Just because a man was barred from membership within status lineages higher than his father’s, this did not guarantee him automatic membership within his father’s status lineage. On the contrary, apical demotion involves the continual reassessment of “ascribed status” depending on achievement. A man who failed to earn the required status lost his (potential) natal membership and either started a new status lineage or married into a lesser status lineage.
To take the example of the sons of a Gowa (or other Makassar) raja, any son who failed in the succession concurrently lost any direct claim on the title for his sons, and so began a new patriline. Therefore the only men included in a royal status lineage are those belonging to the patriline of rajas, including all the installed brothers.
Furthermore, any man who failed to attain a karaengship virtually guaranteed that his descendants would be banished to genealogical insignificance. So the only men included in a noble status lineage linked to the Gowa royal line are those who can trace a direct line of male Karaengs back to the son of a Gowa raja. They could also have traced an ambilineal line of ancestry into other lineages, but this would have been pointless since the Gowa royalty constituted the highest status Makassar lineage. We would also expect the Gowa nobility to exclude from their ranks any nobles directly descended from lines inferior to Gowa’s, and this expectation is confirmed by the genealogical distribution of the major noble titles.
Where do women fit into a genealogical system based essentially on men’s titles? For two reasons I assign women to their father’s status lineage even if the mother’s was higher. Firstly, the father’s title was the major influence on the offspring’s title irrespective of gender, and the systematic demotion observed in the opposite-sex next-of-kin comparisons held true between brothers and sisters. Secondly, the notion that women should marry at their own level or upwards implies that the husband enjoyed either equal or greater authority.
It is not even necessary to assume that daughters left their father’s status lineage upon marriage. Indeed the frequency of divorces, and the occasional instances of women marrying within their own status lineage (Bulbeck 1992), suggest that many women never did. However, the offspring were born within their father’s status lineage, either as potential members in the case of boys, or as members to be strategically married in the case of girls. This and the other points discussed above will become clearer during the description of my 17 “lineage groups” and the associated status lineages.
Makassar Lineage Groups
Gowa Core. All of the sixteenth and seventeenth century Gowa rajas (plus their daughters).
Gowa Nobility. All of the Karaengs (plus their daughters) patrilineally descended from a Gowa raja. Whether we consider them a single status lineage or a group of closely related status lineages is irrelevant. The important point is that their fortunes closely followed those of the Gowa royalty (see below).
Tallok Core. All of the sixteenth and seventeenth century male Tallok rajas, plus their daughters (including Tallok’s only queen), but excluding Tunipasuluk who belonged to the Gowa core. Tallok’s origins would make Tallok a branch within the Gowa nobility except that the Tallok core constituted an independent line of rajas.
Figure 2. Schematic representation of Greater Gowa’s organization.
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Tallok Nobility. See “Gowa Nobility” above.
Gelarang. Previously I had discussed the Gelarang in relation to Gowa, but a similar arrangement also existed in Tallok. The texts occasionally mention marriages involving the families of the Gowa or Tallok Gelarang. These are pooled into a “Gelarang” group for convenience since I have no data on their descent principles.
Garassik. The earliest detailed Makassar historical accounts identify Garassik as a former port-polity which had been reduced to a patch of prime real estate by the early sixteenth century. Garassik first lost its independence after an unnamed daughter of Somba Garassik married Batara Gowa and gave birth to a Gowa noble who later ruled Garassik . Before losing its independence Garassik was also involved in some other marriage exchanges. After the late sixteenth century the Garassik karaengship came to be held by one Tallok noble and various Gowa nobles.
Polombangkeng. Polombangkeng had consisted of an umbrella of seven “brother kings” headed by Bajeng and including Jamarang, Mandallek, Katingang, Jipang, Sanrabone and Lengkesek. The west Polombangkeng members — Katingang, Jipang, Sanrabone and Lengkesek — were punished by Gowa during the mid-sixteenth century for having earlier assisted Tallok’s unsuccessful attempt to retake Garassik from Gowa (Bulbeck 1992). At around this juncture Jamarang, Mandallek and Katingang were also involved in documented marriages with Gowa and with certain local Makassar karaengships. Circumstantial evidence suggests that these three Polombangkeng polities then supported patrilineal cores, even if they were also attached to Bajeng as their central royal line (Bulbeck 1992).
Sanrabone. Although originally one of the west Polombangkeng polities humiliated by Gowa in the mid-sixteenth century, in the late sixteenth century Sanrabone rose to fill the power vacuum created by the demise of Bajeng. Sanrabone retained its prominence until the death of Tumenanga ri Campagana in 1642. The next two Sanrabone rulers died within five years, amidst such chaos that two quite different successions appear equally possible from the records (Bulbeck 1992). In one interpretation, rulership first passed to Campagana’s full brother Karaeng Bambanga , and then patrilineally from Campagana to his son Tumenanga ri Buttana and grandson Puanna Jenalak . In the other interpretation rulership passed to Campagana’s daughter Karaenga Pucu and to her son Karaeng Banyuanyarak before passing back to Puanna Jenalak . Anyway, Puanna Jenalak was expelled in 1658. After an interregnum lasting a decade, Karaeng Campagaya (later Sultan Abdul Jalil), the son of Gowa’s Sultan Hasanuddin by the daughter of Karaeng Banyuanyarak, was installed as Sanrabone’s raja. Hitherto Sanrabone had supported a royal patrilineal core, even if chaos in the 1640s conceivably led to some irregular appointments and ultimately to Sanrabone’s absorption by Gowa.
Minor Makassar. The records are dotted with references to marriages involving local Makassar nobility or petty Makassar royalty not descended from the major lines (Bulbeck 1992). These include Anak Sappuk, Bangkala, Kasuarrang, Bungaya, Beroanging, Laikang, Batu-Batu, Pattung and seventeenth century Mandallek, as well as three which cannot be unambiguously located (Paria, Pabolik and Bontomanaik). I have only the sketchiest data on the succession to these karaengships, none of which forms a cohesive unit of analysis by itself. They can be pooled for present purposes.
Pattekne. The title of Karaeng Pattekne recurs throughout the records and so Pattekne stands apart from the other minor noble Makassar lines. From the late sixteenth century the title was held by men, apparently not descended from the major lines, who furthermore held one stream of the Tumailalang posts until the mid-seventeenth century (Bulbeck 1992).
Maros. The short dynasty of autonomous Maros rulers, plus their daughters. The last of the dynasty, Tunikakassang, reportedly had no offspring. He died an old man and so probably outlived anyone else within the core. When the Gowa king Tunijallok defeated Maros during Tunikakassang’s reign, he struck a treaty whereby Tunijallok’s descendants would rule Maros while Tunikakassang’s “descendants” (presumably his nephews and their descendants) would hold the post of Gowa Tumailalang. Tunijallok’s son Tunipasuluk briefly occupied the Maros throne before Tallok’s palace revolution expelled him in 1593 (Bulbeck 1992).
Lekokbodong. After Tunipasuluk, Maros failed to recover its former status as an independent kingdom. But a status lineage or group of related lineages based in Maros apparently gained major factional status within greater Gowa. A clutch of men held the recurring karaengships of Cenrana and Lekokbodong, as well as one and later two streams of the Tumailalang posts. Where it can be followed, the succession of these titles resembles the succession of the Kasepekang titles (cf. Rössler 1987 and Röttger-Rössler 1989). Kamaruddin et al. (1985-86) retain the name “Maros” for this noble house, but I prefer “Lekokbodong” to distinguish it from its predecessor.
Minor Bugis. Various minor Bugis kingdoms were fleetingly involved in marital exchanges recorded in the Makassar texts (Bulbeck 1992). They are Siang (c.1500), Suppak and Lamuru (sixteenth century), Segeri (early seventeenth century) later called Agongnionjok (late seventeenth century), and Siang, Barru, Sawitto and Sidenreng (late seventeenth century).
Bulo-Bulo. Also a minor Bugis kingdom, Bulo-Bulo had a special status owing to its location due south of Bone. Greater Gowa and its allies propped up Bulo-Bulo as a means of containing any southward expansion by Bone (Bulbeck 1992).
Luwuk. During greater Gowa’s period of hegemony in South Sulawesi affairs, two of the major Bugis kingdoms, Luwuk and Wajok, were allied with Gowa. Only Luwuk is considered here because Wajok fails to appear in the genealogical records (Bulbeck 1992).
Soppeng/Bone-Soppeng. Prior to 1667 Gowa took a few wives from Soppeng (Bulbeck 1992). Bone and Soppeng jointly spearheaded the 1667 assault on Makassar, after which point Bone set about absorbing the Soppeng rulership (Bulbeck 1990). So for our purposes Bone and Soppeng can be grouped for the period after 1667, and made to include the major Bone “Arung” (Maroanging, Tanete and Teko) and Soppeng “Datu” (Belo).
Eastern Indonesia. Bima and Sumbawa, as well as some nearby kingdoms, were defeated at various times by greater Gowa between 1616 and 1626. After some revolts in the early 1630s, Bima and Sumbawa entered into regular marriages with the various factions of greater Gowa from 1646 onwards. The only recorded bride exchange involving Ternate occurred in 1672 when I Asseng, a daughter of Malikussaid, married the Ternate sultan (Bulbeck 1992). All of these data are here grouped into “Eastern Indonesia”.
Having defined our lineage groups, we can now relate the politics of élite marriage to (greater) Gowa’s political history. While the categories “wife givers” and “wife takers” are inappropriate for the Makassar system (Fox pers.comm.), nonetheless we are still dealing with groups of related men who perpetuated their status lineage by attracting wives from other groups of related men. Marriage strategies can therefore be shown by cross-tabulating the father’s and husband’s lineage groups. Chronologically the marriages can be grouped according to the three major phases of Gowa’s history during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Gowa’s Initial Expansion (c.1500-1593)
In the early sixteenth century Gowa was merely one of the chiefdoms located in South Sulawesi’s southwest corner. After the mid-sixteenth century Gowa expanded southwards to incorporate the northern two-thirds of Polombangkeng. When Tunipasuluk briefly occupied the Tallok and Maros thrones between 1590 and 1593, he commanded the largest area ever directly ruled by Gowa.
Until 1593 the great majority of the recorded marriages involved Makassar polities, and one Bugis polity (Siang), located within the southwest corner of South Sulawesi. The notable rôle played by the (Gowa) Gelarang highlights the restricted geographical range of the marriages. True, four royal and noble women from Bugis kingdoms north of Siang married Gowa royalty, but no offspring resulted (Bulbeck 1992).
Most of the marriages which I recorded between close relatives descended from a conjugal pair resulted from the series of royal marriages between Gowa and Tallok during the early to middle sixteenth century. These marriages bound the fortunes of the Gowa and Tallok royalty, but at Tallok’s peril since the number of princesses provided by Tallok was not reciprocated by Gowa. When the Tallok raja Tumenanga ri Makkoayang died in 1577, his only adult descendants were two daughters both married to the Gowa raja Tunijallok. (One of the daughters, Karaeng Batu-Batu [e], may have already died, but this does not affect the argument.) Unless Tallok were to install an immature incumbent, the throne had to pass to a wife of Tunijallok. The woman appointed, Karaeng Bainea, produced nine offspring but little evidence of government independent from her husband (Bulbeck 1992). Tallok was no longer in the position to exclude these offspring from the Tallok core on the basis of lacking patrilineal membership, because Tallok had become a lesser status lineage compared to Gowa. Consequently the first born son of Tunijallok and Karaeng Bainea, Tunipasuluk, claimed the Tallok throne while patrilineally inheriting the Gowa throne.
The growing status of the Gowa royalty compared to Tallok is clear from the number of brides taken by the Gowa royalty, accounting for over half of the marriages between lineage groups. Moreover the Makassar lineage groups which produced rather than attracted wives came to fall within Gowa’s domain. These include Garassik, an early source of brides; and Jamarang and Katingang (here included within Polombangkeng) which had provided Gowa with several royal brides. In contrast Sanrabone and Pattekne attracted wives and survived as status lineages into the seventeenth century.
The Golden Period of Greater Gowa (1593-1667)
Greater Gowa’s heyday began in 1593 when Karaeng Matoaya, or Abdullah as he was later called, instigated the palace revolution which expelled Tunipasuluk. Because his father had been Gowa regent as well as king of Tallok, Abdullah had a direct claim both on Tallok and the regency. His fellow conspirators also joined the confederated power structure which blossomed particularly during the mid-seventeenth century reigns of Malikussaid and Hasanuddin (Reid 1987; Bulbeck 1992).
During the period, marriages involved a wide geographical range of lineage groups, reflecting greater Gowa’s expanded sphere of political influence. Included are Gowa’s eastern Indonesian allies of Bima and Sumbawa, and Gowa’s Bugis allies on the east coast, Bulo-Bulo and Luwuk. The Gelarang now hardly figured at all.
Greater Gowa’s decentralized power structure is clearly reflected in the marriage patterns. The Gowa, Tallok and Lekokbodong nobilities now took a prominent part, while the frequency of daughter exchanges between the Gowa royalty and other lineage groups was reciprocal overall. Indeed the Tallok royalty provided rather than attracted wives; and by the end of the period the rulers of Gowa (Hasanuddin) and Tallok (Harrunarasyid) both had mothers whose common origin is revealed by their “Lokmok” title.
Sanrabone lost its independence during this period. Sanrabone had attracted wives during the reigns of Parallekkena and Campagana, but then provided wives leading up to and during the period of chaotic succession in Sanrabone discussed above. Note that the Gowa prince who absorbed the Sanrabone throne, (later Sultan Abdul Jalil), was either the matrilateral grandson or matrilateral great grandson of a Sanrabone raja (depending on how we interpret Sanrabone’s mid-seventeenth century succession). He could claim the Sanrabone throne based on his descent from a woman either right within or one step removed from the royal Sanrabone core.
The Survivors (Post-1667)
Our third period began when Bone and Soppeng, the two important Bugis kingdoms which suffered most under greater Gowa, joined forces with the VOC. The allies occupied Makassar in 1667 and destroyed Gowa’s entrepôt palace of Somba Opu in 1669. In 1677 the Bone leader Sultan Sahaduddin finally snuffed out all resistance when he occupied Gowa itself. Until his death in 1696, he continued to combine diplomacy and thuggery in monopolizing power within South Sulawesi affairs to an unprecedented degree. Sahaduddin himself was childless but before his death chose a successor in his nephew Alimuddin, who along with his offspring maintained Bone’s pre-eminence in local politics until the mid-eighteenth century (Andaya 1981; Bulbeck 1990).
After the Makassar War, greater Gowa virtually ceased attracting women from external status lineages and instead provided wives. Greater Gowa’s Bugis ally, Bulo-Bulo, which was immediately absorbed by Bone after the Makassar War (Andaya 1981), falls in the same pattern. The Bugis kingdoms which greater Gowa had previously dominated, some of whom had also provided greater Gowa with wives, now married greater Gowa’s daughters. In accordance with Sahaduddin’s pre-eminence, Bone was dominant, but Soppeng, Siang, Agongnionjok, Sawitto and Sidenreng also drew wives from greater Gowa. So did the eastern Indonesian sultanates, now including Ternate.
Marriage patterns within greater Gowa reflect the reorganization of its internal power structure. The Gowa royalty and nobility provided wives while the Tallok royalty and especially Lekokbodong attracted wives. The Tallok nobility was especially active in both spheres. The last point identifies the Tallok nobility as greater Gowa’s “power broker”, a rôle centred on Karaeng Karunrung who was then the regent and the single most powerful Makassar man. Thus after the Tallok sultan Harrunarasyid fled in the wake of Gowa’s 1677 military debâcle, Karaeng Karunrung managed to maintain the royal Tallok patriline by installing the boy sultan Abdul Kadir (Andaya 1981; Patunru 1983).
Gowa’s eclipse and the rise of Tallok and Lekokbodong reflect the specializations of the various factions within greater Gowa. As detailed elsewhere (Bulbeck 1992) territorial control was primarily the province of Gowa, whereas the noble administrative posts were mostly vested in Tallok and Lekokbodong . The Makassar War and its aftermath grievously diminished the area under greater Gowa’s jurisdiction, but without simplifying greater Gowa’s administration (Bulbeck 1992). Consequently Gowa had become largely redundant to the survival of an organization whose strength now lay in its capacity to accommodate the new territorial overlords, Bone and the VOC.
The rot set in Gowa’s succession when Hasanuddin abdicated after the destruction of Somba Opu. His chosen successor, Amir Hamzah, died in 1674. Amir Hamzah’s half brother, Muhammad Ali, was expelled following Sahaduddin’s occupation of Gowa in 1677. Stability was restored only when Muhammad Ali’s full brother, Abdul Jalil, accepted Gowa’s reduced status as the necessary price (Bulbeck 1990).
Furthermore, Hasanuddin’s three successors either died as young adults or were constrained from taking many wives. They produced few children, none of them a son who survived to maturity. Amir Hamzah was childless. Muhammad Ali left two daughters, one of whom (Karaeng Parang-Parang, married the Tallok Sultan Abdul Kadir and gave birth to Tallok’s Sultan Sirajuddin. Abdul Jalil’s only mature child, Karaeng Pattukangang, married Sahaduddin’s chosen successor Alimuddin. As the (adopted) son of a Soppeng female raja, Alimuddin later absorbed the Soppeng rule. His three sons by Karaeng Pattukangang serially ruled Bone, and two also came to rule Soppeng (Bulbeck 1990).
When Abdul Jalil died in 1709, Hasanuddin’s other sons were either dead or close to death, and Gowa’s surviving princesses were aged (Bulbeck 1992). The Gowa royalty was vanquished as a patrilineal core and had to include princesses’ sons. As South Sulawesi’s most powerful lineage, Bone-Soppeng forced its claims, and Sultan Ismail ruled Gowa as the first of his three royal titles. But Bone-Soppeng’s authority waned with the approaching death of Alimuddin. In 1714 Ismail was forced to abdicate in favour of Karaeng Parang-Parang’s daughter, Sirajuddin. Thus the Tallok Sultan Sirajuddin, as a matrilateral grandson within the Gowa royal core from a higher status lineage, ultimately absorbed the Gowa rulership within the Tallok royalty (Bulbeck 1992).
Sirajuddin was preferred over Ismail because a Makassar royal constituted a far more palatable ruler of Gowa than a Bugis royal did (Patunru 1983:76). A fuller explanation notes the depth of Sirajuddin’s ties with the Gowa royalty, compared to Ismail’s which extended back only a generation. Further, very many Makassar nobles were related one way or another to Sirajuddin, and the late seventeenth century flurry of marriages between Bone-Soppeng and greater Gowa was inadequate to repair the difference. This point highlights a key strength of the bilateral component of élite Makassar kinship. Usurpation of a royal title from above could be briefly successful, but it could only be sustained if the appropriate breadth and depth of relationships with the subjects were also established.
Conclusion
In a very practical sense the king was the husband of his realm (cf. Jordaan and de Josselin de Jong 1985). The legitimacy of his control derived from his marriages, or those of his direct ancestors, to princesses within the cores of the subjugated domains. So during 1500-1593 the Gowa royalty attracted status wives from those areas which Gowa came to rule. The territorial ambitions of the Gowa royalty, and its ability to draw status wives, were then contained until the mid-seventeenth century when Gowa legitimately absorbed Sanrabone. With the loss of Gowa’s subjugated lands after 1667, Gowa now became “wife” to the two powerful royal lineages in Makassar, Bone-Soppeng and Tallok.
Makassar remained as South Sulawesi’s effective capital after the eclipse of the Gowa patriline. The most prestigious title, the rulership of Gowa, was absorbed by Tallok as the most powerful Makassar line. Sirajuddin’s ascendancy, which bequeathed a disputed succession until his direct descendants finally monopolized the Gowa rulership late in the nineteenth century (see Patunru 1983:76-99), is not conventionally registered as a dynastic change (e.g. Patunru 1983). In the sense that the disputed succession involved closely related Makassar lineages, and that Tallok’s origins are ultimately one with Gowa’s, there was indeed no dynastic change. Thus the principle of bilateral membership not only allowed the legitimate passage of authority between peer patrilines, it also tended to ensure continuity of social organization by resisting unrelated factions. Analysis along these lines may help to explain why western Indonesian (and Southeast Asian) political history suggests a multiplicity of “dynasties” centred in comparatively few heartlands and often showing strong cross-dynasty continuity.
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