Historical presence of the Portuguese in Indonesia

Map of Southeast Asia in Fernão Vaz Dourado's Atlas Universal of 1571

The Portuguese shocked maritime Southeast Asia when Afonso de Albuquerque and his forces conquered Malacca in August 1511, not even a year after taking control of Goa on the Malabar Coast of India in December 1510. Albuquerque was a man in a hurry: he wanted to get to the source of the cloves, nutmeg and other prized spices that the Indians themselves imported from farther east.

Malacca, in today's Malaysia, got the Portuguese closer, but it was still only a port where the spices were traded. Albuquerque, before returning to Portugal, entrusted António de Abreu and Francisco Serrão in November 1511 with four ships that left in search of the Spice Islands with the help of Malay pilots. On this trip (here’s a related post) Abreu and Serrão would sail past Java and Bali and make it all the way to the Banda Islands, the only places on Earth at the time where nutmeg and mace grew. Their ships returned to Malacca in December 1512 with three ships loaded with the valuable spices.

(Click to expand) Detailed view of the Costa da Iava (Coast of Java) in Fernão Vaz Dourado's Atlas Universal of 1571

This expedition clearly caught the attention of the various rulers of Java, then split between the remnants of the dying Hindu Majapahit Empire, the rising Demak Sultanate on the north coast, and the Hindu Sunda Kingdom warily perched on the western end of the island. The upstart Demak was founded only in 1481 by Raden Patah, whom the Portuguese diplomat Tomé Pires described in his book Suma Oriental que trata do Mar Roxo até aos Chins (An Account of the East, from the Red Sea to China): "[S]hould de Albuquerque make peace with the Lord of Demak, all of Java will almost be forced to make peace with him... The Lord of Demak stood for all of Java.”

The naval commander of Demak, Pati Unus, sent a fleet of ships at the end of 1512 to eject the Portuguese from Malacca. While he was not successful, Pati Unus made an impression. In a letter to Albuquerque dated 22 February 1513, Fernão Pires de Andrade, Captain of the fleet that repelled Pati Unus, wrote:

Pati Unus's junk is the largest seen by the people of this area. He had a thousand soldiers on board, and His Majesty can trust me... that it was a very remarkable thing to see, because the nearby Anunciada didn't look like a ship at all. We attacked it with bombardment, but even the greatest shot did not penetrate it below the waterline, and the esfera (fire) I had on board I managed to get in but did not penetrate; The ship had three layers of metal, all of which were more than one cruzado thick.  And that ship is really so terrible that no one has ever even seen the like. It took three years to build, His Majesty may have heard the story in Malacca about Pati Unus, who made this fleet to become the king of Malacca.

On the other hand, the Hindu king of Sunda, Sri Baduga Maharaja, saw the Portuguese as potential allies against the rising Islamic states in Java. In 1512 (unclear whether before or after the Demak attack on Malacca), he sent his son, the crown prince Surawisesa (whom the Portuguese called Ratu Samian) to Malacca to offer an alliance with the Portuguese, inviting them to trade in pepper and to build a fort at his main port of Sunda Kalapa (the old port of today’s Indonesia capital, Jakarta, and marked in red in the 1571 map above as Çumdacalapa).

Plan of the Malacca Fortress (A Famosa) from 1630. The red arrow marks where the Porta de Santiago still stands (next photo).

The Porta de Santiago, the only remnant of the fortress A Famosa

The Portuguese did not accept, possibly because they were still figuring out the politics in the region. Six years later, in 1518, Demak’s naval commander Pati Unus became Sultan partly on account of his act of bravado attacking the Portuguese in Malacca. He started to prepare for a second attempt, and in 1521 had assembled a war fleet of over 300 ships including contributions from other Javanese sultanates. They set sail that year from Demak's main port of Jepara (marked in red as Japara in the 1571 map above) with Pati Unus himself leading the expedition with three of his sons. Unfortunately for them, the Portuguese had over the past nine years strengthened Malacca’s defenses, with dozens of large cannons pointing out of a fortress built around a natural hill near the sea. Inauspiciously, Pati Unus was killed by a Portuguese cannonball that hit his ship before it was even able to lower a boat to take fighters to the beach. The Javanese joint forces, relatively uncoordinated due to internal rivalries, retreated after suffering heavy casualties.

In that same year of 1521, the Sunda king sent his son once again to seek an alliance with the Portuguese, who after this second attack must have realized the benefits of a local ally. In 1522, the captain of Malacca at the time, Jorge de Albuquerque (the son of Afonso), sent a ship, the São Sebastião, to present valuable gifts to the king of Sunda. The delegation was well received by the new King Prabu Surawisesa Jayapercosa, the crown prince having ascended the throne after the recent passing of his father. King Samião, as the Portuguese called him, concluded the Luso-Sundanese Treaty of Sunda Kalapa, a trade and defence alliance in which the Portuguese agreed to construct a fortress like the one in Malacca. To mark the occasion on August 21, 1522, the captain of the São Sebastião, Henrique Leme, accompanied by representatives of the Sundanese king, erected a memorial stone called a padrão at what was then the mouth of the Ciliwung River.

The Luso-Sundanese padrão of 1522 was found again in 1918 and is currently displayed in the National Museum of Indonesia.

Sadly, the promised fortress was never built. As a result, allied Muslim forces led by Demak destroyed the port of Sunda Kalapa in 1527 and renamed it Jayakarta (today’s Jakarta). Both Sunda and Malacca continued to suffer attacks from the Sultanates of Cirebon, Demak, and Banten with little sign of mutual assistance. Malacca repelled another offensive in 1551 and was besieged for three months in 1574 and survived; on the other hand, the Hindu Kingdom of Sunda collapsed in 1579.

Given that Java was embroiled in its own politics and wars, the Portuguese focused their attention on the parts of today’s Indonesia that were the main producers of spices. Through a combination of military force and local alliances, Portuguese trading posts, forts, and missions were created in North Sulawesi and the Spice Islands of Ternate and Ambon. However, increasingly resented due to bad behaviour (including deposing, murdering, and beheading local rulers), the Portuguese were kicked out of Ternate in 1575 when the locals rebelled. With the arrival of the Spanish and the Dutch (and even the English Francis Drake in 1579), the Portuguese presence in the East Indies was reduced to Flores, Solor, and Timor in the Lesser Sunda Islands by the early 1600s.

A Dutch map of Java from 1750 that still shows most details in Portuguese.

Today, the fact that the Portuguese were the first Europeans to establish a presence in what is today Indonesia is not well known even within Indonesia, especially the extent of the interactions across the archipelago (and not just East Timor). However, the traces of the Portuguese presence are still noticeable in everyday life: here’s an earlier post about the Portuguese influence on Indonesian food, language, and music.