Millennial Alexander in the Making of Aceh

This chapter examines how the Acehnese appropriated Alexander the Great as a model of kingship and imitated Melaka in fashioning a royal mythic genealogy going back to Iskandar Zulkarnain. The discussion focuses on one Acehnese sultan, Sultan Iskandar Muda (r. 1607–36), whose name means Alexander the Younger and whose reign is considered Aceh’s golden age. The chapter explores Aceh’s parallel literary allusions to Alexander, incorporated into local literary genres, through an analysis of Iskandar Muda’s biography, Hikayat Aceh. It shows how Hikayat Aceh employs tropes of Timurid-Alexandrian kingship that are also found in diplomatic letters to European kings, including James I of England. It also describes Hikayat Aceh’s understanding of diplomatic relations as a complex entanglement and how the Acehnese turned to the global tradition of Alexander to reflect on intercultural relations with foreign others.

English Alexanders and Empire from the Periphery

This chapter focuses on Alexander the Great as the monarchical archetype for the medieval heroes of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Parts I and II (1587–8) and William Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599). In both plays, Alexander is used to negotiate a place for England on a global stage dominated by the twin poles of the Hapsburg and the Ottoman Empires. Marlowe imagines another northern tribe, Tamburlaine and his Scythians, invading the Ottoman center to build an empire from the periphery. Shakespeare relies on complex pattern of Alexandrian allusions to counterbalance classical history with an English medieval genealogy accompanied by a native heroism imagined capable of defeating the Ottomans. The chapter also shows how Marlowe and Shakespeare utilize Alexander to explore the complexities, ambitions, and limits of England’s imperial identity, and how their protagonists’ campaigns of imperial expansion foregrounded questions of cultural identity and intercultural encounter.

Scottish Alexanders and Stuart Empire

This chapter examines how the Scottish Alexander Romance, Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, raises issues that are important to the ambitions of James IV of Scotland: religious crusade and dynastic expansion through marriage. Composed in 1460 and attributed to Gilbert Hay, Buik features a crusading Alexander the Great fighting Muslim enemies. The novel’s representation of Alexander’s enemies as Muslims references European fears of the growing power of the Ottomans. James IV wanted both to unite England and Scotland through his marriage and to unite Christendom against the Turks. The chapter discusses Alexander’s transformation from crusader into a merchant in the East, suggesting that it points to the underlying economic basis of the revival of crusading rhetoric—Ottoman control of the spice trade. These two themes—union and crusade—were continuing preoccupations of later Stuarts, including James VI of Scotland.

Milton, Alexander’s Pirate, and Merchant Empires in the East

This chapter examines John Milton’s allusions to Alexander the Great in Paradise Lost, with particular emphasis on his critique of the Dutch East Indies Empire and their English imitators. It considers how Alexander figures mercantile heroism in the age of commerce by focusing on the ways in which Paradise Lost responds to the global spice trade from both sides of the Euro-Asian encounter. The chapter analyzes Milton’s dual characterization of Satan in Paradise Lost as emperor and merchant as well as his depiction of both God and Satan as monarchs. These divergent characterizations of Satan as merchant and as king may be reconciled by recognizing Milton’s allusion to Augustine’s anecdote about the pirate’s critique of Alexander as a tyrant. The chapter also explores colonialism in Paradise Lost, Asia as a significant context for intra-European relations, and Milton’s concern with issues of sovereignty in the East Indies trade.

Hamlet and Arabic Literary Networks

This chapter examines the intercultural resonance between William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Arabic literature and thus with Malay literature. Hamlet is memorable for its graveyard scene which features skulls as stage properties and is linked to the tradition of European memento mori in the visual arts. The play has surprising intercultural resonances with the Arabic cosmopolis of the East Indies in the age of European exploration, and therefore necessitates a reconfiguration of early modern global literary networks. This chapter considers the graveyard scene’s allusion to Alexander the Great and how the anecdote of Alexander and the skulls traveled to England in the form of Naṣīḥat al-mulūk. It suggests that Hamlet’s literary exemplars may derive from an overlooked narrative tradition of young men discoursing on skulls from Arabic mirrors. It also argues for a spatial and temporal realignment of Hamlet as part of global Arabic literary networks.

Islamic Alexanders in Southeast Asia

This chapter explores the ways in which Malay Alexander romances redeploy a medieval discourse of holy war to frame contemporary conflicts. The discussion focuses on the Malay Alexander Romance, Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain (Romance of Alexander the Two-Horned), which features a universal sovereign who united East and West. The chapter reads Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain in the context of the Portuguese conquest of Melaka and considers how it represents global Islam—and its dominant theme of strangers converted to kin. It also examines how a religious empire is gained by technology in the novel, along with the text’s moral critiques of empire. Finally, it analyses the chronicle of Melaka, Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals), its emphasis on the assimilability of outsiders in translatio imperii, its appropriation of Alexander the Great, and how it defines empire as translated from elsewhere by Alexandrian figures embodying “stranger sovereignty.”

Demotic Alexander in Indian Ocean Trading Worlds

This chapter examines the late seventeenth-century Malay prose romance, Hikayat Hang Tuah (Story of Hang Tuah), a maritime epic that projects the figure of Alexander the Great onto a merchant character in a trading world. Hikayat Hang Tuah retells the story of Melaka’s legendary admiral, Hang Tuah, a long-distance trader modeled after the Islamic Alexander. The text is structured around trade embassies to the Mughal and Ottoman Empires, in which Tuah performs the role of the long-distance merchant. The chapter considers Tuah’s kinship diplomacy, his function within Hikayat Hang Tuah’s conception of sovereignty, and how his association with Alexander rescripts the latter’s image. It also explores how Tuah’s outsider identity reworks the Southeast Asian pattern of stranger-kings, of which Alexander was the most important, before concluding with an analysis of Tuah as a commoner or demotic Alexander, who exemplifies the new non-monarchical heroic model of merchant seaborne empires.

Heirs to Rome

This chapter explores the ways in which the Ottomans claimed Alexander the Great and saw themselves as heirs to Rome. More specifically, it examines how diplomatic and literary engagements with the Ottomans helped structure both British and Southeast Asian engagements with each other, coalescing around their competitive imitatio Alexandri. The chapter begins with a discussion of the flourishing diplomatic and trade relations between the peripheries and the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century and how such engagements framed trading ties that the British began to establish with Southeast Asians toward the end of the sixteenth century and in the early seventeenth. It then considers how early modern Ottomans borrowed from the Roman heritage of the Byzantines to forge a culturally-hybrid imperial identity. It suggests that Alexandrian imitations in the peripheries were possible responses to Ottoman claims to universal empire.

From Source to Allusion

This chapter examines the synchronic renewals and the repurposing of Alexander the Great’s image in canonical English and Malay literatures. More specifically, it considers the transmission of the Alexander Romance and its common motifs into English and Malay as well as the shared strand of literary reception that link these traditions together as cousins rather than wholly separate. It also explores how both English and Malay literatures, invoking Alexander to mediate intercultural encounters, use him to fashion a vocabulary for a cultural politics of hybridity. More importantly, English and Malay literary traditions meet in connected themes mediated by Alexander and intersect in their shared deployment of him to figure intercultural relations arising from trade.

Greco-Arabic Mirrors for Barbarian Princes

This chapter focuses on Alexander the Great as an exemplary figure in English and Malay mirrors for princes, deriving from medieval Arabic sources. In particular, it considers Kitāb Sirr al-asrār, known in Latin as Secretum secretorum (Secret of Secrets), believed to be Aristotle’s advice to Alexander. It is a major influence on the early modern Malay Nasihat al-Muluk (Advice for Kings). The chapter considers how the mirrors see foreign others as a source of wisdom by reading Naṣīḥat al-mulūk (“Advice for princes”), Taj us-Salatin (Crown of Kings) and Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers. It also examines Malay adaptation of two themes from Secretum—women’s authority and the art of physiognomy—and how they engaged with shared topoi, which it argues address similar concerns about interactions with foreigners.