ABSTRACT
Maritime Southeast Asia is one of those parts of the world destined by geography to be an international marketplace. The period from the late fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, however, affords a picture of exceptionally rapid growth of trade, and of the network of indigenous cities necessary to sustain it. Since this period also offers a variety of internal and external sources, it is the logical starting point for an examination of the nature and function of the Southeast Asian city. In the Mediterranean it was the Crusades which brought a new demand for Eastern luxuries in the West. The cloves of Maluku and the nutmeg of Banda must have been exported over a longer period, but here too the evidence is strong for a very rapid increase in export in the fifteenth century. In the Mediterranean the pattern of building towns on strategic hilltops, clustered behind stone walls, was of great antiquity.
