ABSTRACT
By 1365 Majapahit claimed as a dependency Tumasik, “the Sea Town”, or, to use its more famous Indian name, Singapore, “city of the Singhs or lions”; but in a few years that mediaeval haunt of pirates, along with the Malay peninsula, fell under the domination of Siam. It was the murder of Siam’s governor of Singapore that drove its Malay king, the Palembang consort of a Majapahit princess, to flee upcountry, where about 1403 he founded Malacca. The legend goes that the site was shown to him by Malay sea-gipsies whose ancestors had served his own as fishermen and pirates in Palembang waters, but it looks as if the Parameswara, or Prince Consort, as the founder of Malacca termed himself in deference to his high-born wife, deliberately chose Malacca as being far enough south not to be overwhelmed by Siam and yet so situated that the port might hope to attract from India, from the east, and from the archipelago the trade that had formerly been enjoyed by Kedah when a part of Sri Vijaya. Kedah, Tomé Pires records in 1512, claimed Malacca, Perak, Manjong, Selangor and Bernam, all of them prized for their tin. Yet Kedah was not only subject to Siam, but apparently part of the little Muslim port-kingdom of Pasai (in modern Acheh), whose missionaries carried Islam inland as far as Trengganu, to judge from a stone there, inscribed in 1326 or 1386 with the first known specimen of Malayo-Arabic script. There is a Megat Kedah mentioned in the chronicles of Pasai, and there is a Pasai grave-stone of 1380 which has been deciphered to refer to a princess of a family that ruled Pasai and Kedah. And the fact that Pasai had a footing in northern Malaya may have influenced Malacca’s first ruler to marry a Pasai princess. Whether or not the Pasai house had by inter-marriage the blood of the Sailendras who ruled Palembang and Kedah and Acheh is unknown. As early as 1406, according to the Chinese, the Parameswara of Malacca had already claimed the throne of Palembang, and folk-lore has always associated the origin of the Malacca dynasty with Palembang. The second ruler of Malacca assumed the Sailendras’ ancient title of Maharaja, and it is to this ruler that the constitution of Malacca is ascribed. That constitution, so far from being based on any Muslim pattern, embodies the ancient Hindu conception of a kingdom as an image of the heavenly world of stars and gods, a conception current in Fou-nan (p. 29) and borrowed probably from Fou-nan by Sri Vijaya. In the ninth century Java was divided into 28 provinces corresponding in number to the houses of the moon, with four chief ministers corresponding to the four cardinal points, and a king, all together making up the number of the 33 gods on Mount Meru, the Hindu Olympus over which Indra presided. Pegu, in the fourteenth century, had 32 governors and a king. Malacca, even as a Muslim Sultanate, had, in addition to the ruler, four great, eight lesser, 16 small and 32 inferior chiefs. From Malacca, Perak and some other modern states have inherited the same constitution.
