Malacca

The founding of the sultanate

According to the Malay Annals, the Sejarah Melayu, and to Portuguese accounts, Malacca was founded around 1400 by Parameswara, a prince of Palembang descent who had ruled at Temasek, the site of Singapore, and fled from there. He chose a site on a river mouth on the narrowest part of the strait, where ships waiting for the change of the monsoon winds could shelter and trade. He sought the protection of the Ming emperor of China, and the fleets of Zheng He called at Malacca repeatedly in the early fifteenth century, using it as a depot.

Parameswara or his successor adopted Islam, and the court took the title of sultan. Malacca became a major centre for the spread of Islam in the region, and Malay in its court form spread as the language of trade and religion.

The entrepot

By the late fifteenth century Malacca was one of the busiest ports in the world. Merchants from Gujarat, the Coromandel coast, Bengal, Persia, Arabia, China, Java and the Moluccas met there, exchanging Indian textiles for the spices of the eastern islands and the goods of China. Each community had its own shahbandar, or harbour master. The Portuguese apothecary Tome Pires, who lived there soon after the conquest, reported that dozens of languages could be heard in its streets, and argued that control of Malacca meant control of the trade of the whole Indian Ocean.

The Portuguese and the Dutch

In 1511 Afonso de Albuquerque attacked and took Malacca. The sultan fled, and his line founded the sultanate of Johor further south. The Portuguese built a fortress, A Famosa, and churches, and held the city for 130 years, under repeated attack from Johor, Aceh and others. Muslim traders shifted to other ports, and Malacca never regained its former dominance.

In 1641 the Dutch, in alliance with Johor, took the city after a long siege. Under the Dutch, Malacca was a secondary post, overshadowed by Batavia. The Stadthuys, the Dutch town hall, and Christ Church survive from this period.

British Malacca

The British occupied Malacca during the French Revolutionary Wars and returned it, and under the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1824 it was exchanged for British Bencoolen in Sumatra. From 1826 it formed part of the Straits Settlements with Penang and Singapore. Most of the Portuguese fortress was demolished in the early nineteenth century; only a gate, the Porta de Santiago, survives. Malacca is known for its Peranakan or Baba-Nyonya community, descendants of Chinese traders who adopted Malay ways, and for a small Portuguese-Eurasian community whose creole language survives.