Sixteenth Century Turkish influence in Western Indonesia

Abstract

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. For the peoples of Indonesia and Malaysia, the Raja Rum has figured as one of the great kings of the world since the earliest Muslim literature. Since the sixteenth century this title clearly referred to the Ottoman Sultan, the strongest of Muslim monarchs and heir presumptive to the dignity of the Caliphate. Long before the Ottoman rise, however, Persian and Turkish literature used Rum to designate the Byzantine, and occasionally also the Roman Empires. It is clear that the legendary greatness of this distant kingdom owed something to the lustre of all three imperial occupants of Constantinople.