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In 1512, an apothecary from Lisbon arrived in the new Portuguese outpost of Melaka. He had been sent out to Goa the previous year to take charge of issuing ineffectual fever cures to the nascent Catholic community there, and had then shipped out further east. His name was Tomé Pires, and though he was a medicine man by trade, his real forte turned out to be reportage. During the three years he spent based in Melaka, he visited many corners of the Archipelago and noted down everything he saw. He also listened carefully to the reports of other Europeans and of the locals in the ports he visited. What really marked Pires out from virtually every other scribbling traveller of the age—from Ibn Battuta to Marco Polo—was his remarkable journalistic insistence on corroboration and fact-checking. This was not a writer to pass on as fact a third-hand tall tale of men with heads like dogs. If he heard a story, he needed it to be credible before he would credit it—and he needed to hear it from more than one mouth. His finished write-up was an astounding document called the Suma Oriental que trata do Mar Roxo até aos Chins, the ‘Summation of the East from the Red Sea up to the Chinese’. Incredibly, the document was never published in his own lifetime. It was bundled away and forgotten after Pires left Melaka for China—where he seems to have died a mysterious death in a dungeon—and it would be four centuries before this mighty trove of humbly presented but scientifically gathered information was uncovered.
The first thing that Pires’ account makes clear is just how spectacularly cosmopolitan the ports of the Archipelago had become by the sixteenth century. Melaka itself was a veritable human zoo:
Moors from Cairo, Mecca, Aden, Abyssinians, men of Kilwa, Malindi, Ormuz, Panees, Rumes, Turks, Turkomans, Christian Armenians, Gujaratees, men of Chaul, Dabhol, Goa, of the kingdom of Deccan, Malabars and Klings, merchants from Orissa, Ceylon, Bengal, Arakan, Pegu, Siamese, men of Kedah, Malays, men of Pahang, Patani, Cambodia, Champa, Cochin China, Chinese, Lequeos, men of Brunei, Lucoes, men of Tamjompura, Laue, Banka, Linga (they have a thousand other islands), Moluccas, Banda, Bima, Timor, Madura, Java, Sunda, Palembang, Jambi, Tongkal, Indragiri, Kappatta, Menangkabau, Siak, Arqua, Aru, Bata, country of the Tomjano, Pase, Pedir, Maldives.
Across the water, meanwhile, Sumatra was in the grip of a great cultural change. A century and a half since Ibn Battuta’s visit, the east coast of the island between Aceh and Palembang was entirely under Muslim rule. The far south was mostly still ‘heathen’, but that, too, was rapidly changing. Samudra Pasai—which had, Pires noted, given its name to the whole island: Samudra, or ‘Sumatra’—had done well from the Portuguese seizure of Melaka. The Catholic conquest had displaced many of the expat Muslim traders based there, sending them scurrying away to seek out new footings in the Archipelago (and probably accelerating the speed of Islamisation in the process). Many had gone to Samudra Pasai, where there were now ‘many merchants from different Moorish and Kling [Indian] nations, who do a great deal of trade’. Inland, the people of the Bukit Barisan mountain ranges had long resisted conversion, but even that was now rapidly changing: ‘In these kingdoms there are in the island of Sumatra, those on the sea coast are all Moors [Muslims] on the side of the Malacca Channel, and those who are not yet Moors are being made so every day, and no heathen among them is held in any esteem unless he is a merchant’.
Much is often made of the peaceful nature of Islam’s entry into the Archipelago—the faith, it is said, spread here through trade and missionary zeal rather than through the sword. But both Ibn Battuta and Tomé Pires recorded Sumatran kings ‘warring for the Faith’. The real significant point is not that holy war was unknown in the Archipelago, but that it was never carried out by foreigners. Initial conversion came at the foreshore; later on, local kings might push inland, conquering and converting as they went, and adding a new element in a manifold process made up of missionary work, settlement, intermarriage, trade and mysticism.
In the second decade of the sixteenth century, as Tomé Pires was scribbling away at his desk in Melaka, the process was at its height in Sumatra, and was rapidly gearing up in other parts of the Archipelago too. Within a decade Banjarmasin, on the underbelly of Borneo, would be Muslim. Buton, off the southeast promontory of Sulawesi, would convert in 1580. At the start of the following century the hub of eastern maritime power at Makassar, on the other southern leg of Sulawesi, would change its faith. According to subsequent legends, Makassar’s seemingly rather slow conversion was down to a particularly passionate local penchant for pork. The Makassar chieftain insisted that he would never convert to a faith that banned the eating of succulent slabs of pig meat as long as the creatures were to be found roaming the forests of his realm. In the legend, an instantaneous extinction of porcine wildlife miraculously ensued, which was more than enough to convince the Makassarese to join the new religion. This was a particularly significant moment in the Islamisation of eastern Indonesia, for Makassar’s influence was strong throughout this region, and within a few short years it would have shunted the westernmost islands of Nusa Tenggara—Lombok and Sumbawa—into Islam too.
These were all places that had come within the broader sphere of Majapahit in earlier centuries—and indeed the final stamp of Islam in the Archipelago would closely match the footprint of the earlier formal Hindu-Buddhist influence. The network of trade, the sophisticated courtly culture, and the swelling internationalism that had welled up out of the Brantas delta ultimately provided the essential fertiliser for the new faith. In Java itself, however, the shift into Islam was unfolding rather differently.
Java on the eve of Islamisation was a land of beauty and sophistication. It was a place where an advanced farming culture had existed for thousands of years in a landscape of towering mountains and deep forests. Villages had taken on a timeless form—a refined rendering of the Austronesian prototype—and there was plenty of space for art and literature. A Majapahit poet in the fifteenth century described the scene in the Siwaratrikalpa, a tale of a sinful hunter wandering the forests of the island:
His journey took him to the northeast, where the ravines were lovely to look down into;
The gardens, ring-communities, sanctuaries, retreats and hermitages aroused his wonder.
There lay large fields at the foot of the mountains, with crops of many kinds growing along the slopes;
A large river descended from the hills, its stream irrigating the crops.
Now there was a village which he also viewed from above, lying below in a valley between the ridges.
Its buildings were fine to behold, while the lalan roofs of the pavilions were veiled in the drizzling rain.
Wisps of dark smoke stretched far, trailing away in the sky,.
And in the shelter of a banyan tree stood the hall, roofed with rushes, always the scene of many deliberations.
To the west of this were mountain ridges covered with rice fields, their dykes running sharp and clear.
Tomé Pires recorded something not dissimilar—though in rather more prosaic terms—when he sailed from Melaka to Java for the first time. It was, he wrote, ‘a land with beautiful air, it has very good water; it has high mountain ranges, great plains, valleys’. There were fish aplenty in the surrounding seas; the forests teemed with wild pigs and deer, and the people were ‘very sleek and splendid’. It was, in short, ‘a country like ours’. Javanese produce was magnificent too, and the rice was the best in the world—though there was ‘no butter nor cheese; they do not know how to make it’. The women also impressed him: ‘When they go out, they go in state looking like angels’. He was less sure about the men, however: ‘The Javanese are diabolic, and daring in treacheries and they are proud of the boast of being Javanese’. They were also well-armed, with every man, rich or poor, obliged by Javanese custom to keep a traditional kris dagger in his house. And just as Zheng He’s men had
