Malacca Sultanate

For roughly a century from about 1400, the port city of Malacca on the western coast of the Malay Peninsula was the hub of trade between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Its founder, a fugitive prince from Singapura known as Parameswara, built a Malay kingdom that came to rule much of the peninsula and parts of eastern Sumatra. Malacca spread Islam and the Malay language across the archipelago before Portuguese forces took the city in 1511, and in Malaysia it is still widely regarded as the cradle of the nation.

In the fourteenth century the island port of Singapura grew rich, drawing the hostility of Ayutthaya to the north and Majapahit in Java. It was sacked in 1398, though sources disagree about which of the two was responsible. Its last ruler, called Parameswara in Portuguese and Chinese accounts and Iskandar Shah in the Malay Annals, fled up the coast and in the early 1400s settled at a fishing village at the mouth of the Bertam River, already home to refugees and traders of several faiths. Tradition says he named the new town after the melaka tree under which he rested. The early royal succession is uncertain, because Malay, Chinese and Portuguese sources give different names and numbers of rulers.

Malacca's rise owed much to the Ming dynasty. A Chinese envoy arrived in 1405, and two years later Zheng He made the first of six visits during his treasure voyages. Regular tribute bought protection against Siamese attack, and in 1411 Parameswara himself travelled to China with a party of 540. Under the third ruler, Muhammad Shah, who reigned from 1424 to 1444, the court adopted Islam and the title of sultan, though the timing of the conversion is debated and Islam was firmly rooted by the reign of Muzaffar Shah from 1446.

Ayutthaya attacked by land in 1446 and by sea in 1456, and both times Malacca prevailed, largely thanks to the Bendahara, or chief minister, Tun Perak. Muzaffar Shah's reign brought land from the Dindings to Johor under Malaccan rule, and Mansur Shah, from 1459 to 1477, conquered Pahang and won Siak, Kampar and other Sumatran territories. By about 1500 the sultanate was at its height: Mahmud Shah rejected the overlordship of both Ayutthaya and Majapahit, and as late as 1506 his forces took Kelantan.

The sultan was an absolute ruler whose authority, called daulat, combined older royal ideas with Islamic kingship. Beneath him came the Bendahara, a treasurer, a Temenggung in charge of security, and a Laksamana who led the navy. Four harbour masters, or shahbandars, each looked after a different group of foreign merchants. The monsoon winds brought spices from the Moluccas, porcelain and silk from China, and cloth from Gujarat, Coromandel and Bengal, all exchanged in Malacca's warehouses. The city produced little itself and even imported rice, but its tin ingots served as currency.

The Portuguese Empire aimed to control the spice trade at its source. An envoy, Diogo Lopes de Sequeira, arrived in 1509 and narrowly escaped a plot against him. In 1511 Afonso de Albuquerque returned with a fleet; a first assault on 25 July failed, but on 15 August the city fell in the Capture of Malacca. The Portuguese built the fortress of A Famosa partly from stone taken from mosques and graves.

Mahmud Shah fought on from Bintan until the Portuguese destroyed his base in 1526, and he died in Kampar two years later. His sons founded the sultanates of Perak and Johor, which carried on Malacca's royal line and court traditions. Portuguese Malacca never controlled the wider trade the sultans had managed, and in 1641 the city fell to the Dutch and Johor.

Our maps show Malacca in 1492, 1500, 1530 and 1600, with Ayutthaya to the north. The 1530 and 1600 outlines postdate the Portuguese capture of the city in 1511 and stand for the Malay states that continued its line.