The Kingdom of Siau

 

Look, I’m going to tell you a story about islands—the Sangihe Islands, to be exact—and if you think islands are just places where people go to get tans and drink mai-tais with little umbrellas in them, well, you haven’t been paying attention to history. Islands are where things happen. Dark things. Things that get twisted up in power and blood and the kind of faith that makes men do terrible, necessary deeds.

These islands—they used to call them the Sangir-Talaud Islands, back when names meant something—they sat right in the middle of an ancient trade route. Sulawesi, Maluku, the Philippines, Java. All those exotic places your high school geography teacher droned on about while you were trying to stay awake. But back then? Back then they were arteries, pumping spice and silk and secrets through the dark heart of Southeast Asia.

The people who lived there had a creation story, the way all people do when they need to explain where they came from and why they matter. They called it The Legend of Prince Gumansalangi, and like all legends worth a damn, it probably had some truth buried in it like a splinter you can’t quite dig out.

This Gumansalangi—sometimes they called him Marauw, because one name is never enough when you’re dealing with princes and legends—he was exiled from his home in Kotabatu on Mindanao. His father threw him out. Now, there’s a story there, you can bet on it. Fathers don’t exile their sons for nothing, not princes anyway. But that’s lost to time, isn’t it? Swallowed up like everything else.

He married a princess named Kondawulaeng (try saying that three times fast), and together they sailed to the Sangihe Islands. Gumansalangi became the first Kolane—that’s king to you and me—of the Kingdom of Tampunganglawo. And from him, all the other kings descended. A dynasty born from exile and ambition. There’s poetry in that, the dark kind.

When the White Men Came

By the time the 16th century rolled around—and brother, things were about to get interesting—the kingdoms were in full swing. Kendahe, Tabukan, Manganitu, and Siau. Four kingdoms on a string of islands that should have been paradise but were about to become something else entirely.

See, the Sangihe Islands sat right in the crosshairs of the spice trade, and if you know anything about history, you know that spice meant money, and money meant power, and power meant blood in the water. The Portuguese were there. The Spanish. The Sultanate of Ternate. All of them circling like sharks, and the islands? They were chum.

The Kingdom of Siau—now there’s where our story really starts to cook. It was the only Spanish protectorate in all of Sulawesi, which was like being the only Catholic kid in a Baptist school. It made you special, sure, but it also made you a target.

The kingdom had been around since before the white men showed up with their crosses and their gunpowder. But when the Portuguese started keeping records in the mid-1500s, suddenly Siau was real in a way it hadn’t been before. Funny how that works. You don’t exist until someone writes you down.

The Portuguese records mention that Siau had an alliance with King Babontehu of Manado Tua Island. This friendship started sometime after 1549, right after Siau had a civil war—because of course it did. Two sons of King Lokongbanua decided to settle their daddy issues the old-fashioned way: with swords and soldiers.

Prince Posumah won. He always figured he would, the way winners do when they’re telling the story after the fact.

The Man Who Came From Ternate

In 1563, something happened that would change everything. An envoy arrived from Ternate, led by a prince named Baabullah—who would later become sultan, because ambitious men have a way of rising, don’t they? He came with a simple request: convert to Islam.

Now, King Posumah found himself in what you might call a pickle. Actually, it was worse than a pickle. It was a dilemma, the kind that keeps you up at night, pacing your chambers, wondering if the choice you make will be the one that destroys everything you’ve built.

His people still followed the old ways, the ancestral beliefs. The gods of their fathers and grandfathers. You don’t just throw that over like a worn-out shirt, not without consequences.

Meanwhile—and there’s always a meanwhile in stories like this—the Portuguese in Maluku were paying attention. Admiral Henrique de Sá was no fool. He could see the writing on the wall, written in nutmeg and blood. If Siau went Islamic, if it allied with Ternate, well, that would help Sultan Khairun’s rebellion against the Portuguese. The nutmeg trade would be disrupted. Money would be lost. Empires would crumble.

So de Sá did what colonizers do: he sent a missionary. A Jesuit named Diogo de Magelhaes, armed with nothing but his faith and his cunning, spreading Catholicism like seeds in dark soil.

And it worked.

Babontehu of Manado Tua got baptized, along with 1,500 of his people. Can you imagine that? Fifteen hundred souls, all dunked in holy water, all pledging allegiance to a God they’d never heard of six months before.

King Posumah attended the baptism. Maybe he was curious. Maybe he was political. Maybe—and this is the part that haunts me—maybe he felt something there, watching all those people transformed, reborn. Whatever the reason, he became sympathetic to Catholicism.

After his own baptism, the people of Siau followed suit. They became devout Catholics, the kind of devout that makes you wonder if they were trying to convince themselves as much as anyone else.

Betrayal

But here’s the thing about conversion: it doesn’t buy you protection. Not from the Portuguese, anyway. Despite their new faith, Siau got nothing. No soldiers. No ships. No safety.

And Ternate? Ternate got hostile. Starting in 1587—just three years after Posumah’s baptism, which tells you something about how much God’s grace is worth when you’re facing armed raiders—Ternate’s forces began attacking coastal villages in Siau. Burning homes. Taking slaves. The usual horrors.

At first, Posumah tried to ignore it. Maybe he prayed. Maybe he hoped. Maybe he told himself it would pass, the way you tell yourself the chest pains are just indigestion until the heart attack comes.

But then Posumah died—they all do, eventually—and Don Jeronimo Winsulangi took the throne. Winsulangi was different. He was done waiting for Portuguese aid that would never come. So in 1593, he did something crazy: he sailed to Manila.

He met with Governor Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas, and he made a deal. A simple deal. Elegant, really. “Protect us from Ternate,” Winsulangi said, “and we’re yours.”

Dasmariñas saw the strategic value immediately. Siau was positioned perfectly for Spanish trade with the Maluku Islands. On August 16, 1593, they signed an agreement. Siau became a Spanish protectorate. Two forts went up: Ondong and Lolento. Stone and timber monuments to a promise.

For a while, it seemed like it might work.

The Dutch

Then 1605 arrived like a storm nobody saw coming. The Dutch East India Company—the VOC, those three letters that would come to mean terror across half the world—captured the Portuguese stronghold in Maluku.

Spain started to panic. They reinforced Siau, stationed troops there, built up the fortifications. And they were right to be worried, because as early as 1601, Dutch ships under Joris van Spilbergen had been spotted in Siau’s waters, circling, watching, waiting.

In 1607, the VOC signed an alliance with Ternate. You could practically hear the noose tightening. A year later, Spain and the Dutch clashed head-on.

Spain lost.

When empires fall, they fall hard, and Siau fell with them. By 1614, the island was under VOC control. The Dutch had won, the way they always seemed to win in those days.

But Don Fransiscus Batahi—the king who now wore a crown that felt more like a prisoner’s chains—he wasn’t done fighting. In 1616, when the VOC tried to enslave his people and ship them off to work the nutmeg plantations in the Banda Islands (because slavery was just good business to the Dutch), Batahi organized a counterattack.

It succeeded. Spain, delighted by this unexpected victory, decided to make Siau its forward stronghold against the Dutch. From 1616 to 1625, Siau remained Spanish, a last outpost of Catholic defiance in a world increasingly dominated by Protestant traders.

But all things end.

On November 9, 1677, Siau finally submitted to the VOC. The long game was over. The Dutch had won after all, the way they always did—through patience and persistence and the simple arithmetic of power.

Epilogue

So there you have it. The story of Siau, a kingdom that tried to survive in a world of empires, that converted faiths trying to find an ally, that fought and schemed and ultimately lost. It’s a story about islands, yes, but it’s also a story about what happens when small places get caught between giants.

And if there’s a lesson in all this—and I’m not sure there is, because history doesn’t give lessons so much as warnings—it’s that faith alone won’t save you. Neither will alliances. In the end, kingdoms fall and empires crumble and the only thing that remains are the stories.

Dark stories.

The kind that keep you up at night, wondering what you would have done if you’d been King Posumah, standing in that church, watching the water drip from your hands, knowing in your heart that the gods of your fathers were watching, and they were not pleased.

The kind of stories I tell.