Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asiaplaying a part in the “global economy” at a very early date. This was,
however, mainly as “producers” not as “exporters” in the proper sense of
the word, as it was not the Moluccans themselves who carried this valu-
able product abroad. It was the task of other intermediaries to transport
the produce in stages all the way to the distant consumption markets.^8
The fact that the Moluccans themselves were producers rather than
exporters meant that their society, economically as well as politically,
was not developing at a quick pace. Nevertheless, by the middle of the
second millennium, the Moluccas were one of the “pockets of moder-
nity” in the eastern Archipelago. Local state formation had resulted in
socio-political constructs, which had long passed the level of chiefdoms
and turned into dynastical monarchies. Four of these, namely the ones
of Ternate, Tidore, Jailolo and Bacan, used for their rulers the title
kolano, which probably derived from the Javanese kalana, a term for an
“overseas king”. Later, the Arabic title of sultan was adopted. The title of
sultan came with the introduction of Islam, dating from the second half
of the fifteenth century. However, a Moluccan sultanate was not always
covering an extensive realm. Only two of the four monarchies just men-
tioned developed beyond the level of a confederation of villages. These
were Ternate and Tidore that possessed elaborate courts ruling over an
extensive territory of connections of vassalage, sometimes even beyond
the borders of the Moluccas. The land surface of the entire Moluccan
archipelago was about 40,000 km^2 , less than half the size of Portugal,
whose first sailors reached the Moluccas in 1512. Except for the above-
mentioned, small clove-producing islands off the coast of Halmahera,
most of the islands were covered with jungle, inhabited by a population
of swidden agriculturists and hunters, often called Alfurese, pagans, liv-
ing in hamlets and villages. Such isolated settlements were nevertheless
subject to the sultans. Estimates of the population numbers are problem-
atic. In the case of the seventeenth-century sultanate of Ternate it might
have been just over 40,000, while Tidore had probably over 20,000
inhabitants. As far as the military element was concerned, the sultan-
ates’ forces were commanded by a kapitan laut. The two sultanates had a
small band of professional soldiers, more of a royal guard, probably 100
- R. A. Donkin, Between East and West: The Moluccas and the Traffic in Spices up to the
Arrival of the Europeans (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003): 4,
53, 89–93, 111–12, 137, 156, 351–59.