to one another, bestowed a special legitimacy on the later rulers of Melaka, creating a genealogy that in theory stretched back to ancient Śri Vijaya and even to Alexander the Great, for the Malay Annals call him not Parameśvara but Iskandar, an arabized form of Alexander.49 However, Tomé’s Parameśvara does not emerge as a particularly savoury character, any more than Iskandar does in the Malay Annals. In the Portuguese version, apparently derived from tales current in Java, Parameśvara was ruling Palembang when he rebelled against his overlord, the Javanese ruler, at the end of the fourteenth centry. He was soundly defeated and fled from Sumatra to Singapore, where he murdered the rajah and seized power, which he held for only six years at most. During his reign, Parameśvara relied on the support of the piratical ‘Sea People’, in Malay Orang Laut. They did not actually live with him in Singapore, but on an island that stands astride the strait between Sumatra and Singapore, and therefore astride the main trade routes from the South China Sea up the Strait of Malacca, a good location from which to prey on merchant shipping.50

  Speculation about what happened at the end of Parameśvara’s brief reign in Singapore, somewhere around 1396, ranges from a Javanese attack, which fits with the Malay account, to a revenge attack by Malay allies of the Thais who had been benefiting from a marriage alliance with the previous ruler.51 All this adds up to a picture of vigorous piracy and local conflicts, into which every now and again more substantial powers – the rajahs of Majapahit and the Thai rulers based at their lively capital, Ayutthaya – threw themselves, because interference with their shipping was proving intolerable. No doubt the Sea People entered into agreements with various neighbours to allow them passage, in return for some material benefits, but the coming of Parameśvara signalled a return to the piratical ways of the founders of Singapore: ‘he had no trade at all except that his people plundered their enemies.’52 Hunger for Chinese and other goods only increased as the Ming emperors made it more difficult to obtain them legitimately.

  The existence of two names, Parameśvara and Iskandar, in accounts of the foundation of Melaka has caused endless confusion, and there are grounds for believing that the real Iskandar was in fact the founder’s son and successor. Further confusion results from the similarity between the account of the foundation of Melaka and the accounts of the foundation of both Semudera–Pasai and Singapore, all contained within the Malay Annals. But even if the annals are fanciful they record the legends in which the inhabitants of Malaya believed, which have influenced the way the early history of Melaka is written even today. The Malay Annals, where he is called Iskandar, describe his search for a new home after he was thrown out of Singapore. He edged up the coast of the Malay peninsula until he came to a river mouth that looked promising.

  And as the king, who was hunting, stood under a tree, one of his hounds was kicked by a white mouse-deer. And Sultan Iskandar Shah said, ‘This is a good place, when even its mouse-deer are full of fight! We shall do well to make a city here.’ And the chiefs replied, ‘It is indeed as your Highness says.’ Thereupon Sultan Iskandar Shah ordered that a city be made, and he asked, ‘What is the name of the tree under which I am standing?’ And they all answered, ‘It is called Melaka, your Highness’; to which he rejoined, ‘Then Melaka shall be the name of this city.’53

  What is not said here is that there were striking physical similarities between the site of Singapore and that of Melaka, which has been described as a ‘mirror image’ of Singapore. Just as Fort Canning rises above the city of Singapore, St Paul’s Hill – though smaller and lower – is the high point of Melaka; these hills were defensible vantage points, and they were also good locations for a royal palace. They were seen as sacred places to which access had to be specially granted. Moreover, both towns were situated close to a river mouth, which provided a convenient berth for shipping.54

  The Malay annalist was well aware that ships transformed the fortunes of Melaka. The book describes the success of the city’s rulers in fostering trade, which also meant that it attracted many foreign merchants and settlers, who were made welcome there.55 There were endless naval engagements with neighbours in the strait, such as the rulers of Siak across the water in Sumatra. After all, everyone wanted to gain control of the lucrative trade that passed through the strait. Not just goods arrived from the other end of the Indian Ocean. Rajah Tengah, who according to these annals would be the grandson of the founder of Melaka, ‘showed in the treatment of his subjects such justice that no other rajah of his time in the world could equal him’. So it is little surprise that he was chosen to fulfil an important part of Melaka’s destiny. He had a dream in which he was visited by none other than the Prophet Muhammad, who taught him the Muslim declaration of faith, or shahadah, and gave him a new name – appropriately, Muhammad. The Prophet told him: ‘tomorrow, when it is time for the afternoon prayer, there will come hither a ship from Jiddah; and from that ship a man will land on this shore of Melaka. See that you do whatsoever he tells you.’ When he awoke, he found that he had been circumcised. He spent the day repeating the shahadah, and his ministers thought he had gone mad. They informed the Bendahara, or vizier, who was reluctant to accept the miraculous circumcision as proof, but who agreed that if a ship came from Jiddah at the promised time he would know that the dream was true. Sure enough, the ship did arrive, and one of the people who disembarked, the Makhdum (or teacher of Islam) Sa’id ‘Abdu’l-aziz, began to invoke Allah on the quayside.

  And all who saw him were astonished at his behaviour and said, ‘What means this bobbing up and down?’ And there was a general scramble to see him, the people crowding together so thickly that there was not a space between one man and another and there was such a disturbance that the noise of it came to the ears of the rajah inside the royal apartments of the palace. And straightaway the rajah set forth on his elephant escorted by his chiefs and he perceived that the Makhdum’s behaviour in saying his prayers was exactly as in his dream. And he said to the Bendahara and the chiefs, ‘That is exactly how it happened in my dream!’56

  The Makhdum was invited to mount the elephant and was borne back to the royal palace with the rajah. The Bendahara and the chiefs all became Muslims, ‘and every citizen of Melaka, whether of high or low degree, was commanded by the rajah to do likewise’.

  Whatever actually happened, Melaka was always, and remains, a city inhabited by people of several faiths. But there is no reason to doubt that the rajahs became Muslim early in the fifteenth century. Rather than a sudden event, this conversion was the product of years of contact and of pondering the advantages of such a conversion. Even before Tengah’s time, the rajahs had flirted with Islam. Pasai, not far away, had a reputation as a beacon of Islam in south-east
Asia. Tengah/Muhammad had actually married a princess from Pasai. In fact, earlier in his career he had quarrelled with the sultan of Pasai over whether he should convert. He tried to draw towards Melaka Javanese Muslim merchants who traded regularly with Pasai, but he found that the sultan was unwilling to let them trade with Melaka unless Tengah converted to Islam; after all, if they made heavy use of Melaka, these merchants would contribute less to the tax revenue of Semudera–Pasai. For the moment Tengah was reluctant to convert; but the quarrel did not last long, and eventually Muslim merchants from Pasai went to live in Melaka as he had hoped; they built the town’s first mosques. But Tengah’s ambitions extended further: he encouraged Muslim merchants from Java itself to come to his city. Islam and trade were two sides of the same coin. The Portuguese writer Tomé Pires wrote: ‘trade began to grow greatly and the king derived great profit and satisfaction from it … The Moors were great favourites with the king, and obtained whatever they wanted.’57 The conversion of Melaka marked a major step in the emergence of the city as the centre of commerce in the region.58 The sultan of Pasai, allied to the newly renamed Sultan Muhammad, acquiesced in the erosion of Semudera–Pasai’s commanding position in the Strait of Malacca, where the upstart town of Melaka now seized the initiative. After all, its location, actually within the strait, was better, not just because it lay right along the direct trade route but because it was better placed to challenge pirates.59

  This is not to say that Tengah was uninterested in his new religion; his conversion may appear opportunistic, but it may just as well have been the result of a slowly dawning conviction that he wanted to become a Muslim. Quite apart from the influence of his wife, Tengah had visited China, where he met the ambassadors sent to the Ming court by Muslim rulers, including the envoys of Pasai. The Melakans would have been perfectly familiar with people ‘bobbing up and down’ five times a day. Yet the conversion of this and other rajahs in south-east Asia changed the religious balance significantly. Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as local cults, had become interwoven, and religious syncretism was the general rule. Islam, as the rajah’s supposed insistence on the conversion of all his subjects makes plain, was exclusive; while there was still space for Hindus and Buddhists in these lands, the Muslim population could not, officially at least, share their festivals, customs and in certain cases their food. But to be seen as the patron of Muslim merchants right across the region would greatly enhance the prestige of the sultan of Melaka, and he could present himself as the champion of all Muslims whenever the conflict between Melaka and Siam flared up again.

  The guarantor of Melaka’s security was Ming China. Contact was established between Melaka and China within a few years of the creation of the new town. Even before Zheng He set off on his great voyages, the imperial eunuch Yin Qing arrived in Melaka in 1404 on a friendly visit, offering Parameśvara a crown; and Parameśvara responded by sending tribute to the Ming court.60 Here was an opportunity to throw off the overlordship of Siam by accepting as new overlord a far greater power. But this was not without risks: Siam was a local power, and China was very far away. The fact that Zheng He’s voyages were on such a large scale – even if the scale has been exaggerated – meant that for a time the Melakans could develop their trade and send campaigns against local pirates without too much fear of Siamese intervention. The Chinese came past Melaka again and again during Zheng He’s voyages; but they also made it more secure by their actions in cleaning up Palembang, suppressing Chinese piracy off Sumatra and holding the Javans in check. The Chinese presence thus acted as a brake on the rivalries that had, until the start of the fifteenth century, made the Strait of Malacca one of the most dangerous sea passages in the region. Paradoxically, then, the Ming emperor’s great distaste for overseas commerce resulted in greater freedom of the seas, as the tribute-seeking expeditions of Zheng He proclaimed a Chinese peace, a Pax Sinica, across the South China Sea and beyond. The moment it was shattered can be identified easily enough. When Xuan-de suspended further voyages, the sultan of Melaka was himself in China, on the third visit by a Melakan ruler, and hoping to present tribute to the emperor. He and other ambassadors, from as far away as Ceylon, were embarrassingly stranded far from home; and in any case Xuan-de died soon after. His successors were not interested in spending vast sums on fleets bound for the ends of the earth.

  Looking back from the start of the seventeenth century, the author of the Malay Annals was unwilling to admit that this was the real shape of things. From a Melakan perspective, it seemed to be Melaka rather than China that exercised thalassocracy:

  When news reached China of the greatness of the rajah of Melaka, the rajah of China sent envoys to Melaka: and as a complimentary gift to accompany the letter he sent needles, a whole shipload of them. And when the envoys reached Melaka, the king ordered the letter to be fetched from the ship with due ceremony and borne in procession. And when it had been brought into the palace it was received by a herald and given by him to the reader of the mosque, who read it out. It ran as follows: ‘This letter from His Majesty the Rajah of Heaven is sent to the Rajah of Melaka. Of a truth there are no rajahs in this world greater than ourselves, and there is no one who knows the number of our subjects. We have asked for one needle from each house in our realm and those are the needles with which the ship we send to Melaka is laden.’61

  Needless to say the rajah then sent back his own cargo, this time of grains of sago, to make an identical point, so that the emperor had to admit: ‘Great indeed must be this rajah of Melaka! The multitude of his subjects must be as the multitude of our own. It would be well that I should marry him with my daughter!’62 The annalist was well aware that a Chinese trading settlement across the river from the hill on which the royal palace stood, known as Bukit China, dated back to these times, and occasional finds of objects in that area, around the Cheng Ho Museum that commemorates Zheng He’s voyages, prove the point further: not just fragments of pottery but what seems to have been a well used by the Chinese community.

  Siam was a constant thorn in the flesh of the rajahs of Melaka, as it had been to the rulers of Singapore. It is, as ever, difficult to disentangle the involved stories in the Malay Annals, and it might make more sense to look at what can be described as the received version of the history of Melaka, as it is portrayed in the impressive displays of the Melaka Historical Museum on St Paul’s Hill. The Siamese attacks of 1445 and 1456 are presented as a response to the prosperity and commercial rivalry of Melaka. On the second occasion, the Bendahara is said to have lit up the river mouth, deluding the enemy into thinking that a massive force lay in wait. The enemy exclaimed: ‘What a vast fleet these Malays must have, no man can count their ships! If they attack us, how shall we fare? Even one of their ships just now was more than a match for us!’ After that the Siamese kept well clear of Melaka.63 Melaka’s own historians like to present the image of a heroic city whose defence of its independence laid the foundations for an Islamic nation consisting of Malay people, strict in their adherence to Sunni Islam but also willing to permit Hindus and Daoists, among others, to settle and erect the ancient temples in Melaka that still stand. In fact, the situation was not so clear. Sometimes the Melakans found it convenient to pay tribute to Siam (forty Chinese ounces of gold each year, at one point); sometimes they could get away without doing so. A small but wealthy city surrounded by enemies was not in a position to declare itself independent of all higher authority. It was much safer to accept an overlord so long as he did not interfere greatly with day-to-day business, which was what really mattered: ‘the ships, large and small, were past counting in number; for at that time the rajah’s subjects in the city alone numbered 90,000’, though the Malay annalist, who wrote those words, then went on to claim that there were 190,000 people in the city alone, not to mention the coastal areas it controlled, and foreigners also flocked to the city.64

  The sultan began to boost his standing in the world by introducing elaborate protocol at court and by building a spacio
us and stately palace on the present-day St Paul’s Hill. The wooden palace, with its beautifully carved panels, no longer survives, but it has been reconstructed, partly from the description in the Malay Annals. The ceremonies that were held there drew on both Indian and Chinese models. There were strict rules about who might wear yellow robes or be shaded by umbrellas, for yellow was the Chinese imperial colour, reserved for members of the ruler’s family. Gold ornaments, including anklets, were the prerogative of the sultan and his close advisers. The sultan sat enthroned with ministers on either side, rather as the Chinese emperors did; everyone who was permitted to attend upon the sultan knew exactly where to stand or sit in the throne room.65 The pirate kingdom of Parameśvara, for that is what Melaka had originally been, had been transformed within a couple of generations into an emporium that linked the Indian Ocean to the Spice Islands and to Ming China.66

  If an outside force intruded itself into the Strait of Malacca, everything would be set spinning once again. And this is what happened when the Portuguese arrived at the start of the sixteenth century: ‘there came a ship of the Franks from Goa trading to Melaka: and the Franks perceived how prosperous and well-populated the port was.’ Those are, once again, the words of the anonymous Malay annalist, but the Portuguese too were impressed, as Tomé Pires bore witness and as the greatest Portuguese poet, Luis de Camões, would write in his epic of his country’s overseas expansion, the Lusiads: ‘farther on lies Malacca, that your countrymen will make known as a great emporium for the wealth and merchandise of all the territories bordering on this vast ocean.’67 Before long the Portuguese came back to Melaka with an armada and captured the city, after a tough fight, in 1511. To understand how they arrived there it is necessary to return to the far-off waters of the eastern Atlantic.