[Peter Hudson]

Ottoman expansion and wars with the Portuguese now encouraged other Muslim Indian Ocean states to seek alliances with the Ottomans. The ruler of Ahmednagar in 1561 communicated a proposal for a joint campaign against the Portuguese stronghold of Chaul in India, and while the sultan of Aceh in Sumatra, Alauddin Riayat Syah (r. c. 1537–1571), also sent an embassy requesting Ottoman aid against the Portuguese in 1562, marking a break in the previous Acehnese policy of friendly relations with the Portuguese. This is the first Southeast Asian embassy that is recorded in the Ottoman sources, and would initiate a longstanding relationship between the Ottomans and the Acehnese—although one in which, as on this occasion, Acehnese hopes were usually to some degree disappointed. At this juncture, the Ottomans were trying again to negotiate a trade agreement with the Portuguese, which they did not wish to jeopardize; despite a more pacific Ottoman policy toward the Portuguese, ultimately the latter rejected the overtures. In the end the Acehnese were sent not the munitions they requested but ten cannon experts to assist the Acehnese in casting cannons. Ottoman cannons and cannonry enjoyed a great reputation throughout the Indian Ocean region. In addition, an Ottoman official, Lutfi, was dispatched to Aceh. Casale attributes a newly active interventionist policy in the Indian Ocean to Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, who was Grand Vizier between 1564 and 1579, but in fact, the dispatch of Lutfi suggests this probably preceded Sokolllu’s appointment, and may reflect Ottoman frustration that attempts to negotiate a trade deal with the Portuguese had yet again failed.

Lutfi returned to Istanbul in 1566, accompanied by an Acehnese ambassador, and bearing a document that is one of the most important and problematic Ottoman sources on the Indian Ocean in the 16th century. Written in Ottoman Turkish and addressed to Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520–1566), this letter appears to be both a request for aid from the sultan of Aceh and a description of Lutfi’s own wanderings, as well as offering an outline of the current political situation in the Indian Ocean. It thus appears likely that Lutfi or another Ottoman official had a hand in composing it, while at the same time it almost certainly does to some degree represent the position of the Acehnese sultan, whom we know from other sources was seeking Ottoman aid at this time. The letter also claims that in the Maldives, Ceylon, and Calicut, the Ottoman sultan’s name was acknowledged in the khutba or sermon at prayers, a traditional symbol of the recognition of suzerainty, and asserts the willingness of the Acehnese sultan to do the same. The implications of this were both commercial and political. In the medieval Indian Ocean world, khutba networks bound together disparate mercantile communities, while the mentioning of the Ottoman sultan’s name could also signify recognition of Ottoman claims to be universal Caliphs. However, the letter goes further, and the Alauddin Riayat Syah purportedly asks to be considered not “an independent ruler . . . but in no way different from the governors of Egypt and Yemen, or the beys of Jiddah and Aden,” in return for the supply of munitions. The genuineness of this offer for the voluntary incorporation of Aceh into the Ottoman Empire has been met with some skepticism by scholars, who have suggested it may represent an elaboration by Lutfi, but in 19th-century Aceh, a memory of the sultanate as an Ottoman province or dependency still remained alive, suggesting it may have some basis.

The letter brought by Lutfi met an enthusiastic response in Istanbul, and Sokollu Mehmed Pasha authorized the equipping of a major naval expedition to Aceh; however, a major rebellion in Yemen in 1567 forced the expedition to be aborted to deal with the threat there. A much smaller Ottoman expeditionary force reached Aceh the following year, and continuing Ottoman interest in the Indian Ocean is suggested by the plan to build a Suez canal in 1568 to link the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, aimed in particular at facilitating the passage of the navy, although the canal was never actually built. A further expedition against Hormuz in 1570 was planned but never executed; similarly, in the 1570s, campaigns against Bahrain were considered but never undertaken. Meanwhile, the Portuguese attempted to disrupt Acehnese shipping heading for the Red Sea, but in the wake of the defeat at Lepanto in 1571 and the commencement of war with Iran in 1578, Ottoman activities in the Indian Ocean started to tail off. The last major expeditions were launched by the corsair Mir Ali Beg, who attacked Portuguese Muscat in 1581, and East Africa in 1586 and 1589, which seems to have aimed to remove the Portuguese from their strongholds there. Local Muslim rulers in Mogadishu and other East African towns pledged their allegiance to the Ottomans, but the final expedition ended in disaster at Mombasa, with Mir Ali’s capture by the Portuguese.

By this point, however, Ottoman–Portuguese rivalry was becoming irrelevant. Portugal itself was subsumed into the Hapsburg monarchy, and the Estado da Índia abandoned its attempts to enforce a monopoly, probably in response to the fact it was simply ineffective: it has been argued that the volume of Acehnese pepper reaching Jeddah by the end of the 16th century was greater than that taken by the Portuguese to Lisbon via the Cape. Furthermore, the age of Ottoman expansion was now at an end, with the Ottomans preoccupied with war with the Safavids (1578–1590), Austria (1593–1606), and widespread popular revolt in Anatolia. Much of the province of Habeş beyond the Red Sea littoral was lost to the Ethiopians in 1579, while Ottoman control of Yemen, always contested and fragile, was challenged by further revolts from 1597, resulting in the abandonment of the province in 1634. Thus by the end of the 16th century, the Ottomans were on the retreat in their two main Indian Ocean littoral provinces, and they abandoned Lahsa in eastern Arabia in the mid-17th century. Similarly, the Portuguese were kicked out of their foothold in the Middle East, the island of Hormuz, by the Safavids in 1622, and lost Muscat in 1650.

17th- and 18th-Century Connections
Ottoman involvement with the Indian Ocean world in the 17th and 18th centuries therefore has a very different character to that of the 16th century. Although occasional embassies with Mughal India were exchanged, there was very little diplomatic or military engagement with the broader region. Elsewhere, it was more the memory of earlier Ottoman involvement that proved enduringly influential. On the small sultanate of Faza in the Lamu archipelago off East Africa, a family named “al-Stambuli” (of Istanbul), claiming Turkish descent, seem to have seized power in the 16th century and remained in power until 1893. On the other side of the Indian Ocean, the Malay chronicle of the Acehnese ruler Iskandar Muda (r. 1607–1636) commemorates the visit of Ottoman ambassadors to Aceh, this seems to be a recollection of the 16th-century relationship rather than a reality. Nonetheless, Malay literature of the 17th century frequently recalls the Ottoman presence in the region, and various Malay rulers claimed descent from the Raja Rum, or Ottoman sultan.The prestige of Ottoman cannon and their associated cannon founders also played a great role in the Malay admiration for things Ottoman. This cultural influence continued to be one way in which the Ottomans continued to exert influence, as were commercial and religious links, which if anything seem to have grown stronger during this period, as far as our admittedly scanty evidence can tell us.

There is also evidence for a diaspora of Ottoman subjects across the Indian Ocean world, comprising military experts (especially cannon founders), merchants, and religious scholars. Some of this can be traced to earlier times: by the early 16th century, as noted above, Ottoman subjects played a major role in the Gujarati military, as well as elsewhere in India. In the 16th century, Ottoman military experts are attested in Aceh as well as Siam and Burma, where they were employed as mercenaries. This process of hiring Ottoman mercenaries continued irrespective of the lack of official Ottoman engagement at a state level, and in the late 17th century, we have an Ottoman subject, from Bursa, who is attested as governor of Bangkok, as well as a governor in Java who is described as “Turkish.” Ottoman merchants continued to play an important role in trade with Southeast Asia and India, and merchants from Constantinople are mentioned as far away as Banten in Java at the beginning of the 17th century, as well as in major emporia such as Aceh and Arakan. Dutch records from the early 17th century reveal a continuing import of a wide range of spices and luxuries via the Red Sea into the Ottoman lands. The Ottomans exported carpets, horses, and of course military equipment. One merchant at the end of the 17th century who is unusually well attested gives us a sense of the wide reach of commercial interests individuals could command: an Ottoman subject of Armenian descent from Aleppo, he made his fortune importing goods from the Red Sea into Ethiopia and sought to branch out into trade with Java, in which context there are copious records of him in the Dutch East India Company (VOC) archives.

Scholars from the Ottoman lands play a part in spreading Islam in the region. In Aceh, a certain Dawud al-Rumi, probably a descendant of one of the Ottoman soldiers, was an important figure in the development of Sufism. This religious connection was to prove particularly important, as from the 17th century onward increasing numbers of Southeast Asian scholars studied in Mecca and Medina; although there doubtless were earlier ones, they are poorly attested, whereas the 17th-century scholars who studied in Ottoman Hijaz and occasionally even traveled to Istanbul comprise some of the most important names in Southeast Asian ulama, such as Yusuf al-Makassari and ‘Abd al-Ra’uf al-Singkili. Particularly important was their relationship with the Medina-based Kurdish scholar and Sufi Ibrahim al-Kurani (1616–1690), who wrote an Arabic tract at the behest of his “Jawi” students to explain his interpretation of the influential ideas of the 13th-century Sufi Ibn ‘Arabi. In the 19th century, scholars from Patani on the Malay peninsula and Banten comprised particularly important elements of the “Jawi” diaspora in the Hijaz. While scholars from other parts of the Indian Ocean world of course also traveled to the holy cities and studied there, they do not seem to have had such a transformative influence as the Jawi migrants did on Southeast Asian Islam.

The Ottomans are largely absent from the 18th-century Indian Ocean, at least according to our current state of research. Yet they still featured on the political landscape, both as leaders of the umma and through the activities of the diaspora. As late as the 1750s, a sultan in the Philippines attempted to contact Istanbul seeking aid against the Spanish, while Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore in South India, dispatched an embassy to Constantinople in 1785. An Ottoman subject, Seh Ibrahim, purporting to be acting on the authority of the Ottoman sultan, played an important role in negotiations between the VOC and the Javanese sultan Mangkubumi in the 1750s, while the Javanese prince Dipanagara (1785–1855) adopted an Ottoman-style title and reorganized his army along Ottoman lines.

The Ottoman Sword most likely to have similar aspects as the Zanzibari Nimcha is as below The Pallash. The Hilt is very similar and has quillons almost the same etc etc... The Ottomans were there in the Indian Ocean from the 16th C and the design flow could easily have followed that situation. The paragraphs above clearly show Ottoman equipment including Cannons being supplied to neighbouring countries by sea routes well established in that period. Copying what was a shipbourne sword style would be a very plausible step. See the picture on my next post please.
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Peter Hudson