Portuguese and Luso-Asian Legacies in Southeast Asia, 1511-2011, vol. 1: The Making of the Luso-Asian World: Intricacies of Engagement

2. Malacca in the Era of Viceroy Linhares (1629-35)

2 MALACCA IN THE ERA OF VICEROY LINHARES (1629–35) Anthony Disney On 14 January 1641, after a protracted siege lasting five and a half months, Portuguese Malacca surrendered to the Dutch. The loss of Malacca, which had been in Portuguese hands since its capture by Albuquerque from Sultan Mahmud 140 years earlier, was a crushing blow to the Portuguese. At the time the greatest loss the Estado da Índia had ever suffered in the East, it proved a setback from which there would never be a full recovery. Effectively, it marked the end of Portugal’s status as a first-rate power in maritime Asia, especially east of Cape Comorin. The story of the final siege of Malacca by the Dutch in 1640–41 is well known and need not detain us here.1 But the build-up towards that climax, particularly in the decade or so preceding it, is less clear. What follows is an investigation into a crucial part of this build-up — the rapidly moving situation at Malacca during the administration of Dom Miguel de Noronha, fourth Conde de Linhares. This viceroy, who held office at Goa from 21 October 1629 to 9 December 1635, was an intelligent and hard-working proconsul, tireless in his efforts to sustain the Estado da Índia. Nevertheless, only five years after his departure, Malacca fell. The questions addressed here are to what extent did Portuguese Malacca cease to be militarily and commercially viable during the course of Linhares’s term — and, insofar as this did happen, how and why did it happen? 48 Malacca in the Era of Viceroy Linhares (1629–35) 49 SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PORTUGUESE MALACCA Seventeenth-century Portuguese Malacca consisted of an inner city surrounded by defensive walls, within which were the citadel and the Augustinian, Dominican and Jesuit churches and establishments clustered on and around St Paul’s hill. Most of the townspeople lived outside the walls in Malay-style thatched houses, particularly to the north of the river. Here were also orchards, gardens and the dusun, or small rural properties on the fringes of the forest. But there was insufficient arable land in Portuguese-controlled territory for the city to feed itself — it was therefore obliged to import rice and other foodstuffs from Java, Siam and elsewhere in peninsular Malaya.2 Malacca’s population under Linhares remained quite cosmopolitan, but the mixture was rather different from what it had been for much of the sixteenth century. Naturally the indigenous Malays formed a substantial majority, but their political influence was limited and they seldom feature in the Portuguese sources. Most remained Muslims, but their religious practice was apparently quite lax. Many were fishermen or seamen, but there were also numerous Malay small traders and craftsmen. There were also the Minangs or Minangkabau, many of whom lived in the area adjoining Malacca to the east. Several thousand of these Minangs had come under Portuguese administration but retained their own tumenggung (an official responsible for law and order), who was usually a Malacca casado (a married man in the reserve army). These people were primarily farmers, especially of betel, but they also brought supplies of tin to Malacca from the interior.3 The various non-Malay, non-Portuguese trading groups that had earlier dominated Malacca’s maritime commerce — the Gujaratis, Klings, Javanese and Chinese — are hardly mentioned in the Portuguese written sources for the Linhares period. In fact, the Gujaratis appear to have left soon after the Portuguese conquest in 1511, and while many Klings and Chinese stayed on and cooperated with the Portuguese, remaining important in Malaccan trade through the first half of the sixteenth century, their numbers gradually dwindled. In Linhares’s time, those who still remained had mostly merged into the dominant Portuguese culture, many becoming Catholic Christians. There were reportedly over 7,000 Asian Christians in Malacca by the early seventeenth century, most being of Chinese or South Indian extraction.4 The politically dominant element in Portuguese Malacca’s population was, of course, the Portuguese themselves. Broadly speaking, there were three major 50 Anthony Disney Portuguese interest groups in the city in this period: the colonial Portuguese, the Portuguese from Portugal and the religious. The colonial Portuguese consisted of Portuguese and Eurasians born in Malacca or elsewhere in maritime Asia, Portuguese immigrants who had effectively become permanent settlers and Lusitanized Asians. These people were sometimes referred to collectively as castiços.The second...