Sultanate of Malacca

At a glance

Where and when did Malacca begin?

The site was a fishing village at the mouth of a small river, with a hill behind it and a sheltered roadstead in front. What made it a port was the water: the strait narrows here, the anchorage is free of the reefs that guard the old Singapore channel, and it can be entered in any monsoon. Meilink-Roelofsz put it plainly — Malacca lay "in the narrowest part of the Straits of Malacca and accessible in any monsoon", with "no dangerous shallows like those off Singapore".

Ma Huan, who sailed with Zheng He, wrote that "formerly this place was not designated a 'country'", that "there was no king of the country; [and] it was controlled only by a chief", and that it was "subordinate to the jurisdiction of Hsien Lo" — Siam — paying "an annual tribute of forty liang of gold". Fei Xin adds that "the people are few and sickly".

So Malacca did not begin as a sultanate or even a kingdom. It began as a small, unhealthy, tin-and-fish chiefdom tributary to Ayutthaya, and the state that made the strait its own was built after 1403, much of it with Chinese help.

Nor does anyone know the year. The earliest hard date is Chinese: on 28 October 1403 the Yong-le emperor sent the eunuch Yin Qing "to take an Imperial proclamation for the instruction of the various countries of Melaka and Cochin". A court that sends a formal mission to "the kings of these countries" is not dealing with an unknown village, so Malacca existed as a recognised polity, with a ruler, by the autumn of 1403. Portuguese writers had dated the founding anywhere from the eighth century to 1420. Paul Wheatley concluded in 1961 that "Malacca was certainly an established trading centre by 1403", noting that Marco Polo, Odoric of Pordenone, the Nagarakertagama and Ibn Battuta all fail to mention it, so it cannot be much older.

The date 1400 is a convention of Malaysian state and school history. The Melaka government's own history page carries a timeline entry "1400 – Parameswara... eventually founded the state of Melaka", and is internally inconsistent about whether he was contending for the Majapahit throne or defeated by it. The honest formulation is that Malacca was founded between about 1390 and 1403, and that any single year — including the one this entry's title uses — is a placeholder.

Who founded Malacca: Parameswara or Iskandar Shah?

The Malay and Portuguese traditions name the founder differently, and the difference has never been resolved.

The Sejarah Melayu, the Malay court chronicle, calls him Sultan Iskandar Shah, a prince of the line of Sri Tri Buana ruling at Singapura. After the city is destroyed he flees to Muar, then inland, then to the coast, and founds Malacca at the mouth of the Bertam river. The Portuguese, who took their information from Malaccan informants a century later, call the founder Parameswara, a prince of Palembang who kills the ruler of Singapore, is driven out in turn, and settles at Bertam with a following of Orang Laut, the sea people of the strait. The Commentaries add that the first settlers were "twenty or thirty fishermen... who supported themselves sometimes by fishing, and at other times by robbing".

"Parameswara" is a title, not a name — Sanskrit parameśvara, "supreme lord" — which is part of why the Malay tradition never uses it. The Ming court calls him Bai-li-mi-su-la, "the native ruler of the country of Melaka".

The founding legend: the king, hunting, sees one of his hounds kicked by a white mouse-deer. "This is a good place," he says, "when even its mouse-deer are full of fight!" He asks the name of the tree, is told it is the malaka (the Indian gooseberry), and gives the name to the city — the animal is a mouse-deer, not a deer, and the name comes from the tree.

Whether Parameswara and Iskandar Shah were one man or two is a live quarrel. Winstedt argued in 1948 that they were the same person before and after conversion, and that the Chinese annalists "naturally took this ruler to be different from Parameswara"; Wang Gungwu's 1968 study took the record at face value instead. That record is blunt: on 5 October 1414 "Mu-wo Sa-yu-di-er Sha, the son of the king of the country of Melaka, came to Court and memorialized that his father Bai-li-mi-su-la had died", and was enfeoffed in his place. It is a bureaucratic entry, not a mishearing, and it is why most modern accounts insert a second ruler, Megat Iskandar Shah (1414–c. 1424), between Parameswara and Sultan Muhammad Shah. The Malay Annals know no such person. This entry gives both readings and adjudicates neither.

How did Ming China make Malacca a kingdom?

In the first years of the fifteenth century the Yong-le emperor sent fleets into the Indian Ocean and embassies ahead of them. Malacca, sitting on the route, was courted rather than conquered. In 1405 its envoy came back with Yin Qing and was enfeoffed in the same ceremony as the rulers of Samudra and Calicut: "It was Imperially commanded that these native rulers all be enfeoffed as kings of their countries, that they be provided with seals and patents."

Six weeks later the Ming court enfeoffed a mountain. Malacca's envoy reported that his king wished "that Melaka like the administrative divisions of China (中國屬郡), could annually show its loyalty through offering tribute", and asked that their mountain be enfeoffed as protector of the country. The emperor agreed and had a tablet set up on the hill. The envoy's speech is what the Ming court wanted to hear; the stele itself was a public guarantee.

It was tested at once. In November 1407 the courts of Samudra and Malacca complained that "Siam had been overbearing and that it had sent troops to take away their seals and title patents which they had received from the Court". The reply to Ayutthaya is one of the sharpest documents in Southeast Asian diplomacy: "Champa, Samudera, Melaka and you have all received the Court's orders. You stand as equals. Why have you, relying on force, detained their envoy to the Court and taken away their seals?... Immediately return... the seals and title patents conferred upon Melaka and Samudera."

In October 1419 the emperor warned Siam off again, and in May 1421 Siamese envoys came to Nanjing "in contrition for the crime of having attacked Melaka" — the high-water mark of the relationship.

Zheng He's treasure fleets called at Malacca on most of their seven voyages between 1405 and 1433, and for part of that time kept a fortified depot there. Ma Huan describes it: "Whenever the treasure-ships of the Central Country arrived there, they at once erected a line of stockading, like a city-wall... inside, again, they erected a second stockade, like a small city-wall, [within which] they constructed warehouses and granaries; [and] all the money and provisions were stored in them." How often it existed is disputed. What the sources never say is that Malacca ceded sovereignty over the site, and no Chinese garrison or governor is recorded. It was a trading factory that could be fortified, not a colony.

The fleets carried Malacca's envoys into the Ming system, brought traffic — in 1423 the Ministry of Rites counted "1,200 persons... sent by the 16 countries of ... Samudera, Aru and Melaka" — and supplied the security of 1407 and 1421. The spectacular moment came in 1411, when Parameswara came in person: "Bai-li-mi-su-la, the king of the country of Melaka, leading his wife, children and attendant ministers, a total of over 540 persons, came to Court." The emperor, "concerned as he knew that, without qualms, the king had left his homeland and travelled far across the seas", lodged him at the Interpreters Institute and sent him home with 100 liang of gold, 500 of silver and 1,300 bolts of silk,

After 1433 the fleets stopped: Malacca lost its escort, its depot traffic and the backing that had kept Ayutthaya at a distance. Everything that made it commercially great happened after the Chinese left.

How did a fishing village become the greatest port of the East?

By sitting in the middle of a timetable. The monsoons made the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea two different sailing seasons, and Malacca was where they overlapped. Gujarati ships left Cambay in March and had to be home by the end of May, when the south-west monsoon closed the ocean. Chinese junks came with the north-east wind at the turn of the year and had to leave by the end of June. Javanese and archipelago shipping arrived between May and September and waited in port until December or January for a fair wind home.

The consequence was a warehouse city. Goods could not be carried straight through; they had to be stored for months, financed, guarded and sold to the next fleet. Meilink: "The merchandise had to be stored for part of the year for resale to customers arriving later. It also explains why trade on a considerable scale came into being among the merchants established permanently in Malacca." Pires put it better: "Malacca is a city that was made for merchandise, fitter than any other in the world; the end of monsoons and the beginning of others."

The port had little of its own to sell — "Apart from gold and tin... Malacca's only domestic product was fish". It lived on arbitrage, warehousing and tolls.

The tolls were administered through the merchant communities themselves. Pires describes four syahbandars, harbour masters chosen from the foreign nations: one for the Gujaratis, "the most important of all"; one for the Klings, Bengalis, Peguans and men of Pasai; one for the Javanese, Moluccans, Banda, Palembang and the Ryukyus; one for the Chinese, Champa and the Lequios. They received a ship's captain, presented him to the bendahara, allotted him a warehouse and judged disputes within their own nation. The port was governed through the diaspora, not against it.

Western merchants paid six per cent on merchandise, plus "presents" to the king, the bendahara, the temenggung and their own syahbandar amounting to "one or two per cent". Eastern merchants paid no duty on goods, only presents — "a reasonable amount, something like dues" — and "the presents from China were larger than from all other parts". Weighing was charged at one calaim in the hundred, "and everything was weighed, even tar-lamps".

What did Malacca trade, and what was its money?

Spices came east to west — cloves from the Moluccas, nutmeg and mace from Banda — and Indian cloth went east. Pires lists what the Gujarat ships loaded for home: "cloves, mace, nutmeg... enormous quantities of white silk, tin... birds from Banda for plumes for the Rumes, Turks and Arabs."

Cloth was the bulk of the value going the other way: thirty kinds from Gujarat, thirty from Coromandel, twenty varieties of white fabric from Bengal, "much in demand throughout the whole of the East". Chinese goods were silk, damask, brocade and copper cash; porcelain was valuable but light. Food was the invisible tonnage — rice from Bengal, Pegu, Pasai and Java, dried fish, onions, garlic, oil. Pires's remark that "in Malacca they prize garlic and onions more than musk, benzoin, and other precious things" is the best evidence that this was a market for calories as much as luxuries.

Tin was the one real export, and it doubled as money. It came from the valleys of the peninsula's west coast, from Klang and Selangor, Bernam and Bruas, and from Perak and Kedah. Ma Huan describes the process — ore washed in sieves, the metal cast into blocks and tied forty to a bundle — and adds that "in trading transactions they all take this tin for current use".

Pires explains the coinage: "The small tin coins are cashes... Every hundred cashes make one calaim and weigh barely thirty-three ounces... The cashes are like ceitis, with the name of the reigning king, and those of the late kings are also current." A hundred calains were worth three cruzados. Coins of dead kings stayed in circulation, which implies a stable accepted medium rather than recoinage at every accession. Gold and silver moved by weight, not as Malacca coin; the claim that the sultanate struck gold dinars has no contemporary support.

The scale is Pires's, and he was repeating what merchants told him: four Gujarati ships a year worth 15,000 to 30,000 cruzados each, "a thousand Gujarati merchants established in Malacca" — a figure Meilink warns "is probably on the high side" — and "eighty-four languages... spoken" in the port. That is a boast about cosmopolitanism, and a good one, but hearsay.

Who actually ran Malacca?

Malay political thought made the ruler, not the territory, the state: kerajaan, the condition of having a king. Sultan Muhammad Shah (1424–44/45) is credited with the ceremonial that made the throne semi-sacred — the white umbrella, the ban on anyone but the king wearing yellow. Birch's Commentaries independently confirm that taboo: "No one is allowed to wear yellow colours under pain of death, except only the king of the land." Two unrelated traditions agreeing on the same rule is good evidence that it was real.

Below the sultan stood the great offices. Albuquerque, who had spent weeks in the captured city, listed five: a Pudricaraja ("Viceroy"), the Bendard ("Controller of the Treasury, and governs the kingdom"), the Lalsamane ("Admiral of the Sea"), the Taimingo for "justice upon foreigners", and four Xatandar — harbour masters — "one of China, another of Java, another of Cambaya, another of Bengala".

Other sources give other lists, and the popular claim that Malacca had "four ministers" is a simplification. The Undang-Undang Melaka names four — bendahara, temenggung, treasurer and syahbandar — and gives no laksamana. The Sejarah Melayu's ceremonial order puts "the four chief ministers" below the great officers. The functions are consistent: the bendahara was chief minister, chief justice and treasurer; the temenggung handled police and customs; the laksamana commanded the fleet and, Pires says, also held the China syahbandarship; the syahbandars judged the merchants of their own nation and were called, in the law, "the father and mother of foreign merchants".

The greatest bendahara was Tun Perak, who served Sultan Muzaffar and Sultan Mansur in the middle of the century. Passed over for the chief office, he went to Klang; when the Siamese attacked he brought the Klang contingent without leave, saying that "territory is territory even if it is only the size of a coconut shell". He broke the second Siamese attack by lighting fires along the shore so that the enemy believed the coast was manned.

Most accounts say Tun Perak died in 1498; the annals place his death before 1488, in Alauddin's reign, with his brother succeeding him. No source opened here supports 1498. His deathbed warning to the young Tun Mutahir is the most quoted passage in Malaccan political history: "You, Mutahir, will be a great man; your greatness will exceed mine. But think not to play the part of the uncle of the Raja. If such a thought comes into your mind, you will be killed."

It was. In 1510 Tun Mutahir was killed on the sultan's order after an intrigue that began as litigation between two Tamil merchants and ended with the laksamana telling the sultan that the bendahara was planning a coup. The sultan believed it — he already resented Tun Mutahir for refusing to show him his daughter, Tun Fatimah — and sent the kris. The father forbade his son to resist: "It is the custom of Malays that they shall never be disloyal to their Raja." Pires' editor calls him "the Bendahara slain in 1510 by his nephew the Sultan Mahmud".

How did Malacca fight Siam and take Pahang?

Siam never accepted that Malacca had left its orbit. Ayutthaya's claim to overlordship over the whole peninsula was asserted, intermittently acknowledged and finally repudiated, and nobody agrees when the last happened: the Commentaries date independence to "about ninety years" before 1511, Pires reports that Siamese ships had avoided the port "for twenty-two years" (so c. 1490), and Ma Huan's editor dates the final repudiation to after 1488.

The annals give two Siamese attacks in the reign of Sultan Muzaffar. Modern accounts date them to 1446 and 1456, but only the second is verifiable here: the Ligor army under Okya Chakra marched overland through Patani, Kelantan, Terengganu and Pahang to the Muar, while a sea-borne attempt under Okya Tejo was broken by Tun Perak's shore fires. Afterwards Muzaffar sent Tun Telanai to Siam to make peace, and the mission succeeded.

Expansion went both ways along the strait. Under Sultan Mansur Shah the court took Pahang, installed Mansur's own son Raja Muhammad there as sultan, and so made Pahang an appanage of the Malaccan house rather than a tributary kingdom — the origin of the Pahang Sultanate. The annals' date of 1454 cannot stand with the Chinese-derived accession of 1459, so the expedition belongs to Mansur's reign, after 1459. The enemy commander, Maharaja Sura, was captured, not killed: he was lodged in a cage, released when his elephant lore was needed to recover the sultan's escaped elephant, and kept at court as an elephant expert.

Two kinds of dependency must not be confused. Some were subordinate kingdoms — Pahang, Siak, Kampar, Indragiri, Jambi, Palembang, Kedah, Patani, Pasai — whose rajas did homage in person and sent revenue; others were fiefs held by Malaccan officers, such as Bentan for the bendahara and Siantan for the laksamana. The test of loyalty was homage by visit, and after 1511 the western vassals stopped coming.

The greatest diplomatic success was with Majapahit: the Batara died leaving no son, and Sultan Mansur sailed to Java to marry his daughter, escorted by the rajas of Indragiri, Palembang, Jambi and Lingga — a demonstration that Malacca's vassals outranked Majapahit's.

What law did Malacca make?

Two codes survive, the Undang-Undang Melaka (Laws of Malacca) and the Undang-Undang Laut (Maritime Laws), and their afterlife is the sultanate's most durable legacy. Liaw Yock Fang, who edited the standard text, records that the digest was "adapted and adopted in Kedah, Pahang, Riau, Pontianak" and quoted as authoritative in civil suits at Brunei in modern times: "The Undang-undang Johor is no other than the Undang-undang Melaka and the Undang-undang Kedah is another version of the Undang-undang Melaka."

How much is pre-1511 is the question that matters, and Liaw's answer is careful: "the Undang-undang Melaka is a hybrid text, or rather, several texts bound together. It is futile to ascribe the compilation to any one ruler or any one period." The core was compiled under Sultan Muhammad Shah and Sultan Muzaffar Shah in the mid-fifteenth century; the manuscripts we can read were copied in the seventeenth century and later. It shows how Malay jurists of the great age thought law should work.

It is Islamic in frame and adat in much of its content: apostasy, usury, witnesses and the hadud penalties all appear, but the code regularly gives the customary penalty first and "the law of God" as an alternative, and its sexual offences — a seducer made a slave, with 80 lashes as the divine alternative — deliberately soften classical stoning.

Its most humane provisions concern debt. A debtor's wife and children do not enter the creditor's service, and if the husband dies in service "the debt will be divided into three parts, one third is to be paid by the debtor's wife and children, two thirds are lost (by the creditor)... a debtor's wife should not be molested, (if she is), the money is lost, for she is a free person." People who sold themselves for food in a famine could not be held to the bargain, "because they... were in an emergency".

The maritime code governed the ship as a legal world of its own — the nakhoda's authority, the crew's duties, cargo space in petaks, jettison, collisions and crimes on board — and says in its own narrative that it was drafted by two great merchants and two senior captains and ratified by the crown.

Justice was also revenue: "half the fine goes to the king and half to the complainant... From this the bemdarás are very rich."

When did Malacca become a Muslim sultanate?

Two incompatible accounts survive. The Sejarah Melayu puts the conversion in the reign of the third ruler, Raja Tengah, who dreams of the Prophet and is visited by a scholar from Juddah; the king takes the title Sultan Muhammad Shah. That is a foundation story, and it places the conversion a generation after the founder.

The diplomatic record is earlier. Ma Huan's editor notes that "Sultan Iskandar Shah must have embraced the Muslim faith about 1413, since he had been converted before he assumed the style of Megat Iskandar Shah... and we find that style under the year 1414 in the Ming shih". By 1433 Ma Huan could write that "The king of the country and the people of the country all follow the Muslim religion". His editor adds a caution: Islam "was not yet completely prevalent in Malacca, and even in 1537 both rich and poor, instead of burying their dead, still adhered to the Hindu custom of burning them" — a Portuguese observer's claim about the countryside, worth keeping hedged.

Islam came through Pasai, the Sumatran sultanate that was the region's centre of Islamic learning, and through Gujarati, Bengali and Arab merchants; the Gujarati community held the senior syahbandarship, so commercial and religious prestige went together. The sultan's title in the law code is the classic Malay formulation: "the Paramount Ruler of the Faithful, the Shadow of God on Earth" — khalifatu'l-mu'minin, zillu'llahi fi'l-alam — who "carries out only the law of God Most High in this world". The same preamble bounds him: he executes God's law, not his own whim. That contract between adat and sharia, with the ruler as its guarantor rather than its owner, is the real political theory of the sultanate.

The old capital had one great mosque at the foot of the hill, and Albuquerque built his fortress on its site; no pre-1511 mosque survives. The city was remembered as a centre of Islamic learning, but nothing of its writing survives.

How did the Portuguese take Malacca in 1511?

Diogo Lopes de Sequeira's squadron reached the city in 1509 and left after a fight, with prisoners ashore, among them Rui de Araújo, whose letters describe about 10,000 houses, some 500 of stone, and "about 4000 fighting men" whose weapons "were not very impressive". The Malay account is unrecognisable: a single Frankish ship, Malays twisting the strangers' beards, a bendahara who "adopted him as his son" — and the Portuguese defeated.

Albuquerque returned with eighteen ships and about 900 Portuguese, and fought the city in three stages.

• 25 July 1511 was the first assault, deliberately on St James's day: "he was determined to attack the city upon the following day, which was the day of the Apostle Saint James". Correia dates it exactly — "Este feito foy em dia de Santyago, vinte e cinco de julho". The attack took the mosque and the bridgehead but could not hold them; the Portuguese lost 14 dead and 30 wounded.
• 14–15 August 1511 was the second assault, on the eve and feast of the Assumption: Correia: the fleet bombarded all day, "que era bespora de Nossa Senhora d'agosto", and the troops landed that night.
• 24 August 1511 was the final entry and sack, on St Bartholomew's eve: the captains formed up "em vespora de são Bertolameu, vinte e quatro d'agosto" and entered at dawn.

So "15 August 1511" is the second assault, not the fall, and a page that gives it as the date of the conquest is using the wrong event. The city was taken in the third week of August, with the final entry on 24 August.

Araújo told Albuquerque to take the bridge first, to split the defenders between the town and the suburb of Upe; the Portuguese fortified it and warped a captured junk under it as a floating battery. The king came out on an elephant, and elephants carrying wooden castles full of men, and the Portuguese broke them with pikes: the animals would not "bear with being wounded". The defence was carried by Javanese mercenaries, not Malays.

In the end the city was not stormed but bombarded and starved: ten days of cannon fire, "a terrible thing to look at... it seemed as if it were all on fire". Albuquerque then "gave permission to everyone to sack the city", and of "the Moors, women and children, there died by the sword an infinite number, for no quarter was given".

Why did it fall? Portuguese firepower was new — the annals' "What may be this round weapon that yet is sharp enough to kill us?" — Malacca was divided after the bendahara's execution, and the Chinese protection had ended eighty years before.

What became of the sultanate after 1511?

Sultan Mahmud fled into the interior, waited ten days for a fleet from Lingga that never came, and went by way of Pahang to Bintan in the Riau islands, from where he and his sons raided Portuguese shipping. The Portuguese thought he died almost at once: "after he had arrived but a few days at the kingdom of Pao [Pahang], he died". The Malay tradition has him live another seventeen years and die at Kampar in Sumatra in 1528. The Portuguese had no intelligence after Albuquerque sailed home in December 1511; the Malay court lived the sequel.

The dynasty continued in the territory the Portuguese never conquered. In 1528 two successor states were founded, Perak under Sultan Muzaffar Shah and Johor under Sultan Alauddin Riayat Shah II, both sons of Mahmud; the dates are conventional rather than documented to the year. Johor kept the regalia, titles and law, and its line ran until Sultan Mahmud Shah II died without issue in 1699, when the bendahara took the throne. Through Johor and Perak the Malaccan tradition reached most of the peninsula's royal houses, and through them the modern sultanates of Malaysia.

The Portuguese held the city for a hundred and thirty years and never recovered its trade. Albuquerque built A Famosa on the hill above the river with stone from demolished mosques and the tombs of dead kings, and a Dutch blockade and a Johor alliance broke the city in January 1641.

Why does Malacca still matter?

Because it is the origin story of the Malay world. Malacca is remembered as the golden age of Malay kingship, law, literature and language, the point at which the archipelago's trading ecumene became an Islamic, Malay-writing civilisation. The Sejarah Melayu was itself compiled in Johor in 1612–13 from older material, which tells you what the court thought it was preserving.

The legal afterlife is the most concrete: the Undang-Undang Melaka was adopted in Kedah, Pahang, Riau and Pontianak, quoted in Bruneian courts into modern times, and adapted for maritime use at Macassar.

The built heritage is another matter. Nothing of the sultanate stands: the palace was destroyed, and its site lies under the colonial government buildings around St Paul's Hill. A Famosa today is a single gate and a stretch of wall, because the British began demolishing the fort in 1795–1818 before stopping. The Stadthuys is Dutch, 1650; Christ Church is 1753. The "sultan's palace" on Jalan Kota is a modern reconstruction built as a museum, not a survival.

UNESCO inscribed Melaka and George Town jointly in 2008. The listing is about the townscape, not the sultanate: its value rests on shophouses, churches, squares and fortifications, and it cites the sultanate only as "the early stages of this history". A page that says UNESCO listed the sultanate would be wrong.

The national claim, by contrast, is literal. A plaque unveiled by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed in 1989 reads "where it all began", and it has been the marketing slogan of Malacca's official tourism campaigns ever since. That is the sultanate's real afterlife: not a state, but the charter of a nation's idea of itself.

Common myths about Malacca

Timeline of the Sultanate of Malacca

What the map shows next

At 1600 on the map the strait is crowded: the Sultanate of Aceh dominates the Sumatran coast, Brunei holds Borneo, and the Portuguese hold the city itself.

At 1700 on the map the successor states have taken the stage — Johor on the river of that name, Perak in the tin country, and the Sultanate of Palembang across the water. The border data still calls the Johor territory "Malacca", which is why this entry's own map card runs to 1660 and beyond: the name on the map outlasted the state by three and a half centuries.