Gowa Trusted Its Subjugated Vassal, Then a Locked-Out Trader Armed Him

By the mid-1600s Gowa ruled the port of Makassar as the dominant power of eastern Indonesia, open to Portuguese, English, Asian and Dutch traders alike. That openness was the problem for the VOC, which held a chartered monopoly elsewhere and could not stop rivals from buying spices at Makassar instead. Gowa had also subdued the Bugis kingdom of Bone in the 1640s and treated its submission as settled.

It was not. Bone's prince Arung Palakka led a revolt in 1660 that failed; he fled with followers to Dutch Batavia, where the VOC sheltered him for years. Locked out of Makassar's trade by Gowa's own free-port policy, the Company found in an embittered, exiled vassal exactly the lever it needed back into Gowa's own tributary network.

In December 1666 a VOC fleet under Cornelis Speelman landed with Arung Palakka and his Bugis fighters. Gowa had built its power on tribute and manpower drawn from subjects like Bone; in the campaign that followed, that same network ran in reverse, as vassals and allies peeled away to the invading side rather than defend a ruler who had once conquered them.

On 18 November 1667 Sultan Hasanuddin signed the Treaty of Bongaya, expelling non-Dutch traders, ceding forts, and ending Makassar's decades as an open port. Gowa's resistance collapsed further within two years; Arung Palakka was crowned ruler of Bone in 1672 and became the dominant figure in South Sulawesi, with the VOC now holding the trade monopoly Gowa had denied it.