The Makassar kingdom of Gowa emerged around 1300 CE as one of many agrarian chiefdoms in the Indonesian peninsula of South Sulawesi. From the sixteenth century onward, Gowa and its coastal ally Talloq became the first powers to dominate most of the peninsula, following wide-ranging administrative and military reforms, including the creation of the first bureaucracy in South Sulawesi. The early history of the kingdom has been analyzed as an example of state formation.
Genealogies and archaeological evidence suggest that the Gowa dynasty was founded around 1300 in a marriage between a local woman and a chieftain of the Bajau, a nomadic maritime people. Early Gowa was a largely agrarian polity with no direct access to the coastline, whose growth was supported by a rapid increase in wet Asian rice cultivation. Talloq was founded two centuries later when a prince from Gowa fled to the coast after his defeat in a succession dispute. The coastal location of the new polity allowed it to exploit maritime trade to a greater degree than Gowa.
The early sixteenth century was a turning point in the history of both polities. Tumapaqrisiq Kallonna of Gowa conquered the coastline and forced Talloq to become Gowa's junior ally. His successor, Tunipalangga, enacted a series of reforms intended to strengthen royal authority and dominate commerce in South Sulawesi. Tunipalangga's wars of conquest were facilitated by the adoption of firearms and innovations in local weaponry which allowed Gowa's sphere of influence to reach a territorial extent unprecedented in Sulawesi history, from Minahasa to Selayar. Although the later sixteenth century witnessed setbacks to Gowa's campaign for hegemony in Sulawesi, the kingdom continued to grow in wealth and administrative complexity. The early historical period of the two kingdoms—a periodization introduced by Francis David Bulbeck and Ian Caldwell—ended around 1600 and was followed by the "early modern" period in which Gowa and Talloq converted to Islam, defeated their rivals in South Sulawesi and expanded beyond South Sulawesi to become the most important powers in eastern Indonesia.
The early history of Gowa and Talloq witnessed significant demographic and cultural changes. Verdant forests were cleared to make way for rice paddies. The population may have grown by as much as tenfold between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, while new types of crops, clothes, and furniture were introduced into daily life. The scope of these territorial, administrative, and demographic transformations have led many scholars to conclude that Gowa underwent a transformation from a complex chiefdom to a state society in the sixteenth century, although this is not a unanimously held position.
Background
Four main ethnic groups inhabit the Indonesian peninsula of South Sulawesi: the Mandar on the northwestern coast, the Toraja in the northern mountains, the Bugis in the lowlands and the hills south of the Mandarese and Toraja homelands, and the Makassar throughout the coast and mountains in the south. Each group speaks its own language, which is further subdivided into dialects, and all four languages are members of the South Sulawesi subgroup of the Austronesian language family widely spoken throughout Southeast Asia. By the early thirteenth century, the communities in South Sulawesi formed chiefdoms or small kingdoms based on swidden agriculture, whose boundaries were set by linguistic and dialectal areas.
Despite limited influence from the Javanese empire of Majapahit on certain coastal kingdoms and the introduction of an Indic script in the 15th century, the development of early civilization in South Sulawesi appears to have been, in the words of historian Ian Caldwell, "largely unconnected to foreign technologies and ideas." Like Philippine kingdoms and Polynesian societies, pre-Islamic Gowa and its neighbors were based "on indigenous, 'Austronesian' categories of social and political thought" and can be contrasted with other Indonesian societies with extensive Indian cultural influence.
Historical sources
The most important historical sources for precolonial Makassar are the chronicles or patturioloang of Gowa and Talloq, dated to the sixteenth century onwards. The Gowa Chronicle and the Talloq Chronicle are written primarily to describe the rulers of both communities, but at the same time they contain a general description of the development of Gowa and Talloq, from the origin of the dynasties to their unification and transformation to become the most important powers in eastern Indonesia in the early seventeenth century. Historians of Indonesia have described these chronicles as "sober" and "factual" when compared to babad, their counterpart from Java in western Indonesia. The South Sulawesi chronicles centered around the reigning monarchs, and each monarch's section is arranged thematically and is not necessarily chronological.
There is another genre of Makassar historical writing called lontaraq bilang, translated variously as "royal diaries" or "annals". These annals are dated according to both Islamic and Christian calendars, with the names of the months derived from Portuguese, making it likely that the tradition of writing annals was itself borrowed from the Europeans. Manuscripts in this genre are arranged chronologically, listing important events such as births and deaths of aristocrats, wars, construction projects, the arrival of foreign delegations, natural disasters, and peculiar events such as eclipses and the passing of comets. The tradition of writing annals seems to have been firmly established by the 1630s; entries from earlier period were limited in terms of frequency and topics.
There are hardly any external records on South Sulawesi prior to the early 16th century, save for sporadic information such as South Sulawesi place names listed in the 14th-century Javanese poem Nagarakretagama. Tomé Pires's account from early 1500 provided a rather confusing description of a "big country with many islands" that he calls "Macaçar". Other reports from the 16th and 17th century were limited in their geographical scope. Only after the rise of Gowa and Talloq in the early 17th century did documentation by external sources regarding the region became more coherent and detailed.
Origin of Gowa and Talloq
Major dynasties in South Sulawesi associate their origins with the tumanurung, a race of divine white-blooded beings who appeared mysteriously to marry mortal lords and rule over mankind. Gowa is no exception. The Gowa Chronicle specifies that the parents of the first karaeng (ruler) of Gowa were the stranger king Karaeng Bayo and a female tumanurung who descended to the Kale Gowa area upon the request of the local chiefs. The polity of Gowa was born when the chieftains known as the Bate Salapang (lit. Nine Banners) swore allegiance to Karaeng Bayo and the tumanurung in return for their recognition of the Bate Salapang's traditional rights.
The tumanurung legend is generally viewed by archaeologists (such as Francis David Bulbeck) as a mythologized interpretation of a historical event, the marriage of a Bajau potentate with a local aristocratic woman whose descendants then became the royal dynasty of Gowa. At the time, the Bajau, a nomadic maritime people, may have been a key trading community who transported goods from the Sulu Sea to South Sulawesi. Estimates based on dynastic genealogies suggest that the founding of the Gowa polity occurred around 1300. This is supported by archaeological evidence suggesting the emergence of a powerful elite in the Kale Gowa area around this time, including a large number of foreign ceramic imports.
The founding of Gowa, circa 1300, was part of a dramatic shift in South Sulawesi society which ushered in what Bulbeck and Caldwell (2000) refer to as the "Early Historical Period". Commerce with the rest of the archipelago increased throughout the peninsula, raising demand for South Sulawesi rice and encouraging political centralization and intensification of rice agriculture. Population densities rose rapidly as slash-and-burn agriculture was replaced by intensive wet rice cultivation dependent on the newly introduced stock-handle plow (drawn by buffaloes), with a large number of new settlements founded in the increasingly deforested interior of the peninsula. Increasing rice cultivation allowed the formerly rare delicacy to displace older crops such as sago or Job's tears and become the staple food of South Sulawesi. These changes were accompanied by the rise of new polities based on wet rice agriculture in the interior, such as the Bugis polities of Boné and Wajoq. Early Gowa, too, was an interior agricultural chiefdom centered on rice cultivation.
Makassar sources recount that Talloq was founded as an offshoot of the Gowa dynasty at the end of the 15th century. During a succession dispute between the two sons of the sixth karaeng of Gowa, Batara Gowa and Karaeng Loe ri Sero, the former seized his brother's lands and, according to the Talloq Chronicle, Karaeng Loe left for 'Jawa', perhaps referring to the north coast of Java or to Malay commercial communities in coastal Sulawesi or Borneo. This incident may have been part of a wider process in which the karaeng of Gowa's direct authority expanded to the detriment of his independent or autonomous neighbors. Upon his return, Karaeng Loe found that some of his nobles had remained loyal to him. With these followers he spent some time in a temporary seat to the east, then sailed to the mouth of the Talloq River where uninhabited forest was cleared and the new polity of Talloq was established. The broad outlines of the story are archaeologically supported by a marked increase in ceramics near the mouth of the Talloq around 1500.
Talloq was a maritime state from its beginnings, capitalizing on the rising quantity of trade in the region and a corresponding coastal population increase. Portuguese accounts suggest the existence of a Malay community in western South Sulawesi from around 1490, while one Malay source claims that a sayyid (descendant of Muhammad) arrived in South Sulawesi as early as 1452. Karaeng Loe's son and successor, Tunilabu ri Suriwa, according to the Talloq Chronicle, "went over to Melaka, then straight eastwards to Banda. For three years he journeyed, then returned." Tunilabu's wives, including a Javanese woman from Surabaya, were also affiliated with mercantile communities. The third Karaeng Talloq, Tunipasuruq, again voyaged to Melaka and lent money in Johor. Talloq's commercial heritage would contribute to the city of Makassar's future emergence as a great center of trade.
Gowa and Talloq from 1511 to 1565
Reign of Tumapaqrisiq Kallonna (c. 1511–1546)
Older historiography, such as the work of Christian Pelras in 1977, has generally taken the view that the kingdom of Siang dominated western South Sulawesi prior to the emergence of Gowa as a major power. This interpretation points to a 1544 account by the Portuguese merchant António de Paiva which seems to imply that Gowa was a vassal of Siang: "I arrived in the aforesaid port, a large city called Gowa, which formerly had belonged to a vassal of the king of Siang but had been taken from him." However, Gowa's heartland is interior farmland, not a port. Bulbeck interprets Paiva's "Gowa" as referring to the coastal port of Garassiq, then contested between Siang and Gowa. Recent archaeological work also yields little evidence of a powerful Siang. The more modern theory suggests that there was no single overlord across western South Sulawesi until the rise of Gowa.
This status quo was broken by Tumapaqrisiq Kallonna (r. c. 1511–1546), son of Batara Gowa, who is the first karaeng described in detail by the Gowa Chronicle. Since the days of Batara Gowa, Gowa had had ambitions to annex the affluent port-polity of Garassiq, site of the modern city of Makassar, but it was not until the era of Tumapaqrisiq Kallonna that this was accomplished. Gowa's conquest of Garassiq occurred possibly as early as 1511 and provided the hitherto landlocked polity with much greater access to maritime commerce. Besides Garassiq, the Gowa Chronicle credits Tumapaqrisiq Kallonna with conquering, making vassals of, or levying indemnities from thirteen other Makassar states. Most of his conquests appear to have been limited to the southwestern, ethnically Makassar areas of the peninsula. Gowa may have encountered setbacks from around 1520 to 1540, such as the loss of the upper Talloq River and Garassiq, but these were temporary. By the 1530s, Garassiq had been reconquered and eventually became the seat of the Gowa court, with the royal citadel of Somba Opu possibly first constructed during Tumapaqrisiq Kallonna's reign. Trade in Gowa expanded substantially, partly due to the decline of Majapahit in Java during the fifteenth century and the fall of Malacca to the Portuguese in 1511. The former event shifted the main source of trade in South Sulawesi from Java to western Indonesia and the Malay peninsula, and the latter caused the predominantly Muslim traders from those regions to avoid Malacca and seek other ports such as Gowa.
The most celebrated of Tumapaqrisiq Kallonna's accomplishments may be his war against Talloq and its allies, a crucial turning point in the history of both kingdoms which occurred in the late 1530s or early 1540s. The cause of war between Gowa and Talloq was not explicitly recorded, but a later text in the Gowa Chronicle hinted that war broke out after a Gowa prince abducted a Talloq princess. Tunipasuruq of Talloq allied with the rulers of two nearby polities, Polombangkeng and Maros, to attack his cousin Tumapaqrisiq Kallonna. Under the leadership of Tumapaqrisiq Kallonna and his two sons, Gowa routed Talloq and its allies in the war. As the victor, Tumapaqrisiq Kallonna was then invited to Talloq where oaths were sworn making Talloq a favored junior ally of Gowa. "The ruler of Gowa was thus publicly acknowledged as the dominant figure in the Makassarese heartlands." This alliance was cemented by the large number of Talloq royal women who married Gowa kings. Similar arrangements with Maros and, to a lesser extent, Polombangkeng ensured that the new kingdom of Gowa would command both the commercial clout of Talloq and the manpower and agricultural resources of not only Gowa proper, but Maros and Polombangkeng as well.