Sultanate of Gowa

Its fall is one of the decisive events of Southeast Asian history. When Makassar's port was closed, the trade of the eastern archipelago was forced through Batavia, the Bugis took over the maritime networks, and the Dutch became the arbiters of the region for three centuries. Gowa's own people scattered across the archipelago, and their descendants are still there.

At a glance

What was Gowa?

A Makassarese kingdom on the south-western peninsula of Sulawesi, which with its partner Tallo controlled the port of Makassar and, through it, much of the trade of eastern Indonesia. It was not a large territorial state; its power was commercial and naval, and its capital was a port city — Somba Opu — with a wall, a mosque, a market and a cosmopolitan population.

Its importance lay in what it refused. Alone among the major ports of the archipelago, Makassar stayed open to all comers: English, Danish, Portuguese, Malay, Javanese, Chinese and Indian merchants traded there without a Dutch pass, and the sultan took a customs duty rather than a monopoly. That openness was the offence for which the Company destroyed it.

What was the twin kingdom?

A diarchy. Gowa and Tallo were two kingdoms with one people — rua karaeng nase're ata, "two rulers but one people" — bound by an oath attributed to Tumapa'risi' Kallonna, the sixteenth-century ruler who united them. The sultan came from Gowa and the chief minister, the Tuma'bicara-butta, from Tallo, and the two courts acted as one in war and trade.

The arrangement gave Makassar a stable, shared government and a single foreign policy, which is part of why it prospered. It also meant that the Dutch, when they came, were dealing with a state that had two thrones but one army.

When did it become Muslim?

On 22 September 1605, according to the Makassar Annals — a precise date that makes Gowa's conversion one of the best-documented in Indonesian history. The missionary was Dato ri Bandang, a Minangkabau scholar; the chief minister Matoaya converted first, then the young king, Sultan Alauddin, and the people followed in 1607.

Conversion was followed by war. The Islamic Wars of 1608–11 brought the neighbouring kingdoms — including Bone — under Gowa's authority or into its religious orbit, and made Makassar the champion of Islam in eastern Indonesia. Within a generation the port was the meeting place of Muslim scholars, Malay traders and European merchants.

Why was Makassar a free port?

Because the sultan wanted the revenue and the Company wanted a monopoly. Makassar's rulers taxed trade rather than controlling it: any ship could come, sell and leave, and the customs house took a percentage. English merchants established a factory there in 1613 and called Makassar one of the "especiallest flowers in our garden"; the Danes, the Portuguese and the Malays came too.

The result was extraordinary. Between 1641 and 1667, forty-two of the ships arriving at Manila from the south came from Makassar — more than from any other port — carrying spices, sandalwood, slaves and cloth. The city was the clearing house of the eastern seas, and its prosperity was built precisely on the freedom that Batavia could not tolerate.

## What was Makassarese society like?

Ranked, seafaring and cosmopolitan. Makassarese society was organised in a hierarchy of nobles, commoners and dependants, with slavery at the bottom; the karaeng — the lords — governed through ties of marriage and clientship, and the sultan was the greatest of them rather than an absolute ruler. Warfare, trade and status were bound together: a lord's following measured his power, and slaves were both labour and currency.

The port city was mixed. Makassarese, Malay, Javanese, Chinese, Portuguese, English and Danish merchants lived in their own quarters, under their own headmen, with their own mosques or churches. That cosmopolitanism is what the Dutch destroyed when they closed the port, and its loss is why the Makassarese diaspora spread so widely: the people who had worked the trade went where the trade went.

Who was Hasanuddin?

The sultan who fought the Dutch, and the one remembered as a national hero of Indonesia. Hasanuddin ruled from 1653, when the previous sultan abdicated in his favour, and spent his reign trying to hold the port open against a Company that had decided to close it. He is called Ayam Jantan dari Timur — "the cock of the east" — in the Indonesian tradition, though the epithet is not in the seventeenth-century sources.

His diplomacy was as important as his war. He played the English, the Portuguese and the Dutch against each other, granted trading rights to anyone who would help him, and tried to build a coalition of the eastern kingdoms. He failed because the Company could blockade his port and his neighbours could be bought.

## How did the Dutch justify the war?

As a defence of treaty rights and free trade. The Company argued that Makassar harboured its enemies, refused its passes, and supported the Portuguese and English against it; the campaign was presented as the enforcement of agreements the sultan had broken. In reality, the free port was the offence: a market that ignored the Dutch monopoly made the monopoly meaningless.

The Batavian government's own correspondence shows the commercial logic. Makassar was the "especiallest flower" of the eastern trade, and the Company wanted the flower. The treaty's clauses — expulsion of Europeans, cloth monopoly, toll exemption, pass system — are the design of a monopoly, not the terms of a peace.

What was the Makassar War?

The campaign that ended the free port, 1666–69. The Dutch, allied with Arung Palakka and the Bugis of Bone, attacked Makassar with a fleet of twenty-one ships and some six hundred European troops under Cornelis Speelman. The campaign was fought on land and sea, with Bugis armies on the Dutch side and Makassarese allies on the other.

The Treaty of Bungaya was negotiated in 1667 — in Portuguese, the diplomatic language of the region — and imposed terms that destroyed Makassar's trade: the expulsion of all European merchants, a Dutch monopoly on cloth, toll exemptions for the Company, and a pass system that made every other ship illegal. It also demanded 250,000 rijksdaalders and 1,500 slaves.

What happened at Somba Opu?

A siege and a storm. Gowa did not accept the treaty, and the Dutch and their Bugis allies besieged Somba Opu. The mine under the walls was fired on 14 June 1669, the breach was stormed on 22 June, the Annals record the city as conquered on 24 June, and Hasanuddin abdicated on 29 June. The walls of Gowa were razed on 3 June 1670, and Hasanuddin died on 12 June 1670, aged forty-one.

The terms were enforced as conquest. The fort was demolished, the port closed, the foreign merchants expelled and the sultanate reduced to a Dutch client. Gowa kept its dynasty and its titles; it lost its position in the world.

## What is the sultanate today?

A cultural institution. The royal line of Gowa continues, the palace at Sungguminasa is a museum, and the sultanate's ceremonies and titles are preserved within the Indonesian republic; Gowa is a regency of South Sulawesi, and Makassar is a city of a million and a half people. The Makassarese language, the chronicles and the aristocratic titles survive.

The memory is political. Hasanuddin is a national hero, and the war of 1666–69 is remembered as a war of independence against the Company — a reading that the documents support, with the qualification that what Gowa defended was a commercial order as much as a territory.

What happened afterwards?

A diaspora. The Makassarese, like the Bugis, scattered: the prince Karaeng Galesong went to Banten, then to Demung in East Java, and by 1675 was at Gresik and Surabaya, from where he joined the Trunajaya rebellion against Mataram. Makassarese soldiers, sailors and merchants settled across Java, Borneo, the Malay peninsula and Siam.

The Dutch got the monopoly and lost the trade. Batavia became the clearing house, but the shipping that had made Makassar rich moved to the Bugis, the Malays and the Chinese, who were not bound by Company passes. Gowa remained a cultural centre — its chronicles, its language and its aristocracy survived — but the commercial empire was gone.

Common myths about Gowa

Timeline of Gowa

What the map shows next

At 1660 on the map Gowa is the great free port, and Bone is its rival.

At 1669 on the map Somba Opu has fallen, and the Dutch East Indies controls the eastern trade.