*The Malacca Sultanate 
; BY 
The Hon'ble R. J. Wilkinson. 
Alone among Malayan townships Malacca may claim to be 
regarded as ancient and sedate. Singapore is no older than the 
lifetime of a man, and Ipoh has won its notoriety within the 
memory of a boy; while Malacca is historic. Her centuries are 
few, but they are full of achievement, and there is very little local 
glory in which she does not share. By the Portuguese conquerors 
she was named la famosa, the Renowned;” she is linked with the 
memory of Camoens, Albuquerque and St Francis Xavier, and 
stands for whatever is me lieval and romantic in a country that is 
lacking sadly in veneration and romance. 
But there have been many Malaceas; and the oldest of all— 
that of six centuries ago—was a petty village of Sea-Sakai or Orang 
Laut, a fishing-hamlet of no fame and.no importance. A humble 
beginning, perhaps, for so great a name; yet there are times when 
it is well to be obscure and when meekness may inherit the 
earth. The third quarter of the fourteenth century was one of 
these occasions. The greatest local power of that day, the Javanese 
empire of Majapahit, decide! suddenly to play a leading part in 
-history and to take a higit place among the conquering nations of 
the world. It sent out its fleets, swept down on the thousand- 
yew-old Malay kingdom of Palembang, and overthrew it utterly. 
It destroye:| Palembang’s daughter—the town of Singapore—with 
a massacre so cruel that for centuries afterwards the memory of 
that colony’s awful fate was enough to deter any Malay from 
settling on the island. It broke the rising power of Pasai, the first 
seedling of a Muhamadanism which was destined at a later date 
to overthrow Majapahit itself. It harried Langkasuka (Ligor), 
and left that ancient Indo-Chinese kingdom—older even than 
Palembang itself—to fall an easy prey te the advancing armies of 
Siam. The wars of 1370 to 1380 A. D. effaced all that was then 
ancient and historic in Malaya. But, as for Malacca, what was 
there in a street of shanties and a fleet of dug-outs to attract the 
conquering arms of Majapahit ? 
So Malacca was spared to become a refuge and a shelter for 
the homeless people of the stricken towns, men of MHinduized 
Singapore and Palembang, Moslems from Pasai and Buddhists from 
the North. The little aboriginal fishing-village of 1370 A. D. had 
become a cosmopolitan trading-port in 1403 when it figures for the 
*Reprinted from the ‘Singapore Diocesan Magazine’, August 1911, pp. 7— 
11, by kind permission of the Author, and of the Editor, the Rey. Frank G. 
Swindell. 
Jour. Straits Branch R. A. Soc., No. 61, 1912. 
