28 Boundaries and Beyond
Persians, as well as such other Islam-inβluenced regions as Gujarat,
Malabar and Coromandel.^97 An equally important presence were the
Ottoman merchants from West Asia who were the middlemen in trade
between the East Mediterranean and the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago.
The link between Islamic inβluence and the dominant trade position of
Aceh in northwest Sumatra was obvious.^98
After the occupation of Malacca by the Portuguese, the Gujaratis, who
had a βirm grasp on the pepper and spice trade, decided to withdraw
from there and go to Aceh. The collaboration between the Acehnese
and the Gujaratis worked to exclude the Portuguese from the lucrative
pepper trade and gave rise to the emergence of Aceh as a trading power
in the sub-region. In Tomé Pires’ words, with little effort Aceh could
assemble a βleet of 30 to 40 ships to intercept a competitor’s vessels.^99
Its trade zone extended to the Red Sea and the port of Aden.^100 By the
last 20 years of the sixteenth century, Aceh had βirmly established itself
as the international center for the pepper and spice trade as well as the
meeting point for the Muslim trading ships that sailed from there to the
Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. Cinnamon produced in Ceylon was even
βirst transshipped to Aceh before being shipped to the Mediterranean.
Shipments of spices to China, Indochina and India (with the exception
of Malabar) also increased tremendously.^101 The tarnishing of the glory
of Portuguese Malacca in the international pepper and spice trade can
be attributed to the brilliant maneuvring of the Acehnese. Although
it reaped the beneβit of trade with the Muslim traders from the Indian
Ocean, Aceh stopped short of becoming another sea and territorial power
in the maritime trade. Its failure to attain this can be attributed to a new
multi-port trading environment, in which each of the port polities was
able to capitalize on its strength in the trading structure.
Bantam: The port town of Bantam was founded by Javanese Muslims
in the sixteenth century and lost no time in attracting Indian, Chinese
and European company merchants in pursuit almost exclusively of
one commodity, namely pepper. A part of the production from Java,
Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula and Borneo was sent here for re-export
- Arun Das Gupta, “The Maritime Trade of Indonesia: 1500–1800”, in Southeast
Asia: Colonial History, ed. Paul H. Kratoska (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 95–9. - Ismail Hakki Goksoy, “Ottoman-Aceh Relations as Documented in Turkish
Sources”, in Mapping the Acehnese Past, ed. R. Michael Feener, et al. (Leiden:
KITLV, 2011), pp. 65–6. - The Suma Oriental of Tome Pires, pp. 136–7.
- Ismail Hakki Goksoy, “Ottoman-Aceh Relations”, p. 66.
- Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, p. 568.
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