A Handful of Peppercorns: The Cannons Istanbul Sent to Sumatra

Bölüm metni

The black pepper aboard the envoys' ship — the envoys kept waiting a full year at the palace gate — had rotted away in the hold until only a single bowlful was left. In return for that one bowl of pepper, the Sultan sent master gunners to the far side of the Indian Ocean. Today, in the middle of Sumatra, there stand cannon bearing the Ottoman coat of arms.

In August of fifteen eleven, a fleet of eighteen vessels dropped anchor in the waters of the Strait of Malacca. On the decks stood roughly nine hundred Portuguese and some two hundred Indian soldiers; at their head was the man who read the Indian Ocean like a chessboard, Afonso de Albuquerque. The city facing them was one of the busiest junctions of world trade in that age. In Malacca, cloth merchants from Gujarat, junks carrying silk and porcelain from China, boats bringing rice from Java, and small sailing craft loading cloves and nutmeg from the Moluccas all lay side by side in the same harbour. Observers of the period wrote that dozens of languages were spoken in the city, and that within the crowd people who understood not a word of one another spoke only in the language of the scales and the purse.

Albuquerque's aim was not to trade. His aim was to lock the door that trade passed through. For the Strait of Malacca was the only practical passage between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea: a shallow, current-swept, pirate-ridden waterway that narrowed in places to just a few nautical miles between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. Spice travelled from East to West through this strait. Whoever held the strait held the spice.

The city fell after several weeks of bitter street fighting. Sultan Mahmud Shah abandoned his elephants and his treasury and fled inland, and from there to the islands on the far side of the sea. At the mouth of the harbour the Portuguese raised a thick-walled fortress from material salvaged from the city's ruined stone buildings. The fortress was called A Famosa — the Famous. The guns of the Famous looked out over the harbour, and from that day on every ship entering Malacca had to anchor within their range.

What followed was one of the most far-reaching attempts at control in the history of the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese established a system of passes known as the cartaz. Every vessel wishing to trade in the ocean had to obtain this document from a Portuguese port, call at certain harbours, and declare certain goods in certain places. A ship caught without the pass was confiscated along with its cargo and its crew. On paper this was a customs regime; at sea, it meant that an ocean no one had claimed for centuries was, for the first time, being claimed by a state.

But the lock never quite closed. The fall of Malacca did not end the trade of Muslim merchants; it merely changed its address. Traders who had no wish to unload their goods at a port flying the Portuguese flag turned instead to the small harbours on the Sumatran side of the strait. And one of those harbours, a sultanate at the northern tip, grew swiftly on the wealth that came flowing in: Aceh.

The Sultanate of Aceh, pulled together in the closing years of the fifteenth century by Ali Mughayat Shah, was no more than a small coastal principality. But its geography was perfect. It lay just outside the strait — a natural gateway for any ship wanting to reach the open Indian Ocean without touching Malacca at all. What is more, the foothills behind it were well suited to growing black pepper. By the middle of the sixteenth century Aceh had become one of the world's largest exporters of black pepper, and it was sending that pepper not along Portugal's Cape of Good Hope route, but along the old road: across the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and on to Jeddah. By some reckonings, the quantity of pepper reaching Alexandria by way of the Red Sea in the middle of the century had come to rival the quantity rounding the Cape of Good Hope to reach Lisbon.

The Portuguese, of course, noticed. The coasts of Aceh were blockaded, its ships hunted, and every sail going to or coming from Aceh became a target. And Aceh struck back. In fifteen thirty-seven and again in fifteen forty-seven it sent forces against Malacca; on both occasions it was halted before the walls of the Famous. The problem was not courage. The problem was the absence of heavy guns capable of bringing down thick stone walls — and of men who knew how to work them.

Where was Aceh to find such men? It followed the direction its pepper travelled. Beyond the Red Sea there was, in that age, only one name that came to mind when anyone spoke of gunnery.

To send a letter from Aceh to Istanbul is a undertaking our modern minds can scarcely grasp. The matter is not merely one of distance, but of the rhythm of that distance. From the northern tip of Sumatra to the mouth of the Red Sea, there are more than three thousand nautical miles of open ocean. But you cannot make that journey whenever you please. Trade in the Indian Ocean was bound to the calendar of the monsoon winds; for certain months of the year the wind blew one way, and for certain months it blew the other. Set out in the wrong season and you arrive nowhere; miss the right season and you wait six months. A ship leaving Aceh would catch the northeast monsoon, pass south of Ceylon, reach the coasts of Arabia, and from there make for Aden, enter the Red Sea, call at Jeddah, and put in at Suez. After Suez, the sea came to an end. Cargo and people were loaded onto camels, crossed the desert to Cairo, and from there went down the Nile to Alexandria. From Alexandria a galley or a galleon would carry them across the Mediterranean to Istanbul.

If everything went well, this voyage took months; if a delay, an illness, a storm, or a pirate got in the way, it took more than a year. Which meant that when the sultan of Aceh wrote a letter, he had to wait two years at best for the reply to reach his hands. Two years is more than enough time for a siege to be won and lost, for a ruler to come to the throne and die. This is the real tragedy of sixteenth-century diplomacy: even when both sides genuinely wanted to help one another, the speed of communication was itself an enemy.

Even so, Aceh tried. And not once, but again and again.

From fifteen thirty-nine onward, the throne of Aceh was held by Alauddin Riayat Shah al-Kahhar. His epithet, al-Kahhar, meant the subduer, the one who forces submission, and he was a hard enough ruler to earn it. He annexed the neighbouring principalities to Aceh, built a navy, enlarged his palace. But on the question of the Portuguese, he knew he was not enough on his own.

In the very first years of the fifteen sixties, envoys from Aceh reached Istanbul. Portuguese sources speak of a delegation from Sumatra being received at the Ottoman court in those years. In fact the Ottoman presence in the Indian Ocean goes back much further than that; the Red Sea fleet, Basra, Aden, the shipyard at Suez, the Indian campaigns — all of it was half a century of accumulated effort. There are also accounts of Ottoman gunners, Ottoman weapons, and Ottoman shipwrights filtering one by one into the far corners of the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese traveller Fernão Mendes Pinto writes that Turkish soldiers were present in Sumatran waters; but Pinto's travel account was a book famous for its exaggerations even in its own day, and the figures he gives should be read with caution. For the peoples of the region, the distinction was simple: wherever they came from, these soldiers arriving from the eastern Mediterranean were always given the same name. Rum. In the coastal villages of Sumatra, the Ottomans were known by that name.

And then came the document that still sits in our hands today.

In the Topkapı Palace Archive there is a letter registered under the number E eight thousand and nine. It bears the date the seventh of January, fifteen sixty-six. It is the letter written by Sultan Alauddin of Aceh to Suleiman the Magnificent. The text lay largely silent in the archive until it was published in nineteen sixty-three by the historian Razaulhak Şah.

The language of the letter is not that of a state correspondence between equals, one ruler writing to another. It is the language of someone who has come to the door, writing in self-abasement. The sultan of Aceh describes his own country as a village of the Ottomans, and himself as a servant of the sultan. He tells of his war with the Portuguese, of the desperate straits he is in, of being left alone among his enemies. He says that Muslim pilgrims on their way to the Hajj are being raided by Portuguese ships, and that for this reason help is needed not only for Aceh but for the safety of the pilgrimage route itself. The items he asks for are precise: experienced commanders to teach the art of war, heavy guns that can batter fortress walls, craftsmen who know shipbuilding, and materials for fortifications.

The letter set out. It waited for the monsoon, crossed the ocean, crossed the desert, crossed the Mediterranean.

And when it reached Istanbul, the man it was written to was no longer alive. Suleiman the Magnificent died in September fifteen sixty-six, before the walls of the fortress of Szigetvár, in his tent, with the siege not yet over. The recipient of the pepper-laden ships that had sailed from Sumatra, and of that letter, had passed into history while the journey was still under way. The one who would give the answer was to be his son, Selim the Second, newly seated on the throne.

The story told about what became of the delegation Aceh sent to Istanbul survived not in archive documents but in the memory of the people of Aceh. For centuries it was passed from father to son, and in the end it took the shape of a legend. And legends sometimes tell us something the documents cannot: the weight of an event upon human beings.

The story goes like this. The sultan of Aceh, asking the Ottoman sultan for cannon, does not wish to arrive empty-handed. He loads his country's most precious commodity, black pepper, onto his ships. This is no ordinary gift; it is the whole wealth of Aceh, all of its bargaining power and all of its prestige, made material. A shipload of pepper was a fortune in that age. The delegation sets out and, after a voyage lasting months, arrives in Istanbul. But when they get there, they find no door open to them. The imperial capital is busy with other matters. There is war in the Mediterranean, there is a campaign in Europe, the court is caught up in its own commotion. Very few people know where this place called Sumatra even is, and the troubles of envoys from that place sit at the very bottom of Istanbul's agenda.

The envoys wait.

This is the most poignant part of the legend. They wait, and they wait. Months pass, the seasons turn. The pepper they brought is sold off, a little at a time, first just to keep themselves fed; then it is handed out, then given away as gifts, then some of it rots and some of it simply disappears. When at last the day comes that they are received in the sultan's presence, all that remains of a shipload of treasure is one cupak of pepper. The cupak is a small measure of volume used in the Malay world; an amount you might call a handful.

The envoys offer up that single handful of pepper.

According to the story, the sultan looks not at the smallness of the gift before him, but at the journey behind it. These are people who set out from the other end of the world, from a country whose name he had barely heard, who came all this way, who waited years at his gate, who spent everything they had in the waiting, and who still did not give up on presenting their gift. What they ask for is granted. Cannon are cast, master gunners are assigned, and they are sent to Aceh.

And one of those cannon is given a name in Aceh: Lada Sicupak. That is, "one cupak of pepper." A handful of black pepper.

In telling this story, one thing has to be said plainly: the Ottoman documents we possess make no mention of any such scene. In the Mühimme registers there is nothing about waiting envoys, rotting pepper, or a sultan moved to feeling. What the documents contain is the cold language of the state: request, decision, allocation, appointment. The details of the legend were probably added later, as the memory of the event took shape in Aceh.

But the legend does capture one thing correctly. For Aceh, this really did mean staking everything it had. And for Istanbul, this really was an item at the very bottom of the agenda. That gulf between the weight each side gave the matter is also the key to what would happen next. Because while Aceh waited for the help that would save its life, a far closer and far more searing problem was about to appear in front of Istanbul.

Istanbul did not refuse Aceh's request. On the contrary, on paper it gave an extremely serious response.

By a decree dated the twenty-first of September, fifteen sixty-seven, Kurdoğlu Hızır Reis was appointed to command the fleet that would be sent to Aceh. He was a seaman who had spent his life in the waters of the Red Sea and knew the region. The records in Mühimme Register number seven show the scale of the force being prepared: fifteen galleys and two barks were to be fitted out at the Suez arsenal. A chief gunner and seven master gunners were assigned from the imperial artillery corps. Among the weapons to be loaded were heavy guns of the badaluşka, şayka and hevâyî types; the badaluşka was a long-barrelled gun for battering fortress walls, while the hevâyî was a mortar-type piece that dropped its shot behind the wall on a high arc. In other words, what was being sent was no ornament; it was a siege battery. In addition to these, troops from Egypt, sappers, and materiel for use in a fortress siege were allocated.

The justification for the decision stated that meeting the request was an obligation both of religion and of the traditions of the state. Anyone looking at the document might think the matter was settled. A fleet has been prepared, its commander appointed, its guns loaded, its destination fixed.

But at exactly that moment, Yemen rose in revolt.

The rebellion that began in fifteen sixty-seven in the mountainous interior of Yemen grew quickly. The rebels seized the mountain passes, besieged the Ottoman garrisons, and Sanaa fell. Within a short time the Ottoman presence in Yemen was squeezed into a handful of coastal fortresses. And Yemen was no ordinary province. It was the place that controlled the mouth of the Red Sea, Aden, the entire gateway opening onto the Indian Ocean. If Yemen were lost, the fleet being prepared at Suez would have nowhere left to go.

The priority changed. The fleet bound for Sumatra was turned not toward the direction it was meant to sail, but north and east, toward the coasts of Yemen. The galleys, together with part of the troops and guns meant for Aceh, entered the war in southern Arabia. It took the Ottomans a long and bloody series of operations, over the course of several years, before they could take Yemen back.

We do not know exactly what became of Kurdoğlu Hızır Reis. In the records we have, there is no trace of his setting out for Sumatra after the Yemen campaign. He most likely died during those operations. The man appointed to go to Aceh never saw Aceh.

What reached Sumatra was not the fleet that had been prepared, but a very small fragment broken off from it. The sources speak of two ships arriving in Aceh. Two ships are nothing beside a fleet of fifteen galleys and two barks.

But what those two ships carried should be measured not in tonnage, but in knowledge. Because it was not only cannons that came down from those ships. Masters who knew how to cast cannon came ashore, along with gunsmiths and engineers trained in fortification. And what that means is this: what arrived in Aceh was not a one-time gift, but a repeatable capability. If they give you a cannon, you have a cannon; if that cannon bursts, you have nothing left. But if they teach you how to cast cannon, you have an industry.

Foundries were established in Aceh. Local copper and tin, local labor, and Ottoman knowledge of moulds and alloys all came together. At the northern tip of Sumatra, in a place no European state had reckoned with, heavy siege guns began to be cast. This production did not die with the masters who had brought it; it carried on for generations. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, it is recorded that the Acehnese arsenal held some twelve hundred cannon and around eight hundred swivel guns. That is a figure no other local state in the region came anywhere near.

Istanbul was never able to send the fleet it had promised Aceh. But in place of the fleet it could not send, it sent — without realizing it — something far more lasting.

And Aceh decided to test this new power, for the first time, at its enemy's strongest point.

In the year fifteen sixty-eight, the Acehnese fleet set sail for Malacca.

The numbers given by Portuguese chroniclers are quite striking as to the size of the force they faced. According to the accounts, the Acehnese army numbered fifteen thousand men, and it brought with it some two hundred cannon. And manning those guns was a group the sources point to insistently: around four hundred Ottoman gunners. The Portuguese refer to them in their own records simply as "the Turks." One has to keep in mind that these figures come from enemy sources, and that enemy sources tend to inflate the other side. But the course of the siege shows, at the very least, that the gunnery was conducted with serious professional skill.

The man defending Malacca was Dom Leonis Pereira. The force at his disposal was almost laughably small next to the attackers: roughly fifteen hundred fighting men, and only about two hundred of them Portuguese. The rest had been drawn from Malays, from mixed communities, and from the various peoples living in the city. Against this, Pereira had two advantages. The first was the walls of A Famosa; for half a century they had been steadily strengthened — a European-style fortification, thick and low in profile. The second was politics: the sultan of Johor, who was at least as unsettled by Aceh's rise as the Portuguese were, this time sided with Malacca. The Muslim powers of the strait could not unite against their common enemy.

When the siege began, a cannonade unlike anything it had seen before came down on Malacca's walls. The Acehnese batteries fired at high volume and at regular intervals. This was nothing like the scattered, irregular bombardments of earlier attempts. Then came the assault. The Acehnese had brought some two hundred ladders to set against the walls; that alone shows how carefully the attack had been planned. The ladders went up against the walls, and the soldiers climbed.

And those who climbed never made it over the top. The defenders toppled the ladders and threw the climbers down. The low, thick profile of the walls made it difficult for cannonballs to open a breach. Then Pereira made the riskiest move in the defender's book: he opened the gates and went out. Portuguese and Malay soldiers plunged into the trenches and gun positions the Acehnese had dug. Many men died in the close fighting. As they pulled back, they carried off swords, muskets, and one cannon.

The siege lasted three days. At the end of the third day, the Acehnese army returned to its ships.

Here lies the bitter irony in the story of those guns and those gunners. Aceh spent years asking for help from the other side of the world, spent a fortune, and let its envoys grow old waiting at foreign doors. In the end, it got the knowledge and the weapons it wanted. And in the first great test it took those weapons to, it turned back in under three days against a garrison a tenth its size. Because winning a siege is not only a matter of cannon; it is a matter of supply, of time, of control of the sea, of allies, and of patience. Aceh had the guns, but it did not have command of the strait, and it did not have time.

Malacca never did fall into Aceh's hands. It was attempted twice more in the fifteen seventies, without success. Portugal finally lost Malacca in sixteen forty-one — but not to Aceh. To the Dutch, allied with Johor.

Even so, that slender thread running from Istanbul to Sumatra was never cut. At the Acehnese court, the Ottomans went on being remembered as something more than an ally. The history written in Aceh in the seventeenth century, the Bustan us-Salatin — the Garden of Kings — records this relationship as part of the sultanate's founding story. Aceh's rulers used a language that cast them as bound to a distant caliph. The Ottoman crescent and its emblems worked their way onto Aceh's banners and seals. And that memory returned to the stage once more, three centuries later. When the Netherlands declared war on Aceh in eighteen seventy-three, Aceh knocked on that very same door again. The envoy the Sultan sent, Habib Abdurrahman az-Zahir, travelled to Istanbul and delivered Aceh's request for protection; he presented documents declaring that the country, its people and its ruler surrendered themselves to the Caliph. But the Ottoman Empire of eighteen seventy-three was not the Ottoman Empire of fifteen sixty-seven. It was under heavy pressure on its own borders, hemmed in by the diplomatic objections of the European powers, and sending a fleet to the far side of the Indian Ocean was simply out of the question. The only thing granted was moral support. Az-Zahir returned empty-handed, and in Aceh he took up arms and fought at the front himself.

When the Dutch army captured the palace in Aceh's capital in eighteen seventy-four, among the spoils it found there was an enormous bronze cannon. Four point one five meters long, with a bore of eighteen point five centimeters, weighing five thousand six hundred kilos. The Acehnese called it Lada Sicupak. A handful of black pepper. The cannon was carried off to the Netherlands as a trophy of war, and to this day it still stands there, in the museum of Bronbeek, the old soldiers' home in the city of Arnhem.

And here is the most surprising part of the story. In their study of the Arabic inscriptions on the cannon, the researchers Claude Guillot and Ludvig Kalus concluded that it had most likely been cast not in Istanbul, but in India, in Gujarat. In other words, the object Aceh had kept for centuries as "the cannon Istanbul sent us" had probably never passed through Istanbul at all.

But this does not make the story a lie; it shows us where the story truly lives. What the Ottomans actually sent to Aceh was never a cannon in the first place. Of the fifteen galleys that set out, only two ships reached Sumatra, and what mattered was the knowledge left behind by the craftsmen who stepped ashore from them. What was received in return for a handful of black pepper was not a weapon, but a craft. And the people of Aceh named every cannon that craft produced, regardless of where each one had been cast, after the memory of that door on the other side of the world.

That brings us to the end of today's episode of Neuron History. Until we meet again, in a new story.