Early history of Gowa and Talloq
From the sixteenth century onward, Gowa and its coastal ally Talloq[a] 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.
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.
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.
[3] 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.
[4][5] Despite limited influence from the Javanese empire of Majapahit on certain coastal kingdoms[6][7] and the introduction of an Indic script in the 15th century,[8] 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.
[23] 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.
[27] 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.
[32] 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.
[33][34] 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".
[36] 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[37]), with a large number of new settlements founded in the increasingly deforested interior of the peninsula.
[38] Increasing rice cultivation allowed the formerly rare delicacy to displace older crops such as sago or Job's tears[38] and become the staple food of South Sulawesi.
[50] 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.
By the 1530s, Garassiq had been reconquered and eventually became the seat of the Gowa court,[61] with the royal citadel of Somba Opu possibly first constructed during Tumapaqrisiq Kallonna's reign.
[66] 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.
[66] 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[67] which occurred in the late 1530s or early 1540s.
[74] Tumapaqrisiq Kallonna's reign was also associated with internal reforms, including the expansion of historical writing and the invention of the first bureaucratic post of sabannaraq or harbormaster.
In order to maintain their commerce in Makassar, in 1561 Tunipalangga signed a pact with Datuk Maharaja Bonang,[l] a leader of Malay, Cham, and Minangkabau merchants.
[96] Tunipalangga's conquest of competing ports and shipbuilding centers in the peninsula, such as Bantaeng,[97] and his economic reforms, such as the standardization of weights and measures—which may have been suggested by the Malay community—also facilitated Gowa-Talloq's strategy to make itself the preeminent entrepot for eastern Indonesian spices and woods.
[108] But concurrently with Tunipalangga's foreign campaigns, La Tenrirawe, the arung (ruler) of Boné, endeavored to expand his own realm across eastern South Sulawesi.
The two polities soon came to compete for the lucrative trading routes off the southern coast of the peninsula, and in 1562 war broke out when La Tenrirawe incited three of the newly acquired vassals of Gowa to ally with Boné.
The two karaengs established alliances with and sent envoys to states and cities across the archipelago, including Johor, Malacca, Pahang, Patani, Banjarmasin, Mataram, Balambangan, and Maluku.
[128] Other internal reforms under Tunijalloq included the expansion of court writing, the introduction of kris-making, and military strengthening such as the deployment of additional cannons in forts.
[126][131][132] Gowa was provoked by this alliance and launched a series of offensives to the east (often with the aid of Luwuq, another Bugis polity[131]), beginning with an attack on Wajoq in 1583 which was repulsed by the Tellumpocco.
[153] Subsequently, Gowa won a series of victories against her neighbors, including Soppéng, Wajoq, and Boné, and became the first power to dominate the South Sulawesi peninsula.
[155] In the same period, the twin kingdoms became a more integral part of an international trading network of mostly Muslim states stretching from the Middle East and India to Indonesia.
[183] William Cummings has asserted that writing, by being perceived as more authoritative and supernaturally potent than oral communication, wrought profound social changes among the Makassar.
[70] Cummings's arguments have been contested by historians such as Caldwell, who argues that authority derived from the spoken word more than the written and that histories from other Makassar areas reject a Gowa-centered view of legitimacy.
[189] Similarly, Ian Caldwell classifies Gowa as a "modern state" marked by "the development of kingship, the codification of law, the rise of a bureaucracy, the imposition of a military draft and taxation, and the emergence of full-time craftsmen.
[191] Cummings concedes that there were moves towards bureaucratization and rationalization of government, but concludes that these were of limited scope and effect—even Gowa's incipient bureaucracy was organized according to patron-client ties—and did not fundamentally change the workings of Makassar society.
