Military Capability and the State in Southeast Asia’s Pacific Rimlands, 1500–1700
the Spanish speak of caracao. Maguindanao on the west coast was much
stronger than Sarangani as it controlled several vassal groups, mostly
Iranun, Bajaus and Alfurese. Eventually, Sarangani also became part of
Maguindanao. Information about Maguindanao’s military capability is
scarce, but not as limited as about seventeenth-century Sulu. In 1628,
the Sultan of Maguindanao boasted that he was capable to mobilize ten
thousand men within a few days. It is known that besides sharp weapons
Maguindanao possessed firearms, often bought from Europeans. By
1700, Maguindanao seems to have possessed 300 pieces of artillery. At
that time, it was again claimed that in the capital, Simoay, some eight to
ten thousand men could be brought under arms. Moreover, the num-
ber of kora-kora could be up to 500 vessels although that seems rather
exaggerated, considering that average crews of kora-kora were about 60,
which would make the total number of men on board three times as
many as Simoay’s potential number of warriors. In cases of the regular
raiding expeditions to the Visayas or other parts of the Sulu zone, kora-
kora were equipped with a few swivel guns. A kapitan laut, an “admiral
of the sea”, commanded the forces at sea, while a kapitan majores com-
manded the sultan’s troops on land. Strongholds in Mindanao were
usually stockades, although by 1700 two stone forts were recorded in
Simoay.^7
MoluccasSoutheast from Mindanao are the islands of the Moluccas. The conno-
tation “Moluccas” or Maluku has changed much over the centuries. In
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it referred to Halmahera and the
surrounding islands; nowadays this area is equal to the Indonesian prov-
ince of Maluku Utara, the North Moluccas. The “historical” Moluccas,
particularly the five smaller islands west of Halmahera, namely Ternate,
Tidore, Motir, Makian and Bacan, were the original area of the world’s
production of cloves. Long before the arrival of the Europeans, as early
as the beginning of the first millennium C.E., cloves were already being
transported to other parts of the globe, notably to India, the Middle
East, the Mediterranean and China. In China and India, cloves might
have arrived even earlier. Consequently, the Moluccas were already
- Laarhoven, Triumph, 27–28, 34–35, 49, 72, 74, 100–01, 109–15, 118, 160–63.