It’s the sixteenth century. A powerful Ottoman sultan hears of the distress of a far distant co-religionist, assailed by the Christians and short of artillery, and dispatches a great gun to smite this ruler’s enemies. It sounded an intriguing tale; and the truth was actually not far off it.
The story begins with the Portuguese conquest of Malacca in 1511, and the expansion of the Ottomans into the Red Sea region a decade later. Aceh, a pepper port sultanate on the northern tip of Sumatra led resistance against the Portuguese at Malacca, and successfully repelled an early invasion attempt by ’the Franks’ as they called them; a feat not many polities in the Indian Ocean could boast of in this era. Funded by its pepper and gold trade profits, Aceh rose as a military power, circumventing the Portuguese blockade. It had a number of cracks at Malacca, but all were unsuccessful, defeated by the strength of the walls and the power of its guns.
Successive sultans sought modern firepower and gun-founding technology throughout the Muslim world, firstly from Gujerat and Kerala in India and then across to the Ottomans in Egypt. Finally, an embassy in the mid-sixteenth century took a shipload of pepper and arrived at the court in Constantinople with hopes of acquiring some wall-smashing cannon. But no-one there had heard of Aceh, the Turks at the time being much more focused on the Mediterranean theatre, and the envoys were stuck for a year or so without getting even to see the sultan. Finally, so the legend goes, they had an audience with the new sultan, Selim II, but by now the pepper of their tribute had dwindled–through expenses–to just a single cup; lada secupak in Malay, by which the cannon became known. And so, the sultan is assumed to have sent out this gun to Aceh in exchange for just a single cup of pepper.
This then is one tale that is attached to a fairly impressive 22 caliber 5600 kilogram bronze smoothbore muzzle-loaded barrel 4.15 metres long with a bore of 18.5 centimeters (around 7.5 inch) that now sits in the Bronbeek Museum at Arnhem, in the Netherlands. Scholar Dr Crucq considered the cannon a 100 pounder, and similar vintage ordnance can be seen in the Museu Militar, Lisbon and the Askeri Musesi, Istanbul. The barrel itself has little taper and some rather simple Islamic-style adornments. The base ring is fairly flat and the pomiglion a plain button. The trunnions are workmanlike, the chace quite short and the muzzle moulding heavy though without swell. It is an attractive though unspectacular piece. And very big.
The Acehnese were inveterate fighters, taking on the Portuguese until Malacca fell to the Dutch in 1641, on whom they then turned their anger. A Dutch attempt to overcome continued resistance began in 1873 and went on into the 20th century. They rose against the Japanese occupation in WWII and upon independence in 1949, they continued an insurgency against the Jakarta central government until peace was eventually signed in 2004. Five hundred years of war!
It was during the Dutch assault in 1873 that a number of impressive but obsolete artillery pieces at capital Banda Aceh–including lada secupak–were captured by the Dutch and taken as war spoils to the Netherlands. Supposedly slaves had been chained to it as the focal point of the local Aceh slave market. It’s difficult to say whether it was ever fired in anger. Any gunner would need to have a great deal of confidence in its distant manufacturer to light a full charge and await the result on such a monstrous weapon, but it certainly would have looked impressive standing in front of the palace. Which was probably more important to the sultan than its operation anyway.
A Malay inscription on the barrel suggests the weapon was donated during the reign of Aceh’s greatest sultan, Iskandar Muda (reigned 1607-1636) giving the piece a Turkish provenance, but there is no record of such a transfer from Ottoman sources. An Arabic inscription elsewhere on the barrel studied by French scholars Claude Guillot and Ludwig Kalus provides a different origin.
By their reckoning, the cannon was foundered in Muslim Gujerat, India for a ‘very great khan’ known as Chingiz Khan (not that Khan) who took the capital Ahmedabad in 1567 and ruled briefly before being deposed the next year. Gujerat was a wealthy state built on maritime trade, and is known to have traded with Aceh, and so perhaps the real story is that this great gun was bought for a load of pepper, but made in India, not Turkey. One large cannon taken in the 1511 Portuguese capture of Malacca had been made in Calicut, India, and Babur, invading India in 1525 did so with an arsenal of cannon, culverins, swivel guns and muskets based on Ottoman designs and tactics so even though made in India, the barrel now at Bronbeek likely has considerable Turkish heritage.
Whether the Pepper piece is from the Ottomans or India, Indonesians, and particularly the Acehnese even today consider it a signifier of the strong historic links with Islamic Turkey, and no doubt, they would like this historic and well-travelled weapon back.
For more information on the museum see www.bronbeek.nl/museum
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