Early history of Gowa and Talloq

The Makassar kingdom of Gowa emerged around 1300 as one of many agrarian chiefdoms in the Indonesian peninsula of South Sulawesi. From the sixteenth century onward, Gowa and its coastal ally Talloq became the first power to dominate most of the peninsula. This political accomplishment was enabled by wide-ranging administrative and military reforms, including the creation of the first bureaucracy in South Sulawesi. Sixteenth-century Gowa has been characterized as an empire and the early history of the kingdom has been analyzed as an example of state formation.

Genealogies and archaeological evidence suggest that the Gowa dynasty was founded around 1300 in a marriage between a local woman and a chieftain of the Bajau, a nomadic maritime people. The establishment of Gowa was part of a radical restructuring of South Sulawesi society by which wet rice cultivation intensified rapidly. Likewise, early Gowa was a largely agrarian polity with no direct access to the coastline. Talloq was founded two centuries later when a Gowa prince fled to the coast after his defeat in a succession dispute. The coastal location of the new polity allowed it to exploit maritime trade to a greater degree than Gowa.

The early sixteenth century was a turning point in the history of both polities. The Karaeng Gowa (king of Gowa) Tumapaqrisiq Kallonna conquered the coastline and forced Talloq to become the junior ally of Gowa. His successor, Tunipalangga, enacted a series of reforms intended to strengthen royal authority and dominate commerce in South Sulawesi. Tunipalangga's wars of conquest were facilitated by the adoption of firearms and innovation on local weaponry and allowed Gowa's sphere of influence to reach a territorial extent unprecedented in Sulawesi history, with the king's power felt from Minahasa to Selayar. Although the later sixteenth century witnessed setbacks for Gowa's campaign for hegemony in Sulawesi, the kingdom continued to grow in wealth and administrative complexity. The year 1593, when a tyrannical Karaeng Gowa was ousted and the chancellor Karaeng Matoaya became de facto ruler of Gowa, is often marked as the end of the early phases of Gowa and Talloq's history.

The early history of of Gowa and Talloq witnessed significant demographic and cultural changes as well. Verdant forests were cleared to make way for rice paddies. The population may have grown by as much as tenfold in between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, while new types of crops, clothes, and furniture were introduced into daily life. The scope of these territorial, administrative, and demographic transformations have led many scholars to conclude that Gowa underwent a transformation from a complex chiefdom to a state society in the sixteenth century, although this is not a unanimously held position.

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