In the first half-century since its foundation, the Dutch East India Company seemed nigh invincible. The Hollanders had swooped down seemingly out of nowhere, and, in a matter of decades, broken the might of the Portuguese. The Dutch were now seen from the Cape to Nagasaki, their armadas towering over dhows and junks.
By 1650, the Company felt strong enough to gamble. It declared war on two of its most formidable enemies: Aceh in the Malay world and Makassar in eastern Indonesia. The Gentlemen Seventeen (the central board of the Company) knew this would be a long war, costly both in money and manpower. Nevertheless, when push came to shove, the Company would certainly prevail.
The Dutch had attacked Indian shipping in Southeast Asia as part of their blockade on Aceh, provoking the ire of Mirza Arab, Mughal governor of the port of Surat. The governor had offered two choices to the Company: either compensate the affected merchants in full, or refuse to pay and be evicted from Surat and possibly the entire Mughal realm.
The Company could not possibly pay such a ridiculously large sum in the middle of a war. It would have to forsake access to Mughal territory, then. The Company considered retaliation, by attacking and sacking Surat and its riches – but more experienced East India men warned that attacking India’s premier port might doom the Company’s chances of ever regaining access to the empire. So the Company sat and watched as it lost its toeholds in the world’s richest empire. In 1651, Mirza Arab sacked the Dutch factory in Surat. A decree from Delhi soon arrived to forbid all Dutchmen from trading in the empire for an indefinite period of time.
At least for the time being, the Dutch were evicted from North India.
Depredations on Mughal commerce continued. Surat’s greatest merchant magnate, Virji Vora, requested that the state provide a fleet to protect its subjects’ trade, or at least that he and the other great merchants be allowed to build their personal fleets to protect their own ships. The Peacock Throne rebuffed both requests. Vora might be rich and influential, but his official capacity in the Mughal administration was limited. In any case, Delhi’s central government knew and cared little for the Dutch – for all they cared, the Dutch Company was just another group of “nomad tribes patrolling the seas” (
khana ba dush muhafazat-i darya) who hailed from their “nests” (
nasheman) on the “Islands of the Franks” (
jaza’ir-i Firang).
Matters were different further south in the subcontinent. In the famous gem-laden kingdom of Golkonda, whose very name would become an English word meaning “place of fortune,” all matters of state were dominated not by the sultan but by the Persian merchant-official Muhammad Sayyid Ardestani. Like Virji Vora, Ardestani saw losses to the Dutch blockade of Aceh. But unlike his Jain counterpart, Ardestani had the full backing of the Golkonda state on his side. In 1651, he expelled the Dutch from all their factories in the kingdom. Even Fort Geldria, the capital of the Company’s governorate in southern India, was swiftly conquered. The merchant-official then began to buy European warships from the Portuguese to try and reverse-engineer them. The Dutch were far from pleased, but what could they do? There was little to gain and much to lose by making Ardestani an implacable foe.
Meanwhile, war raged on Below – and sometimes Above – the Winds. Considering the complexities of this prolonged war, which would eventually pit the Company against virtually all its enemies, the different theaters and stages of the conflict have been separately treated in the following discussion.
1. The Malay theater, 1650-1651. The Dutch blockaded Aceh throughout these years, though the Company fleet turned out to be much too small for the embargo to be anything more than a nuisance to the Sultana. More dangerous was the Dutch campaign in the Malay Peninsula. When the war had begun, the small city-state of Kedah had abandoned its Acehnese overlord and declared for the Company. Perak now remained the last mainland outpost of Aceh.
In the dry season of 1651, the Governor-General in Malacca presented the Acehnese vassal sultan of Perak with an ultimatum: surrender peacefully and abandon his loyalties to Aceh, or resist and see the kingdom brought to ruin. Sultan Muhyiddin Mansur Shah replied, “Has God truly decreed that a slave should betray his honest master?” It was war, then. The armies of Kedah, Johor, and Dutch Malacca – around seven thousand Malays and four thousand Company troops – joined to invade Perak. If it fell, Aceh would be reduced to Sumatra alone. Its pretensions to pan-Malay dominion would be proven a sham for once and for all.
There was no help forthcoming from across the Strait. Sultan Muhyiddin’s army of several thousands, outmanned and outgunned, met the enemy in battle and was annihilated. The civilians of the kingdom fled to the mountains, while Muhyiddin and his court fortified themselves in their capital of Hilir Perak. The VOC and their allies soon arrived and laid siege to the town in late 1651.
2. The eastern Indonesian theater, 1650-1651. Meanwhile, the Company struggled to hold its ground in eastern Indonesia. Dutch control over the Spice Islands of northern Maluku and their fragrant cloves had long relied on their subsidiary ally, the sultan of Ternate. The sultan nominally ruled the only sources of clove trees in the entire world, after all. Yet, as the 1650s began, Dutch-Ternate relations began to fray.
Sultan Hamzah, the old and tyrannical king of Ternate, died in 1648. The Dutch quickly crowned Mandar Syah, Hamzah’s meek eldest son. But Mandar was a man considered by all Ternatens to lack even the faintest traces of royal character. In 1650, just as war was beginning with Aceh and Makassar, the leading nobles of Ternate deposed Mandar and crowned his younger brother Prince Manilha as sultan. The old sultan fled to the Dutch fortress in Ternate, begging for protection and pleading that the Company restore him to the throne.
Makassar could not have been more elated. With Dutch fleets withdrawing to Ternate to depose Manilha, the initiative was theirs. Three thousand troops went east from Sulawesi to support Manilha and the insurgent Ternatens, while Makassar agents fanned the flames of rebellion in areas under direct Dutch control. Their efforts were not in vain. In 1651, Majira – chieftain of the spice-rich Hoamoal Peninsula in southern Maluku and traditionally a vassal of Ternate – proclaimed that his loyalties lay with Sultan Manilha and not the infidel-tainted Mandar, rebelled against his infidel overlords, and sent letters to Makassar asking for help.
By 1652, the Company was on the defensive in the Spice Islands. The Dutch had chased Manilha and his followers out of Ternate Island, but the insurgents – which included the majority of Ternate’s 8,000 inhabitants – simply fled to the eastern island of Halmahera, where they continued their raids on Dutch positions. The Dutch and their allies regularly ravaged Hoamoal to break Majira’s will to fight, but taking his fortified positions proved to be arduous. Asahudi, Majira’s capital town, was on a steep mountain slope directly overlooking the sea. There were nine small fortresses on this single slope, all stocked with artillery, and then a battery on an island off the coast to prevent Dutch ships from entering nearby waters. Such a fortress could only be taken with great time and money; the Company was starting to run out of both. Clove production was at a standstill and the spice trade was ebbing. Makassar troops were everywhere, whether they were helping Majira’s warriors use their cannons to full effect or providing much-needed manpower for the refugee Sultan Manilha.
The Gentlemen Seventeen began to worry.
3. The Europeans join in. Still, as the year 1652 began, the Company was winning. Perak was about to fall. Manilha and Majira were steadily forced back, no matter how many troops Makassar might send.
But the Dutch were not the only Europeans in the scene.
Commercial tensions between England and the Netherlands had long been raging, but in the 1650s they reached new heights. The end of the war between Spain and the Netherlands in 1648 gave Dutch merchants free rein over the seas, and by 1650 English merchants everywhere seemed overwhelmed. As one Englishman remarked, “the Dutch have too much trade, and the English are resolved to take it from them.” Meanwhile, proposals of political union between the English Commonwealth (Charles I having recently lost his head) and the Dutch Republic had recently collapsed. So Parliament – confident from its victories in the Civil War – passed the first Navigation Act in 1651, essentially banning the Netherlands from all trade with England.
This state of affairs could not last, and eventually the first of the Anglo-Dutch Wars broke out. In Europe, this was a war between republics; in Asia, it was a war of Companies. The English East India Company would, under normal circumstances, never have proved a match for its Dutch counterpart. But with the Dutch hard-pressed in Indonesia, these were not normal circumstances.
Portugal, long chaffing under a personal union with Spain, had recently seen its maritime empire shatter under Dutch offensive. The immensely profitable Spice Islands were among the first to be lost; soon followed the fall of Hormuz, the main Portuguese outpost in Persia, and with it, the demise of Portuguese power in the Arabian seas. The Dutch built forts in Africa and Brazil, and finally even Malacca fell. Even in 1650, when Portugal was finally free of Spain, the Dutch were still laying siege to the vestiges of Portuguese empire. In Sri Lanka, for example, the local Kingdom of Mahanuwara was in an alliance with the Dutch to drive the Portuguese from this island of cinnamons. Mahanuwara was no exception; throughout India the Dutch incited rajas and emirs against the beleaguered Portuguese outposts.
But now, with England and many Muslims united in war against the enemy, Lisbon saw its chance to strike back. Even better – the Treaty of The Hague of 1641, creating a ten-year truce between Lisbon and Amsterdam, had finally expired.
* * *
Back after a long, test-induced hiatus. Feels nice to be back writing again. This ties into
Post #73, of course.
The Mughal elite’s view of Europeans, which I paraphrase as thinking that Europeans were poor nomad tribes living on desolate island “nests,” might seem surprisingly parochial. But this ignorance is much more understandable from a Mughal perspective. The little Frankish outposts that dotted the coastline posed no serious threat to the Mughal enterprise, that of cavalry-based,
tellurocratic (land-centered) dominion over the Indian subcontinent. If anything, the Europeans were
reliant on imperial benefaction to access the vast North Indian market (the Mughals assumed, perhaps correctly, that the Franks were so interested in Indian goods because their own homeland was so impoverished). This made Europeans fundamentally similar to Inner Asian nomads like the Afghans or Baloch, also separate from but reliant on the Mughal state. This also meant that the Franks could be mollified and manipulated to serve imperial needs, and so historian Khafi Khan, who wrote his
History of Alamgir, notes that the Portuguese are essentially unpaid servants of Emperor Aurangzeb.
For information on Mughal perceptions of Europeans, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s “Taking stock of the Franks: South Asian views of Europeans and Europe, 1500-1800,” Jos Gomman’s
Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and High Roads to Empire, 1500-1700, p. 163-164, and S. Digby’s “Beyond the ocean: Perceptions of overseas in Indo-Persian sources of the Mughal period.”
ITTL, this means that the Mughals are unwilling to attack the Dutch in a moment of weakness. Where would the glory be in attacking such a negligible foe? And even if the Dutch are engaging in piracy along Mughal sea routes, there have always been pirates as long as there were ships – so why waste resources building a fleet, or nurture a potential threat by arming merchant-princes?
Thankfully for the Dutch, the Mughals will not enter the war.
The Mughals might be the biggest Indian power, but they are far from the only one. Here we also have the kingdom of Golkonda, the second most powerful Indian state in 1650 (albeit an order of magnitude weaker than the Timurids). And Golkonda, unlike Delhi, has very good reasons to intervene overseas.
1650s Golkonda is ruled by the merchant-prince Muhammad Sayyid Ardestani, who was born in Persia in 1591. Ardestani came from humble origins, arriving in India in his early thirties as a mere horse dealer. But he had a keen business sense and knew just how to use his talents to the full. Just a few years after arriving in the Deccan, he had already made a fortune by running diamond mines. By 1643, not only was he the richest man in Golkonda, he was also Prime Minister of the realm and governor of its southern territories. He dominated both trade and politics in the kingdom throughout the next decade as a close associate of the Portuguese, making ludicrous amounts of money. Ardestani’s commercial enterprise mainly focused on trade between India and the Middle East, but even in Southeast Asia, the fluctuations of the regional textile market were basically identical with the fluctuations of the merchant’s life.
For Ardestani, the current predicament of the Dutch is a most welcome opportunity to remove a serious commercial competitor and help out his Portuguese friends. This is especially given the fact that the Dutch possess a fort in Golkonda territory (Fort Geldria, which was technically built in the territory of the Vijayanagar kingdom, but then Ardestani conquered the area), while the Golkonda court was always opposed to the presence of foreign forts on Indian shores.
For Ardestani’s illustrious career (both as merchant magnate and as Mughal general – but I’ll have more to say on Ardestani’s role as Mughal governor later), see Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s
The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India 1500-1650, p. 322-327, or Jagadish Narayan Sarkar’s very old study,
The Life of Mir Jumla: The General of Aurangzeb.
So there’s both good news and bad news for the Honorable Company when it comes to India.
As for the discussion of the war in Southeast Asia, I tried to draw on historical analogues as much as possible. When it comes to the war in the Malay Peninsula, Perak’s solitary defiance is based on the fact that Perak almost uniquely remained loyal to Aceh even after the Dutch took Malacca in 1642. IOTL, a 1650 Aceh-Dutch treaty nonetheless coerced the sultana into having to share Perak’s trade with the Company. ITTL, things may well be different.
The contention between Mandar Syah and Prince Manilha for the throne of Ternate are also loosely historical. The Dutch did indeed crown the incapable Mandar Syah when Sultan Hamzah died in 1648. This did indeed lead to a rebellion by the Fala Raha (the four leading noble houses of Ternate), who crowned Prince Manilha as sultan. Mandar won this succession war only in 1653, and only with extensive Company support. The Hoamoal chieftain Majira did indeed refuse to accept the legitimacy of Mandar Syah and declared war on the Company in 1652 with the aid of Makassar. His capital town of Asahudi really was as well-fortified as described. See Leonard Andaya,
The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period, p. 163-165.
