Maluku Islands
Officially, the Maluku Islands or the Moluccas, the islands Renaissance Europeans knew as the Spice Islands, lie east of Sulawesi in the lee of New Guinea and Halmahera towards the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago. There are more than six hundred islands in the group, including Ceram, Buru, and Ambon, as well as the Banda, Wetar, Babar, Tanimbar, Kai and Aru archipelagos. Their position within Wallacea on the Halmahera Plate places them at the geographical and cultural intersection of Asia and Oceania. The islands' position, at the intersection of four geological plates and two continental blocks, makes them one of the world's most geologically complex and active geological regions.
Historically, the islands were part of the maritime empires that stretched across modern-day Indonesia—Sumatran-based Srivijaya and Javanese Majapahit—before Portuguese, Spanish, English, and Dutch expeditions arrived in the Indies in the 15th and 16th centuries. As the world's only source of the nutmeg, mace, and cloves that brought traders from China, India and Arabia into the Indies, the islands were always going to attract European attention when the
Islanders in the main centres of trade adopted Islam when Arab merchants brought the religion with them; others adopted the various forms of Christianity that arrived with the Europeans two to three hundred years later. Today, the northern islands are largely Mulsim, while Christianity tends to dominate the religious landscape. Local animist beliefs persist in the hinterlands and on the more isolated islands.
Europeans arrived after Afonso de Albuquerque seized Malacca in August 1511 and sent a three-ship expedition under António de Abreu to identify the route to the source of the spices traded in the newly captured city. Although unfavourable winds prevented them from reaching Ternate and Tidore, a month-long stay in Banda delivered a lucrative cargo of nutmeg and other spices.
On the return journey, Francisco Serrão was shipwrecked in northern Ambon, where he established ties with the local ruler and then made his way to Ternate, allied himself with the Sultan, constructed a fortress and headed a mercenary band of Portuguese seamen. His correspondence with his cousin Ferdinand Magellan is generally assumed to have prompted Magellan's attempt to reach the islands from the east without entering the Portuguese hemisphere as defined under the Treaty of Tordesillas.
With Portugal and Spain established in Ternate and Tidore, the Iberian powers bickered over territorial jurisdictions as Spain strengthened its foothold in the Philippines, and Portugal did the same to the south after the local ruler expelled them from Ternate. Dutch traders established a presence on some of the islands from 1599, then set about establishing a monopoly of the spice trade by expelling all their rivals. The Dutch conquest was completed when the sultan of Tidore recognised Dutch sovereignty in 1667. Apart from brief occupations by Britiah (1796 – 1802) and Japanese forces during World War II, the islands remained in Dutch hands until the Dutch officially acknowledged the Republic of Indonesia's independence in 1949.
