Malacca's merchants were its walls — until the Portuguese made them a better offer

In the early sixteenth century Malacca was the richest entrepôt in maritime Southeast Asia. Its power rested less on its own army than on the foreign merchant communities — Gujarati, Javanese, Tamil, Bengali — who brought goods, paid customs, and supplied ships and fighting men when the city was threatened. The Sultan's treasury depended on them.

The Sultanate also taxed them heavily and, according to contemporary accounts, treated them as revenue sources rather than partners. When Afonso de Albuquerque arrived in 1511, he understood that the city's strength was its merchants. He cultivated the non-Muslim Indian traders and offered protection and trading terms that contrasted with the Sultan's demands. The Indian merchant Naina Chetu openly sided with the Portuguese and gave them detailed intelligence about the city's defences.

The Portuguese fleet was smaller than Malacca's forces, but the alliance that should have met them was already split. Gujarati and Javanese merchant contingents either fought half-heartedly or looked to their own futures elsewhere. Malacca fell in August 1511. The Sultan escaped, and the commercial community that had made the city great dispersed to Aceh, Banten and Johor.