The existence of diplomatic and military relations between Ottoman Turkey and some Muslim states of Southeast Asia has been known for centuries. The Portuguese chroniclers, notably Couto and Pinto, kept the idea alive in the West; oral traditions and a few chronicles kept it more vividly before the imagination of the Atjehnese; and in Turkey there has been a revived interest in the connection since at least 1873. An attempt therefore seems overdue to seek greater precision on these remarkable events, by considering at least the most notable of the sources from the three sides.

No reputable historian nowadays maintains that the Portuguese 16th- century thalassocracy in the Indian Ocean was always and everywhere completely effective. In particular, it is widely accepted that there was a marked if erratic revival in the Red Sea spice-trade shortly after the first Turkish occupation of Aden in 1538, though much work remains to be done on the causes and effects of this development. The Portuguese reactions to the rise of Atjeh have been studied chiefly in connection with the frequent fighting in the Straits of Malacca; and the economic side of the struggle has been less considered. The connection of Atjeh with the revival of the Red Sea spice-trade has been insufficiently stressed; though Mrs. Meilink-Roelofsz and Dr. V. Magalhaes Godinho have some relevant observations on this point in their recent and well documented works (Asian Trade and European Influence in the Indonesian Archipelago, 1500–1630, The Hague, 1962, pp. 142–46; Os Descobrimentos e a Economia Mundial, Vol. II, Lisboa, 1967, pp. 111–171). The purpose of this paper is to amplify the facts and figures which they give there, in the hope that someone with the necessary linguistic qualifications will be incited to make complementary researches in the relevant Indonesian, Arabian, or Turkish sources.

For almost a century before 1629, the sultanate of Acheh in north Sumatra was the most formidable indigenous state on either side of Malacca Strait. A stalemate had developed between Acheh and the Portuguese in Malacca, with the Portuguese unable to maintain sufficient forces locally to invade Acheh, and the Achinese unable to press their numerous sieges of Malacca to a successful conclusion before the Portuguese relief fleet arrived from India. Under additional Dutch pressure early in the seventeenth century, the Portuguese seem to have been unable to render the assistance against Acheh which they had given the Malay states on occasion in the sixteenth century. In 1613–20 Johore, Pahang, Kedah and Perak were conquered by Sultan Iskandar Muda (1607–36) of Acheh. In most cases, the defeated sultan was carried off to Acheh and a relative installed as a vassal of Acheh. Sultan Ala'ud-din Ri'ayat Shah II of Johore escaped when the Achinese overran Batu Sawar in June 1613, but died a few years later. His half-brother, Raja Bongsu or Raja Seberang, was taken to Acheh, married to Iskander Muda's sister, and sent back to Batu Sawar as Sultan Abdu'llah Ma'ayat Shah (1613–23). When Abdu'llah rejected Iskander Muda's sister and married a daughter of the Sultan of Jambi about 1617, he also rejected the Achinese tradition of hostility to the Portuguese. For this, the Achinese pursued him from his new capital at Lingga to Tambilan, where he died of “hartseer” (despair) in 1623. Carpentier, the Dutch governor-general at Batavia, assumed that the once mighty Johore empire had come to an end.

The west Sumatran coast between Barus in the north and Inderapura in the south, which came under Achehnese rule, was originally part of the Minangkabau kingdom which developed in the fourteenth century and reigned supreme in central Sumatra up to about the end of the following century The Padang lowlands and the coastal region up to the northern border of Silebar were considered in the Alam Minangkabau as part of the rantau, or acquired territories, as different from the darat, or nucleus of the kingdom formed by the 3 luaks (or districts) of Agam, Tanah Data and Lima Puloh Kota. The important distinction between the darat and the rantau was that the former was administered on genealogical principles with a penghulu at the head of each negeri in the luak while the rantau was divided into several parts and was under the territorial rule of various rajas who were members of the royal family.2 Beneath the rajas appointed by the central administration at Pagarruyong were minor rajas and penghulus selected from amongst the local inhabitants who were in charge of the various districts. In return for the help and protection provided by the darat, especially in times of trouble, the negeris in the rantau were obliged to pay homage and tribute to Pagarruyong, a duty which they evaded during periods of weak central control, as at the end of the fifteenth century.

The trade between India and the Malay Peninsula was an important link in the inter-Asian trading system. It took in a wide assortment of goods, embracing not only the produce of these two countries but also serving as a vehicle for the transhipment and distribution of goods from neighbouring and even distant regions that are assembled at these centres of trade. Thus the import trade from India to Malaya had cotton piece-goods as its staple and other produce of India in lesser quantities such as rice, wheat, butter, sugar, oil, hemp, leather and sometimes slaves. Among the items of import, goods that have an obviously non-Indian origin are Arabian incense, amber, red corals, rhinoceros horns and most of the elephant tusks. The articles exported show an even wider area of distribution. From the Malay peninsula itself and neighbouring regions there was tin, pepper, cloves, tortoise shells, sandal wood, sappan wood, benzoin, gumlac, coconut fibre, white and brown sugar, diamonds, besoar stones, quick silver and elephants. Chinese porcelain and copper were obviously brought from the far east. Even allowing for some exaggeration in Tome Pires's figures of Gujerati merchants in Malacca and of his account of the trade from Coromandel, Malabar and Bengal, there seems no doubt of the economic importance of the trade to societies on the two ends of the Bay of Bengal. Indeed the Bay seems to have formed a wellknit commercial unit exchanging surplus produce from its various regions for which the Indian traders were an invaluable medium. The main participants of this trade were the Muslims of the Gujerat ports, Muslims of Bengal and Golconda and Hindu and Muslim traders settled in Coromandel and Malabar coasts.

The Philippines today has a battalion of soldiers in Vietnam, popularly known as the Philippines Civil Action Group or PHILCAG for short, and a controversy has risen as to whether or not it is justified to have done so. This is the third Philippine expedition to Indo-China. The second was sent in 1858, and the first late in the sixteenth century.

With the exception of Alfonso de Albuquerque in the 16th century, Marquis de Pombal in the 18th and Oliveira Salazar in the 20th, Portugal can hardly boast of any special genius for administration, whether of the colonies or of the mother-country. This lack of administrative acumen is matched by lack of interest in administrative matters among Portuguese chroniclers and historians. While the secular historians concentrated on the heroic deeds of a rather limited era, their Jesuit counterparts concerned themselves with exaggerating the scanty exploits in their evangelical enterprise. The administration was not elaborate and, therefore, the records were scanty. Portugal did not have a budgetary system; no systematic accounts were maintained either for Portugal or for the colonies, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Consequently, one might with justification lament with Professor Charles R. Boxer upon the paucity of material for an administrative history of the Portuguese colonial possessions. Even so, one might study the Portuguese colonial administration in the larger context of interests, policies, and prejudices.

Over recent years some Portuguese politicians and historians have been very concerned to argue, with undoubted sincerity, as Armando Cortesão has argued, that:

‘The Portuguese never had any preconceived notions of race or colour. They always dealt and still do deal with Christian brotherhood towards all peoples, whether they are white, black, khaki or yellow’. and ‘they have always treated indigenes with humanity and, when civilized, as equals amongst equals,’

The expression of this viewpoint has taken a variety of forms, often expressed quite categorically and without any qualification whatsoever, and has been supported by official policy and, academically in particular, by the distinguished Brazilian socio-historian Gilberto Freyre. More recently it has been attacked by Professor Charles Boxer in his Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415–1825 (Clarendon, 1963), where the author has presented a substantial body of entirely reliable historical evidence of actual discrimination against indigenes and mestiços within the Portuguese Empire and Provinces, and has argued that whilst this viewpoint is sincerely held it is substantially incorrect in its extreme and bald form.

The General State Archives in The Hague are gradually becoming famous, even outside Europe, for the wealth of documentary material on Asian history deposited there. Moreover, this institution endeavours to supplement the Company archives with microfilms of documents stored in less obvious places, whether public or private, at home or abroad. Now such documents, written in Dutch and pertaining to subjects which usually fall outside the scope of other groups of archives in such institutions, attract little attention locally and so are insufficiently utilised. It is therefore very gratifying that the General State Archives recently acquired the microfilms of a comprehensive collection of documents deposited in the Badische Landesbiliothek in Karlsruhe in the German Federal Republic. This collection derives from Artus or Arnoud Gijsels, official of the Dutch East Indies Company, and only at the end of the century became known in the Netherlands. Then the German Dr. E. F. Kossmann, Germanic scholar who later settled in the Netherlands, father and grandfather of renowned Dutch scholars, drew up a brief guide to its contents. He published this guide in “De Nederlandsche Spectator” (1888), a now almost forgotten cultural periodical published in the Netherlands. Colonial history was not Kossmann's special line, but the way he summarised this guide demands our respect. Thanks to his article, this collection received the attention both of the editors of the “Bouwstoffen voor de geschiedenis van de Maleise Archipel” (Material for the history of the Malayan Archipelago), P. A. Tiele and J. G. Heeres and of the editors of the journal of Batavia, H. T. Colenbrander, later professor of Colonial History at the University of Leyden. One gets the impression, however, that they did not personally investigate the entire collection in Karlsruhe. Tiele and Heeres mention it only in passing. Colenbrander's interest was directed mainly towards two reports drawn up by the Governor-General Van Diemen in 1636 and 1637. The report of 1636 was also deposited in the General State Archives, and this example differed only on minor details from that of Karlsruhe. But neither the General State Archives nor the Government Archives of Batavia had a copy of the 1637 report. This report, spanning merely the period from 1 January to 27 May 1637, was published by Colenbrander in his series of journals, supplemented by two other documents dating from after 27 May 1637. Van Diemen's journal of his voyage to Amboina was also lacking in The Hague and Batavia, and of it he had manuscript copies made — it was still the pre-technical age —. These copies are now preserved in the General State Archives' collection of accessions.

The value of Antonio de Morga's Sucesos de las Islas has long been recognised. A first-hand account of the early Spanish colonial venture into Asia, it was published in Mexico in 1609 and has since been re-edited on a number of occasions. It attracted the attention of the Hakluyt Society in 1851, although the edition prepared for the Society by H. E. J. Stanley was not published until 1868. Morga's work is based on personal experiences, or on documentation from eye-witnesses of the events described. Moreover, as he tells us himself, survivors from Legazpi's expedition were still alive while he was preparing his book in Manila, and these too he could consult. As a lawyer, it is obvious that he would hardly fail to seek such evidence. The Sucesos is the work of an honest observer, himself a major actor in the drama of his time, a versatile bureaucrat, who knew the workings of the administration from the inside.It is also the first history of the Spanish Philippines to be written by a layman, as opposed to the religious chroniclers. Morga's book was praised, quoted, and plagiarized, by contemporaries or successors. Filipinos have found it a useful account of the state of their native culture upon the coming of the conquistadors; Spaniards have regarded it as a work to admire or condemn, according to their views and the context of their times; some other Europeans, such as Stanley, found it full of lessons and examples.