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Date of Birth: Place of Birth: Date of Death: Place of Death: Biography Primary Sources of Information Secondary Sources of Information    Works on Christian-Muslim RelationsDutch and Malay authors on the Paderi Wars in west SumatraKarel Steenbrink

- Javanese court chronicles on the rising power of the Dutch, 17th and 18th centuries Date: 17th and 18th centuries Original Language: Javanese DescriptionThis entry concentrates on Javanese works produced for the major courts of the Sultanate of Mataram, located in the Yogyakarta-Surakarta area. These court chronicles were not written for entertainment, devotion or moral edification, unlike the many works on Muslim romantic figures such as Amir Hamzah, Iskandar Zulkarnain, Sultan Ibrahim, Muhammad Hanafiyya and many …

BiographyJan Pieterszoon Coen was born in Hoorn, one of the seven towns with a representative in the VOC (Dutch East India Company). His father was a trader, and in 1601 he sent Jan to Rome to be educated in international commerce. The young Coen learned double-entry bookkeeping, a skill that would serve him well in future endeavours.In December 1607, Coen departed for the East Indies on a fleet of 13 ships as a junior official of the VOC. In April 1609, the fleet visited the harbour of the small archipelago of Banda, the sole provider of nutmeg at …

Date of Birth: Place of Birth: Date of Death: Place of Death: Biography Primary Sources of Information Secondary Sources of Information Works on Christian-Muslim RelationsDutch and Malay accounts of the conflicts known as the Banjar War, 1859-1905Karel Steenbrink

Date of Birth: Place of Birth: Date of Death: Place of Death: Biography Primary Sources of Information Secondary Sources of Information Works on Christian-Muslim RelationsCorpus Diplomaticum Neerlando-IndicumKarel Steenbrink

Date of Birth: 10 October 1845 Place of Birth: Haarlem Date of Death: 3 March 1927 Place of Death: Delft BiographyLodewijk Willem Christiaan van den Berg was born into a family of artists; his father was a painter and his mother worked as a musician. As a child, he lost the sight in one eye, hit by an arrow while playing. This may have contributed to his calm and very serious character, contrasting with the somewhat Bohemian lifestyle of his parents. He was a brilliant student in languages and law, and in 1868 gained his doctorate with a dissertation on Islamic law ( De contractu 'do ut des' jure…

‘Memorandum to the noble governors about the condition of the Dutch Indies’ Jan Pieterszoon Coen Date: 1 January 1614 Original Language: Dutch DescriptionJan Pieterszoon Coen wrote many letters and reports for the VOC central office in Amsterdam, and the substantial memorandum of 1 January 1614 was known as his vision statement for the VOC. It occupies 24 pages in his biography (Colenbrander,  Jan Pietersz. Coen . Levensbeschrijving, pp. 451-74; all the references that follow are to this edition), and is divided into 14 sections. The first five discuss the VOC…

VOC treaties with Muslim rulers of Indonesia Frederick de Houtman Date: 1605-20 Original Language: Dutch DescriptionFrederick de Houtman attracted most attention for his second trip to Indonesia, while his two periods as colonial administrator, in Ambon and the Moluccas, are only documented in his own official reports. These are stored in the National Archives of the Netherlands in The Hague and published partly in the collected works of Jan Pietersz. Coen ( Bescheiden omtrent zijn bedrijf in Indië, ed. H.T. Colenbrander, The Hague, 1919-34, 6 vols).One report of 1607 gives a s…

- L.W.C. van den Berg Date: 1873-95 Original Language: Various languages Description De beginselen van het Mohammedaansche recht, volgens de imāms Aboe Hanīfat en asj-Sjāfe‘ī ‘Handbook of Muslim law according to the Ḥanafī and Shāfiʿī schools’ Published in 1874, this book was written in 1871-2 when the author was teaching Islamic law at the Gymnasium Willem III in Batavia (xv + 269 pages long). The only comparable work in European languages at the time was N. von Tornauw’s  Das moslemische Recht (Leipzig, 1855), though his book concentrates on Shīʿa law. Van den Berg’s boo…

‘History of Tunis, Algiers and other towns of Barbary’ Cornelis Pijnacker Date: 1626 or 1627 Original Language: Dutch Description After his second mission to Algiers in 1626, Pijnacker composed his monograph  Historisch verhael van den steden Thunes in the same year or the year after.  It is not the story of his travels (which was published in print in 1650 as the anonymous booklet  Reyse naer Africa) but rather of his diplomatic mission and the general culture of the two cities of Tunis and Algiers. It consists of 54 unnumbered chapters, of which chapters 46-…

Date of Birth: Place of Birth: Date of Death: Place of Death: Biography Primary Sources of Information Secondary Sources of Information Works on Christian-Muslim RelationsJavanese court chronicles on the rising power of the DutchKarel Steenbrink

Jacob Corneliszoon van Neck Date of Birth: About 1564 Place of Birth: Amsterdam Date of Death: 15 March 1638 Place of Death: Amsterdam BiographyJacob Cornelisz. van Neck was born into a prominent family in Amsterdam. Very little is known about his youth except that his father died when he was two years old and his mother when he was about 11. He received a good general education and then special training in nautical sciences, and he became involved in various forms of trade.The oldest company for trade with Southeast Asia selected him as the admiral for its second fleet of ei…

‘Lecture on the religion of the Turks’ Johannes Coccejus Date: About 1625 Original Language: Greek Description As a 22 year-old student in Bremen, Coccejus delivered a lecture in Greek on the religion of the Turks, partly as a linguistic exercise. This formed the basis for Oratio de religione Turcarum (constituting 11 pages in print), written as an admonition for the reformation of church and state in his time. The origin of Islam and its immense progress at the time presented a great challenge for Christians. Using secondary sources, Coccejus summarises the life of Muḥammad an…

‘Daily account of what has taken place here in Batavia since 1 January 1624, as well as some reports about other settlements’ Dagh-register Date: 1624-1799 Original Language: Dutch DescriptionOn 6 December 1621, Governor General Jan Pieterszoon Coen ordered all settlements of the VOC to keep a diary ( Dagh-register) of important events. This was to include reports about local politics and trade rivals, especially the British but also the French, Danish, Portuguese, Gujarati and others. An account was entered for every month, detailing the shi…

‘Travels’ Nicolaas de Graaff Date: Unknown; before 1688 Original Language: Dutch DescriptionThe first 100 pages of this book (its full title is  Reisen van Nicolaus de Graaff, na de vier gedeelten des Werelds, als Asia, Africa, America en Europa, mitsgaders sijn Oostindische spiegel) contain brief and concise reports of de Graaff’s first 13 voyages. The following 130 pages cover his last three voyages.  Oost-Indise spiegel (98 pages) is re-printed with new pagination in the same volume. On his first voyage, de Graaff arrived in Aceh, Sumatra, where he saw th…

BiographyLittle is known about the childhood and early career of Livinus Bor. He entered the service of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1639 as a naval cadet and worked in modest positions in Ternate after arriving in the Indies. In 1650, he became the secretary to Arnold de Vlaming van Oudshoorn, superintendent for the three governors in East Indonesia: Banda, Ambon and Ternate. He joined his superior when, in early 1652, the sultan of Ternate was brought to Batavia to sign a treaty in wh…

Karel Steenbrink [email protected] Last modified: December 2016The Portuguese, as part of their journey eastwards in search of spices for trade and souls to be converted to Christianity, conquered Malacca…

Ahmad Rifaʾi (or Ripangi) (c. 1786–1876), one of the most radical Islamic reformers of nineteenth-century Java, was born in Kendal, Java, and died in exile in Ambon. Ripangi, as he is usually known in Java, was the sixth son of Raden Kyai Haji Muhammad Abu Sujak, also known by his Javanese name, Raden Sutawijaya, a penghulu (the highest level of religious official) in the Residency of Kendal. The position of penghulu in Kendal was subsequently held by a son of Sutawijaya’s older brother, and it was this penghulu who, in the 1820s, ordered Ripangi imprisoned for some time in Semara…

Jeuriaen Everhard Rumpf; Georg Eberhard Rumpf Date of Birth: 1 November 1627 Place of Birth: Wolfersheim, Germany Date of Death: 15 June 1702 Place of Death: Ambon Island, Indonesia BiographyGeorg Rumphius was born Georg Rumpf in 1627 in Wölfersheim, Hessen, Germany, and spoke Dutch from an early age because his mother had family in the Dutch Republic. His youth was troubled by the Thirty Years War, as well as a wave of plague in 1635. He learned Latin and studied at the gymnasium in Hanau. In 1645, at the age of 18, he joi…

‘A history of Ambon’, and ‘A general description of the Islands of Ambon’ Jeuriaen Everhard Rumpf; Georg Eberhard Rumpf Date: 1678 Original Language: Dutch DescriptionThe two works De Ambonse historie, behelsende een kort verhaal der gedenkwaardigste geschiedenissen, zo in vreede als oorlog voorgevallen, sedert dat de Nederlandsche Oost Indische Comp. het besit in Amboina gehadt heeft, and  De generale lant-beschrijvinge van het Ambonese Gouvernement behelsende en wat daaronder begrepen zij, mitsgaders een Summarisch verhaal van de Ternataanse en Port…