Tun Fatimah

Tun Fatimah (?-?) was a well-known Malaysian heroine and daughter to the Malaccan Bendahara. She was married to Malacca's Sultan Mahmud Shah as one of his consorts after all her male siblings were executed.

Her role in Malay politics

She was the first Malay woman to lead her people like a charismatic sovereign queen. It is said that the Portuguese were more afraid of the Queen than her reigning Sultan husband. She was known to help Tun Perak, a Malaccan bendahara, to lead the Malays in their fight against the invading Portuguese forces in the early 16th century. Unfortunately, the Malays had later lost the war to the more technologically powerful Portuguese army. According to Malaysian historians it was a sly foreign Datuk of Malacca who gave out the secrets to them to conquer the city, and thus had eventually made the Malays lost their control of it. Perhaps the fall of Malacca is also partly due to the Sultan's cruelty. When Malacca fell to Portugal in 1511, it seemed that it was mainly Tun Fatimah's work that expanded the new Malay Johore-Riau from Johore and the Riau islands to parts of Sumatra and Borneo. The Malaccan sultan's power was almost restricted to a figurehead. Tun Fatimah created an alliance with neighbouring kingdoms by letting her children marry the royal families of Aceh, Minangkabau and Borneo.

No one knew how long she had lived for, as well as when and where she died. However, fellow historians of the Malay Archipelago suggested that her tombstone is located in Kampar, Riau on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

Notes

* N.B. the terms "Raja" and "Sultan" are used interchangeably to refer to the Malaccan monarch.

References

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