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Sultan Mahmud Shah

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Sultan Mahmud Shah

Sultan Mahmud Syah II was the ruler of Johor who was murdered in 1699, an act of regicide that severed a line of sovereignty stretching back through the Melaka sultanate and, in traditional genealogical claims, to Srivijaya. His death, committed by a court noble with the approval of much of the Johor ruling elite, ended a childless line and precipitated a reconfiguration of political authority across the southern Melaka Strait that shaped the region’s history for centuries. The event has been recounted in a variety of texts, from traditional hikayat to comic books and films, each iteration adding new elements and explanations that reflect the concerns of the society in which it was written [1, pp. 1–2].

Life and Reign

Sultan Mahmud Syah II was the sole heir of Sultan Ibrahim of Johor, who died in February 1685, leaving his son too young to rule [2, pp. 28–29]. The regency was initially administered by the Dato’ Paduka Raja, the Queen-Mother’s brother, who died in 1688, after which the Bendahara Sri Maharaja Tun Habib Abdul Majid assumed the regency and the court relocated from Riau to the older capital at Makam Tauhid [2, pp. 28–29]. The death of the Bendahara in 1697 allowed the young sultan, approximately seventeen years old at the time, to assume power over Johor [1, p. 5].

The results were, by the accounts of European observers, disastrous. VOC reports described the young sultan as ‘ungoverned’ and in possession of a ‘strange humour’, concluding that he was one ‘who occupies himself mainly with all sorts of mean pleasures and indecent behaviour’ [1, p. 5]. Alexander Hamilton, a Scottish sea captain who visited Johor in 1695, estimated the sultan to be twenty years old at the time and described him as ‘viciously inclined… corrupted by adulation and flagitious company that… became intolerable’ [1, p. 5]. Hamilton recounted an episode in which the sultan, having received a pair of screw-barrelled pistols as a gift, tested them on a passer-by in the street, shooting him through the shoulder [1, p. 5]. Hamilton further reported that the sultan ‘was a great sodomite, and had taken many of the orang kaya or nobles’ sons by force into his palace for that abominable service’ [1, p. 5].

The Malay court’s own defence, preserved in the unpublished Hikayat Johor, attributed the sultan’s cruelty to lunacy, stating that ‘he was under the influence of the moon’ [2, p. 29]. This explanation allowed the court to account for his behaviour without entirely absolving him, a strategy that would recur in later traditional texts.

The Murder and Its Aftermath

The murder took place in August 1699 at Kota Tinggi [2, p. 29]. The closest account of the event was related second-hand by a Muslim trader who arrived in Melaka in October 1699 and informed VOC authorities that Sultan Mahmud had been killed with the approval of most of the Orang Kaya [1, p. 7]. According to this report, the sultan was riding through the market on the shoulders of a servant when one of the Orang Kaya, with the assistance of thirty to forty armed men, attacked him. After initially being stabbed, the other men fell upon the sultan and stabbed him to death. His body was then dragged naked to the Bendahara’s residence, where it lay exposed until late afternoon, after which it was wrapped in cloth and buried with little ceremony [1, p. 7].

The contemporary Malay court diary, the Peringatan Sejarah Negeri Johor, records the event in a single clause: ‘Sultan Mahmud died, as he was killed at Kota Tinggi in the state of Makam Tauhid and the rule of Sultan Abdul Jalil Shah ibni Datuk Bendahara began’ [1, p. 7]. No description of how the murder took place, or of its motivations, is provided in this text.

The Bendahara, Abdul Jalil, succeeded the sultan ex-officio on 3 September 1699, not by blood relationship but by the constitutional custom that the Bendahara takes the throne when the ruling house dies out [2, pp. 29–30]. Because Sultan Mahmud was childless, this succession marked the end of a direct line of sovereignty that had been traced, in traditional genealogical claims, from Johor back through Melaka to Srivijaya [1, p. 2]. In its aftermath, the rulers of Johor had to contend with shifting loyalties and new migrant groups—particularly Minangkabau and Bugis—in eastern Sumatra and the Riau Islands, resulting in changes in cultures, societies, and political leadership that still influence the region today [1, p. 2].

The violence surrounding the sultan’s death was not an isolated incident. VOC accounts noted that Sultan Mahmud’s father, Ibrahim, had been poisoned in 1685, with three of his wives as the main suspects, all subsequently killed [1, p. 7]. In 1688, on the orders of the Bendahara, the Paduka Raja and other members of his family had been executed [1, p. 7]. The Peringatan Sejarah Negeri Johor records that Sultan Mahmud himself had ordered the capture and killing of two children during a military expedition [1, p. 7]. Such violent deaths and intrigue were, as Barnard observes, common in the Johor court, and perhaps most Malay courts, in the late seventeenth century [1, p. 8].

The Jackfruit Motif and Traditional Accounts

It was not until the nineteenth century, when the events of 1699 had entered the realm of folktales, that a more elaborate explanation of the murder took shape. Among the texts collected by European scholars during this period was the Hikayat Siak, a variant of the Sulalat al-Salatin that traces the origins of the eastern Sumatran polity of Siak through Johor and uses the death of Sultan Mahmud as one of the key events in the development of that polity [1, p. 9]. The most famous recension was copied by Tengku Said for Hermann von de Wall in 1855, and subsequently re-copied by Muhammad Nuruddin Acheh in Batavia in 1893 [1, p. 9].

The Hikayat Siak introduces the now-famous jackfruit motif. According to the text, a man brought a jackfruit as tribute to the sultan while he was sleeping. The wife of Megat Seri Rama, who was seven months pregnant, entered the palace and, overcome with a craving for the fruit, asked the head of the palace guard for a piece. He gave her one. When the sultan awoke and learned that a piece of the jackfruit reserved for him had been consumed, he ordered the woman summoned. Her stomach was sliced open, and the child within was found sucking on the piece of jackfruit. The woman died [1, pp. 10–11].

This account identifies Megat Seri Rama as the sole perpetrator of the treasonous attack. According to the Hikayat Negeri Johor serta Pahang, a traditional text copied in 1917, Sultan Mahmud had ordered Megat Seri Rama to Linggi on a military expedition, and it was upon his return that he learned of his wife’s death [1, p. 11]. The Bendahara then told Megat Seri Rama the news, and his response was: ‘I will commit derhaka. If Datuk wants to become the ruler, this is the time’ [1, p. 11]. The Bendahara immediately met with the temenggung and explained that they could no longer be ruled by ‘a crazy man’ [1, p. 11].

The murder itself, as described in the Hikayat Siak, took place on a Friday as the sultan was being carried in a palanquin to the mosque for prayers. At the entrance gate, the Bendahara and all the other nobles awaited. Megat Seri Rama approached, declared ‘Your servant commits treason my lord’, and attacked with his parang, striking the sultan’s head. The sultan ordered his sedan carrier to release him, but the carrier carried him away. The sultan stabbed the carrier, who died, and fell to the ground. Megat Seri Rama then stabbed the sultan in the side and fled. The sultan threw his keris, which struck between Megat Seri Rama’s toes. As God had willed, grass grew from the wound for four years, and between life and death he suffered, ‘such was the torture for treason’ [1, p. 12]. The sultan was then carried inside the palace, where he died, and was buried at Kota Tinggi [1, p. 12].

The role of the loyal retainer Sri Bija Wangsa is also elaborated in these accounts. When the other nobles called for him to appear before them, they tricked him into thinking the sultan believed he wanted to commit derhaka. Sri Bija Wangsa then proclaimed, ‘there has never been a Malay who has committed treason against his lord’, and, accepting that the sultan had condemned him, allowed himself to be ritually killed due to the shame [1, p. 11]. This episode echoes the arguments concerning the audacity of derhaka found in the Sulalat al-Salatin, balancing the tensions between justifiably acting against a tyrant and the cultural conventions prohibiting treason [1, p. 12].

Raja Ali Haji’s Tuhfat al-Nafis, written in the 1860s by a member of the Riau elite, modified the Hikayat Siak version. In this account, Megat Seri Rama is killed immediately by the sultan’s thrown keris, eliminating the prolonged suffering and thereby removing any lingering sympathy for the traitor [1, p. 14]. Sultan Mahmud also dies immediately in this version; he is not carried back to the palace where he can state his last wishes [1, p. 14]. As the Tuhfat al-Nafis is a text that justifies the presence of a Bugis elite in Riau and a Malay nobility descended from the Bendahara who replaced Sultan Mahmud, the daulat of the court—and the underlying treason that led to its emergence—was not to be questioned [1, p. 14].

Legacy and Documentation

The death of Sultan Mahmud Syah II has been a subject of continuous reinterpretation for over three centuries. The first accounts came from reports of European visitors and local court diaries, representing the closest witnesses to the event or at least discussions of it that occurred shortly afterward [1, p. 2]. A century later, accounts of the murder entered the realm of traditional literature, from oral tales to written court histories, in which the actors and consequences were explained in a manner that gave meaning to the world they inhabited [1, p. 2]. In the twentieth century, accounts of the death entered academic studies of the Malay past as well as popular media, such as comics and films [1, p. 2].

The tale first re-surfaced in scholarly print in Richard Winstedt’s History of Johor, published by the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1932. Winstedt, who had become General Advisor to Johor in 1931, combined Alexander Hamilton’s description of events with the Tuhfat al-Nafis for the first time, while in many respects echoing the earlier account of Eliza Netscher, which had melded traditional texts with VOC reports [1, p. 15]. Winstedt’s key contribution was to re-introduce the tale to scholarly audiences, who would use it as a vital component of their understandings of the Malay world in the decades that followed [1, p. 15].

After World War II, scholars who were not linked to the colonial enterprise began to use these texts as sources for studies of local history. Primary among these was Leonard Andaya, who used both Malay texts and European archival materials as legitimate sources, referring to each and understanding their contexts [1, p. 16]. Andaya came to the conclusion that the death of Sultan Mahmud was a turning point in Malay history: the derhaka committed in 1699 severed the daulat of the Johor–Melaka rulers, and ‘the ruler was no longer the “sacred lodestone” around which the community evolved and gained its meaning and purpose’ [1, p. 16].

In popular media, the tale has continued to evolve. The 1961 film Sultan Mahmud Mangkat Dijulang, directed by K. M. Baskar with a screenplay by Salleh Ghani, replaced the framework of derhaka with keadilan (justice) and perjuangan (struggle), recasting the murder as a righteous act against tyranny in a manner that reflected the decolonization context of 1950s–60s Malaya and Indonesia [1, pp. 17–18]. The 1996 Malaysian comic Laksamana Bentan, produced by Komik Creative, framed the sultan’s death as a consequence of kesombongan (arrogance), with Megat Seri Rama explicitly rejecting the adat obligation of loyalty because the ruler no longer treated his subjects with respect—a reading Barnard connects to the Mahathir government’s constitutional efforts to limit the sultans’ powers in the mid-1990s [1, p. 20].

R.J. Wilkinson, in his 1931 article for the Society’s journal, argued that although the reigns of Sultan Mahmud II and his successor Abdul Jalil III constitute ‘a dark page of Malay History’, they are of special interest because they mark the origin of five Malay dynasties: Lingga, Singapore, Trengganu, Pahang, and Johore [2, p. 28]. Wilkinson traced these dynasties through genealogical reconstruction, cross-referencing the Bugis History, the Hikayat Johor, Dutch treaties, and official genealogies [2, pp. 31–34].

As Barnard concludes, the authors of the various accounts of Sultan Mahmud’s death use the tale to emphasize the core values of the societies that produced the texts. Whether it is the Islamic rationality of Raja Ali Haji, the focus on derhaka amongst the pengarang of the Hikayat Siak, or the modern, nationalistic world of Salleh Ghani, the flesh they place on the skeleton of the tale presents a reflection of their own society [1, p. 21]. History, while describing the past, is rarely about explaining events solely for erudition; it is written to explain the present and inscribe the future, even when it is about a murder over four hundred years ago [1, p. 21].

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. T.P. Barnard (2016). Historiography and shifting interpretations of the death of Sultan Mahmud Syah JMBRAS 89(2): 1–23.
  2. R.J. Wilkinson (1931). Mahmud II and Abdul Jalil III, 1685–1720 A.D JMBRAS 9(1): 28–34. Read on JSTOR