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The Sultans of Acheh (Atjèh, Aceh)

c. 901–1321/c. 1496–1903

The northern tip of Sumatra

Acheh is the most northerly part of Sumatra, and it became the centre of a powerful Muslim sultanate which at times controlled much also of the coastlands of Sumatra to the south. Sustained Islamic activity in the region, brought from western India, certainly dates from the thirteenth century. Marco Polo found a Muslim town Ferlec (Pĕrlak) on the north-eastern coast of Sumatra and along the Malaccan Straits; Ibn Baṭṭūṭa landed at Muslim ports there some forty years later; and the names of various Muslim rulers, for some of whom there are coins extant, are known from c. 1300.

When the sultanate of Acheh was established in the early sixteenth century, it rapidly gained control of much trade with Gujarāt and with China, and in this expansionist phase confronted the Portuguese in Malacca and such Malayan states as Johor and Pĕrlak, with its sultans soliciting and receiving aid from the Ottoman Turks. A three-cornered struggle ensued between the Portuguese, Acheh and Johor, complicated in the seventeenth century by the appearance of the Dutch and English. By then, the sultans of Acheh were dealing substantially with the Dutch over the export trade in tin from Pĕrak, but in the later seventeenth century Acheh declined in power under the nominal rule of a series of female rulers, with the real authority exercised by the great chiefs. Acheh nevertheless remained a strong religious and cultural centre for Indonesian Islam, with such famous scholars as Ḥamza Fanṣūri (flor, in the later sixteenth century) as proponents of an Indian-type Ṣūfī mysticism in Indonesia.

In the nineteenth century, tensions became acute with the Dutch government, by now controlling southern and central Sumatra, largely because of Achenese piracy and slave trading in the waters around northern Sumatra. These led to a lengthy and costly guerilla war extending from 1873 to 1903, by the end of which the Acheh sultanate was swept away and the last claimant to its throne exiled; members of the family still survive, however, in contemporary Indonesia.

Zambaur, 308.

EI² ‘Atjèh’ (Th. W. Juynboll and P. Voorhoeve).

Jan M. Pluvier, A Handbook and Chart of South-East Asian History, Kuala Lumpur 1967, 25–7 (recent period only).

T. Ibrahim Alfian, Mata ugang emas kerajaan-kerajaan di Aceh, Aceh Museum, Aceh 1977.

D. G. E. Hall, A History of South-East Asia, 4th edn, 367–72, 618–22, with a genealogical table at pp. 973–4.

M. C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1300, 2nd edn, London 1993, 32–6, 133–8.