Alexander The Great From Britain To Southeast Asia Peripheral Empires in The Global Renaissance Su Fang NG Full Chapter

Alexander the Great from Britain to
Southeast Asia: Peripheral Empires in

the Global Renaissance Su Fang Ng
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/alexander-the-great-from-britain-to-southeast-asia-pe
ripheral-empires-in-the-global-renaissance-su-fang-ng/
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 02/01/2019, SPi
CLASSICA L PR ESENCES
General Editors
lorna hardwick james i. porter
CLASSICAL PRESENCES
Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome
inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present.
Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the centuries allows
us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old and new. Classical
Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such
use, and abuse, of the classical past.
Alexander the Great

from Britain
to Southeast Asia
Peripheral Empires in the Global
Renaissance
Su Fang Ng
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Su Fang Ng 2019
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2019
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957602
ISBN 978–0–19–877768–7
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Acknowledgments
Following Alexander into Europe and Asia has been a long labor of love, and along the
way I have incurred many debts to institutions and individuals. I am grateful for all
the support that made this book possible. A Bunting fellowship at the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard in 2005–6 provided an inspiring environment
of highly-accomplished women in which to begin this project. I must thank Judy
Vichniac, then Executive Director, and her staff, as well as fellow fellows, especially
Susan Suleiman, who invited me to contribute an essay to a special issue. When I was
on a Delta Delta Delta fellowship at the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle
Park, I learnt much from discussions with a group of like-minded scholars who formed
a seminar on Master Languages and Vernaculars—Catherine Chin, Mary Ellis Gibson,
Alison Keith, Tim Kircher, Stephen Rupp, David Samuels, and Nigel Smith—as well
as benefiting from the support of the Center’s staff and librarians. In 2009–10 as a
Harrington faculty fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, I enjoyed the intellectual
community of early modernists in the English department. It was a particularly lively
time as it was the inaugural year of the Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies
(TILTS) organized by Wayne Rebhorn and Frank Whigham. At Texas I particularly
appreciated the warm welcome from Hannah Wojciehowski and John Rumrich, whose
work on Milton I have long admired. I also thank the Harrington Foundation for spon-
soring a symposium I organized on “The Seaborne Renaissance”; additional support
was provided by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the South Asia Institute, and
the Harry Ransom Center.
It is a pleasure to thank several other institutions for short-term fellowships and
grants that supported research for this book. The American Philosophical Society and
British Academy awarded me a Joint Fellowship for Research in London, which gave
me a summer in London archives. The International Institute for Asian Studies at Leiden
granted me an affiliated fellowship for a month’s stay. This research was supported in
part by a grant from the Oklahoma Humanities Council and the National Endowment
for the Humanities. (Findings, opinions and conclusions do not necessarily represent
the views of the OHC or the NEH.) In addition, this scholarship was supported by an
Arts and Humanities Faculty Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Working
Group through funding from the Office of the Vice President for Research (VPR) at
the University of Oklahoma Norman Campus. During its tenure, I spent two months
at Leiden University as a visiting scholar courtesy of the Scaliger Institute: I thank
Harm Beukers, at the time the Scaliger chair, and Kasper van Ommen for helping me
get settled. I would also like to acknowledge the scholarship I received from the Dutch
Language Union (Nederlandse Taalunie) for a three-week Dutch immersion course in the
vi Acknowledgments
Netherlands; and tuition grants for language study from the University of Oklahoma’s
Office of the Vice-President for Research.
A number of scholars generously shared their expertise and work, including
Bernadette Andrea, Richmond Barbour, Jonathan Burton, Martin Dzelzainis, Annabel
Teh Gallop, Jane Grogan, Robert Markley, Ian McClure, Thom Richardson, Peter
Riddell, Lisa Voigt, Rienk Vermij, Timothy Wilks, and Paul Wormser. I would also like
to thank Leonard Blussé, who graciously allowed me to audit his graduate course on
the history of European-Asian relations when he was Erasmus Chair at Harvard, as
well as Sharon Achinstein, Chris Chism, Geraldine Heng, Vince Leitch, Curtis Perry,
and Michael Schoenfeldt. I appreciate the opportunities to present work-in-progress
to various audiences. Especially fruitful was the conference on “Alexander the Great in
Medieval and Early Modern Culture” organized by Markus Stock at the University of
Toronto: the collected essays have now been published. I thank the following organ-
izers for kindly inviting me to speak on their campuses: Elizabeth Chang and Samuel
Cohen at the University of Missouri, David Porter who organized a conference on
“Comparative Early Modernities” at the University of Michigan, Jonathan Eburne and
Lovalerie King at Pennsylvania State University, David Loewenstein (then) at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison, Allyson Creasman and Christopher Warren at
Carnegie Mellon, Jennifer Waldron at the University of Pittsburg, Adam McKeown
and Scott Oldenburg at Tulane University, Thomas Martin at College of the Holy
Cross, and not the least, at my alma mater Whitman College, Dana Burgess, who first
got me interested in all things Greek.
The anonymous reviewers read the manuscript with care and their detailed comments
made this book far better. I am grateful for the support of the general editors of the
Classical Presences series, Lorna Hardwick and especially James Porter, and I thank
the press editors, Charlotte Loveridge and Georgina Leighton, for their indispensable
help. I also thank a number of colleagues who welcomed me into their language class-
rooms: Hossam Barakat (Arabic), Ehsan Qasemi and Marjan Serafi-Pour (Persian),
Joseph Sullivan (German), Vincent Vanderheijden (Dutch), and Arthur Verbiest (Dutch
at the Taalunie). Final revisions were completed while on a Solmsen Fellowship at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison. I thank Stewart Scales for drawing the maps. My
thanks also to Virginia Tech for their support: the cost of maps and image permissions
was covered by financial support from the Faculty Book Publishing Subvention Fund.
Librarians and staff at various archives have been very helpful, especially the British
Library, the Royal Asiatic Society in London, and Leiden University Special Collections.
I still remember the day when one librarian at Leiden thoughtfully brought out a stool
for me to stand on so I could more easily photograph an oversized manuscript in its
entirety. Particular thanks are due to the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; the
syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Centre for Research Collections, University
of Edinburgh; and Leiden University Special Collections for permission to quote from
manuscript material. I am also grateful to archives that granted permission to repro-
duce images (noted in the List of Figures). Further thanks are due to journal publishers
Acknowledgments vii
for permission to reuse earlier work. An earlier version of Chapter 9 appeared as

“Pirating Paradise: Alexander the Great, Dutch East Indies, and Satanic Empire in
Milton’s Paradise Lost” in Milton Studies 52 (2011): 59–91, published by Duquesne
University Press. Parts of an article were reworked and incorporated into the book:
“Global Renaissance: Alexander the Great and Early Modern Classicism from the
British Isles to the Malay Archipelago,” special issue on The Idea of Europe, ed. Susan
Rubin Suleiman, Comparative Literature 58.4 (Fall 2006): 293–312, published by Duke
University Press. Brief excerpts of two other articles were also incorporated into the
book: “Dutch Wars, Global Trade, and the Heroic Poem: Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis
(1666) and Amin’s Sya’ir Perang Mengkasar (1670),” Modern Philology 109.3 (February
2012): 352–84, published by the University of Chicago Press (© 2012 by The University
of Chicago. All rights reserved); and “Global Souvenirs: Bridging East and West in the
Malay Alexander Romance,” special issue on The Global Middle Ages, ed. Geraldine
Heng and Lynn Ramey, Literature Compass 11/7 (2014): 395–408, published by Wiley-
Blackwell Publishing (© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.).
My family has been a constant source of support: I thank my father Ng Kim Nam,
who made sure his children got an education, and my mother Chan Lai Kuen, who first
taught us to read in English and Malay. Finally, this book would not have been written
if not for Kenneth Hodges, who believed in the project before I did. His faith in it kept
me going and his love, encouragement, and generosity sustained me.
Nota Bene
I follow Marshall Hodgson’s distinction between the adjective “Islamicate” to refer to
societies where Muslims are dominant and “Islamic” to pertain more specifically to the
religion. Europeanists, however, do not make such distinctions with Christianity. All
translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated or where I quote from published
translations. I use Loeb translations of Greek and Latin texts for their accessibility.
Contents
List of Maps and Figures xi
Introduction: Intimate Strangers—Peripheries in Global Literary Networks 1
Part I. Conjunctions
1. Heirs to Rome 49
2. Islamic Alexanders in Southeast Asia 75
3. Scottish Alexanders and Stuart Empire 113
4. Greco-Arabic Mirrors for Barbarian Princes 149
5. Hamlet and Arabic Literary Networks 179
Part II. Invocations

6. From Source to Allusion: Alexander in Intercultural Encounters 203
7. English Alexanders and Empire from the Periphery 211
8. Millennial Alexander in the Making of Aceh 243
9. Milton, Alexander’s Pirate, and Merchant Empires in the East 277
10. Demotic Alexander in Indian Ocean Trading Worlds 303
Epilogue 333
Timeline of Texts and Events 343

Bibliography 345
Index 399
List of Maps and Figures
Maps
1. Eastern Hemisphere. xiii
2. Southeast Asia. xiv
Figures
0.1 Map of the Spice Islands by Willem Jansz. Blaeu, Molvccae insvla
celeberrimae, Amsterdam, 1630? 6
Harvard Map Collection, Harvard Library.
0.2 Judocus Hondius, Vera totius expeditionis nauticae: description
D. Franc. Draci, Amsterdam?: I. Hondius, 1595 (“Drake Broadside”). 25
Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, https://www.loc.
gov/item/92680608/.
2.1 Opening illuminated pages of Hikayat Iskandar Dhulkarnain, copied by
Enci’ Yahya bin ʿAbdulwahid anak Melaka, 1816. Farquhar MS 2, f.1–2. 82
Reproduced courtesy of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain
and Ireland.
2.2 Detail from “Genealogies of Rulers of Palembang,” copied by
Raden Mochtar bin Raden Rangga Astrawidjaija Abdulla at Palembang,
January 22, 1869 showing descent from Iskandar Zulkarnain.
MS Or. 78, f2. 98
Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Leiden
University Libraries.
2.3 World map, Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq (Entertainment for
He Who Longs to Travel the World), copied from Muhammad al-Idrisi
(c.1110–66) in Cairo, 1553; Gog and Magog (‫ )یأجوج و مأجوج‬are confined by
Alexander’s wall in the bottom left corner. MS Pococke 375, f. 3v–4.
The Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford. 106
Image © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
3.1 [Poly-Olbion. Part 1] Poly-Olbion by Michael Drayton Esqr. [1612],
engraving of prince, fourth page from beginning. STC 7226 copy 1. 142
Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
xii List of Maps and Figures
4.1 Miniature of Aristotle instructing Alexander the Great, from

Kitab Nact al-hayawan (Book of the Characteristics of Animals),
compiled from works by Aristotle and cUbayd Allah ibn Bakhtishu,
Baghdad, c. first half 13th century. MS Or. 2784, f. 96. 154
© The British Library Board.
8.1 English cannon with James I’s coat of arms and cartouche of his
name given to Aceh in 1615; inventory number 1875/07-1-6. 245
Author’s photograph. Museum Bronbeek, Arnhem, the Netherlands.
8.2 Sultan Iskandar Muda’s 1615 letter to King James I. MS Laud Or. Rolls
b. 1 (R). The Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford. 248
Image © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
8.3 Sultan Iskandar Thani of Aceh’s 1636 letter to Prince Fredrik Hendrik
of Holland. MS. Cod. Or. 4818a.I.3. 251
Special Collections, Leiden University Libraries.
9.1 “Gezicht op de stad Bantam” (View of the City of Bantam) by
Pieter Serwouter after Pieter Sibrantsz., 1614–22. Number
RP-P-1886-A-11180.278
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Map 1 Eastern Hemisphere.
Map 2 Southeast Asia.
Introduction
Intimate Strangers—Peripheries in
Global Literary Networks
. . . more kings and princes have written of his deeds [Alexander the Great] than
other historians have written of any king or prince that has ever been; that even
today the Mahometans who despise all other biographies accept and honour his
alone by a special dispensation.
Michel de Montaigne1
When Michel de Montaigne praises Alexander the Great as one of the three most
outstanding of men, he notes Muslim reverence for Alexander as proof of his wide
influence, suggesting the easy translatability of such stories into other kingdoms, cul-
tures, and religions.2 Alexander’s gests spread so widely they were retold in Southeast
Asia even before European arrival. The Southeast Asian Alexander, however, was a
Muslim conqueror, transmitted to the region through a Perso-Arabic literary tradition.
Furthermore, he was claimed as an honored ancestor in royal genealogies, and several
sultans took his Arabic name, Iskandar. When in the early modern period Europeans
started arriving in numbers in Southeast Asia, subsumed under the catch-all term East
Indies, they encountered this alternate Alexander tradition. Shortly after Afonso de
Albuquerque’s stunning victory in capturing the key port city of Melaka in 1511, the
Minangkabau people from the highlands of nearby Sumatra sent an embassy; the
report notes that they incorporated Alexander into their royal traditions:
And just at this very juncture there arrived at Malaca three pangajaoas [boat propelled by oars]
from the kingdom of Menamcabo [Minangkabau], which is at the point of the island of
Çamatra [Sumatra] on the other side of the south, and brought with them a sum of gold, and
they came to seek for cloaths of India, for which there is a great demand in their country. The
men of this kingdom are very well made, and of fair complexion; they walk about always well
dressed, clad in their silken bajus [Malay dress], and wearing their crisis [kris, a Malay short
sword with a wavy blade] with sheaths adorned with gold and precious stones in their girdles.
1
“On the most excellent of men,” Essais II:36, Montaigne 1991: 854.
2
For Montaigne’s knowledge of the Ottoman Empire, see Rouillard 1941: 363–74.
2 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia
These are a people of good manners and truthful character; they are Hindoos [gentios, Gentiles];
they have a great veneration for a certain golden head-dress which, as they relate, Alexander
[the Great] left there with them when he conquered that country.3
Instead of absolute alterity, the Portuguese found commensurability in shared literary

history. The report emphasizes likeness in the antipodeans, describing them as “white”
(alvos) and in such positive terms as “well habituated and true” (bem acostumada, e
verdadeira). The Minangkabau’s “high esteem” (grande estima) for Alexander –
translated as “great veneration” in the nineteenth-century edition—suggests they fall
on the near side of the civilized–barbarian divide. Not fully understanding that the
people they met were Muslim, the Portuguese classified them as gentios (Gentiles,
meaning pagans)—(mis)translated as “Hindoos”—of another nation, non-Christian.
But like Montaigne, they found Alexander revered by strangers, and over the course
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as they came into greater contact with
Islamicate societies, Europeans became increasingly aware of this other reception
of Alexander.
Alexander’s notable translatability should alert us to the connectedness of literary
cultures of East and West, guiding our understanding of early modern literary cultures
and cross-cultural interactions. The Alexander stories—fascinated with strangers
and marvels, thematizing travel and cross-cultural contact, and featuring an impe
rial conqueror as protagonist—offered not only shared motifs for divergent imperial
self-definitions but also provided ways for peoples across Europe and Asia to con-
ceptualize their place in the world. The Alexander legends spread through economic
and political networks connecting the world’s different regions and became a means of
imagining these linkages.
My particular foci are the cultures of Britain and Southeast Asia in the early
modern period of direct contact as Europeans entered the Indian Ocean sphere in
search of spices, with their ultimate goal the Spice Islands (the Moluccas or Maluku)
of eastern Indonesia. Myriad versions of Alexander offer many points of entry into
this transnational body of literature, but the unprecedented meeting of cultures from
the two ends of Eurasia makes early modern Southeast Asia a particularly acute locus
to “map the labyrinth” of a global literary network.4 Of places to find Alexander, Britain
and Southeast Asia are some of the most distant culturally and linguistically. As the
regions came into contact, classical presences in both shaped ideas of empire, of trade,
and of contact with foreigners. In this early modern encounter, their “connected
3
Albuquerque 1964: 3.161–2. The report is included in the narrative compiled by Afonso’s son Braz
and published in Lisbon in 1557: “e neste tempo chegáram tres pangajaoas do reyno de Menamcabo, que
he na ponta da ilha de Çamatra da outra banda do sul a Malaca, e trouxeram somma de ouro, e vinham
buscar pannos da India, de que tem muita necessidade na sua terra. Os homens deste reyno sáo muito
bem dispostos, e alvos, andam sempre bem tratados, vestidos em seus bajus de seda, e crisis com bocaes
de ouro, e pedraria na cinta. He gente bem acostumada, e verdadeira. São gentios. Tem em grande estima
huma carapuça de ouro, que dizem que lhes ali deixou Alexandre, quando conquistou aquella terra”
(Albuquerque 1923: Parte 3, Capitulo 37, 2. 133–4).
4
The phrase is from Akbari 2013: 20.
Introduction: Intimate Strangers 3
istories”—Sanjay Subrahmanyan’s term to refer to “supra-local connections,” wherein

h
“ideas and mental constructs, too, flowed across political boundaries” so that histories
are recognized as “not separate and comparable, but connected”5—included a literary
dimension: the flows of Alexander stories. Given the significance of the early history
of Asia’s interactions with Europe, their connected literary histories of Alexander
constitute an important exemplar for cultural translation.
This book explores parallel literary traditions of the mythic Alexander in Europe
and Southeast Asia. They share a common ancestry as cousins springing from the
same classical sources and shaped by mutual contact with Middle Eastern Islamicate
societies, both in the shared inheritance of medieval Arabic literature and in contem-
porary trade and diplomatic relations, particularly with the Ottoman Empire.
Moreover, these parallel traditions were shaped by cross-cultural encounters arising
from trade and exploration that were starting to connect Britain and Southeast Asia.
The economic stimulation of long-distance trade gave rise to state centralization,
including forceful incorporation of surrounding provinces. The expansionist king-
doms in both archipelagoes were empires of trade. And out of these cross-cultural
interactions they produced parallel discourses of empire. These imperial discourses
pivoted around Alexander the Great (356–323 bce), whose name has long been syn-
onymous with empire. The historical Alexander waged war so successfully—and bru-
tally—that in a short lifetime he subdued an immense territory. Pushing further into
Asia than any Greek before him and overthrowing the great Achaemenid empire,
Alexander’s conquests turned him into a figure of myth. Yoking together East and
West—especially in the symbolic unification of the Susa weddings where he and his
men took Persian brides—Alexander, seemingly, created a universal empire. Even
after death, Alexander became the object of imitation by Roman emperors and many
others, including Southeast Asian sultans.
In the age of early modern exploration Alexander became associated with trade.
European travelers to Asia saw themselves as another Alexander in the East. They
couched the pursuit of long-distance trade in the rhetoric of imperial conquest. Southeast
Asians turned to the example of Alexander to understand their diplomatic relations
with the West, which for them also included the Ottoman empire. Their Alexander
romances tentatively explore Alexander’s role in encouraging East–West trade; later
fictions invoking Alexander in moments of cross-cultural encounter use him as model
first for monarchs and then for merchants. By the eighteenth century, Pierre Briant has
shown, Enlightenment authors—especially Montesquieu in his influential Spirit of the
Laws (De l’esprit des loix, 1748)—developed a full theory of Alexander’s “commercial
revolution,” depicting him as the discoverer of the Indian Ocean who opened up the
East for trade; justifying European imperialism, they saw in Alexander a “sovereign
guided by reason, exercising power based on knowledge, and able to introduce har-
mony and peace in a new world made up exchanges and communications,” in short,
5
Subrahmanyam 1997b: 747–48.
the rational Western ruler reviving a supposedly stagnant “orient.”6 While the image of
Alexander as “conqueror-civilizer” would become a prominent strand in European
Enlightenment discourse at a time when an ascendant Europe was colonizing Asia,
elements of this discourse were already present in earlier representations of Alexander.7
British and Malay versions of the Alexander Romance depict Alexander as a conqueror
who institutes civilization; their literatures associate him with the values, positive and
negative, of contemporary empires of trade.
As trade and exploration expanded knowledge of the world, English and Malay lit-
erary traditions evinced increasing awareness of each other. Their literary traditions
incorporated images of the other in their representations. The literatures of maritime
empires adapted Alexander to reflect local ideas of empire, outsiders, trade, and mar-
vels; he functioned as a transcultural icon through which various cultures mediated
their relationship to the foreign. Reading the varied discourses of Alexander in English
and Malay literatures, this book examines what Barbara Fuchs calls “mimetic rival-
ries”: while focusing on “European dynamics of imperial competition,” she notes that
rivalries “extend across hemispheres because of Rome’s contested nature as imperial
exemplum and predecessor. Thus, Ottomans and Incas engage with a Roman imperial
imagery as they argue for their imperial status.”8 My book turns to Britain and
Southeast Asia’s imperial claims to examine their mimetic rivalries in a shared imitatio
Alexandri. Their retailing of Alexander stories did not happen in a closed system;
rather, increased cross-cultural contact and the consequent need to assimilate new
knowledge generated by that contact made Alexander an especially attractive figure as
a conceptual bridge to the outside world.
The existence of shared literary elements and traditions suggests that the character
of cross-cultural encounters was not the civilizational clash of utterly alien Others but
rather a meeting of distantly-related cultures with overlapping interests and history,
and these parallel traditions (and the interactions between them) shaped major canon-
ical works in both traditions. Comparative literature has long focused on the study of
influences, sources, and allusions, which provide insight into how individual authors
read and wrote; however, study of literary traditions should go beyond influence and
imitation to consider unstated assumptions that define the period’s crucial ideas.
Historicizing the parallel receptions of Alexander traditions in Britain and Southeast
Asia, this book shows how borrowings from a transcultural literary tradition fash-
ioned imperial self-definition.
Traffic in Books
Europe’s eastern “trafficking” focused particularly on Southeast Asia, especially the
famed Moluccas (Maluku) or Spice Islands in eastern Indonesia, whose “ownership,
possession . . . navigation and trade” was the direct cause of a series of negotiations
6
Briant 2017: 158, 150. 7
Briant 2017: 118. 8
Fuchs 2015: 412; see also Fuchs 2001.
between Portugal and Spain that finally ended in the Treaty of Tordesillas.9 The poet
Edmund Spenser praises Queen Elizabeth’s glory by alleging that it extended to the
“margent of the Moluccas,” while John Milton compares Satan to East India ships
sailing from “the Isles / Of Ternate and Tidore, whence Merchants bring / Thir spicie
Drugs.”10 Ternate and Tidore are two islands of the Moluccas (Maluku) or Spice Islands,
whose importance as the only source of nutmeg and cloves far exceeded their size; two
pages are devoted to these tiny islands in Willem Blaeu’s Atlas Maior (1665), the earlier
Atlantis Appendix (1630), and other Blaeu atlases (Figure 0.1). European intervention
in the islands’ local politics served as matter for William Shakespeare’s successor with
the King’s Men, John Fletcher, whose play The Island Princess (1619–21) was so popular
it was adapted four times in the Restoration.11
Southeast Asia’s centrality in European imagination may be discerned from
Portuguese traveler António Galvão’s view of European discoveries as simultaneous
expansion eastward and westward to meet in the Pacific anti-meridian of the Treaty of
Tordesillas, offering, as Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam suggest, “a world-
view in which the imagined centre lies in fact in the Moluccas.”12 The Spice Islands
were the new hub of a globalizing economy, as Europeans found a sea route that
rounded the Cape of Good Hope to obtain spices directly from the source; however,
the historical and cultural center lay westward, in the area defined by Mecca, Jerusalem,
Rome, and Constantinople. How trading kingdoms of the East and West reimagined
themselves in relation to the old cultural center, the theme of this book, is traced in the
elliptical orbits of world literature.
Literary journeys took circuitous paths along trade routes. Trade was not just in
silk, spices, porcelain, and silver but also in books and manuscripts. Asian texts were
acquired for European collections and in the early modern period collections of eastern
works were dearly sought after. One such collection came available in 1625: the famed
Arabist Thomas van Erpe (Erpenius, 1584–1624)’s library of “oriental” manuscripts. In
November 1625, George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, was at the Hague in the
Low Countries in November 1625 pawning England’s crown jewels to raise funds in sup-
port of a Protestant alliance to recover the Palatinate lost to the Spanish in the Thirty
Years’ War. It was an unpopular cause, exacerbated by royal high-handedness: having
ascended the throne only in March that year when his father James I died, already in
August Charles I dissolved Parliament when he was refused further s ubsidies for the
war. But in 1625, the worst of the crises were yet to come, and Villiers had leisure to
pursue cultural interests. An influential patron and collector of art, while abroad he
purchased Erpenius’ manuscript collection for the sum of 500 pounds, thwarting
Leiden University’s months-long effort to acquire it. This collection, which came to
Cambridge University Library in 1632 when Buckingham’s widow finally donated it to
fulfill his intent to build up the library when he was appointed Chancellor in 1626,
9
Brotton 1998: 132. 10
Spenser 2007: 5.10.3; Milton 1998: Paradise Lost 2.638–40.
11
Sprague 1926: 49, 74, 82–6, 123. 12
Alam and Subrahmanyam 2011: 340.
Figure 0.1 Map of the Spice Islands by Willem Jansz. Blaeu, Molvccae insvla celeberrimae, Amsterdam, 1630?
Harvard Map Collection, Harvard Library.
included six Malay manuscripts. One is a commentary on the Qur’ān identifying the
figure of Dhū’lqarnayn from Sura 18 (Sura of the Cave) as Alexander the Great.
The transfer of Alexander in a Malay work to Cambridge was part of a larger early
modern movement of material objects, luxury goods (spices, silk, and porcelain),
ideas, and even people from what was then known as the “East Indies” into Europe.
Exploration had a profound effect: it opened up new natural worlds for scientific study
while material and knowledge exchanges with Asia through commerce led to the
development of medicine and natural history.13 This “trafficking”—a term Jonathan
Burton proposes, from the early modern word “traffique,” to signify not just trade but
also wider, multidirectional forms of cultural intercourse and exchanges14—not only
transformed European material culture—drinking tea from china or spicing foods
with pepper—but also left its mark on art and literature.15 Trafficking with Asia left not
only traces in literary representations and images of the exotic, but also on English lit-
erary forms. Eastern imports—as Miriam Jacobson shows with the imagery of sugar,
horses, bulbs, “orient” pearls, and the concept of zero—modified classical reception to
give English verse a “materially inflected Eastern poetics.”16
The path taken by the idea of Alexander in the Cambridge manuscript, MS Or.
Ii.6.45, Tafsīr sūrat al-Kahfi, reveals the complexity of intertwined literary and trade
networks in the early modern era that connected Southeast Asia with Europe and the
Middle East. The manuscript itself, a duodecimo of 134 pages, presenting Arabic
verses in rubrication interspersed with Malay commentary in black ink, is one of the
earliest extant Malay works of Qur’ānic exegesis. The work’s two major sources,
al-Khāzin (d. 741/1340)’s Lubāb al-ta’wīl fī ma‘ānī al-tanzīl (The Core of Interpretation
in the Meanings of Revelation) and al-Bayḍāwī (d. 685/1286)’s Anwār al-tanzīl wa
asrār al-ta’wīl (The Lights of Revelation and the Secrets of Interpretation) show reli-
ance on Middle Eastern traditions of Qur’ānic commentary that identified Alexander
as Dhū’lqarnayn. In addition, the manuscript shows traces of transcultural traditions
of Alexander, for its commentary on Dhū’lqarnayn (verses 83–98) offers rival Greek
and Persian genealogies. The name is first mentioned in verse 83, in which the Jews ask
prophet Muhammad for the story of Dhū’lqarnayn journeying to the East and West.
The exegesis of the second half of the line, running to about four and a half eleven-line
pages, offers varied opinions on his identity:
Kata Moghaser bahawa nama Dhū’lqarnayn itu Marzaban anak Marzazabah al-Yunani dari-
pada anak Yafith. Yafith [sic] itu anak Noh. Kata setengah nama[nya] Iskandar anak Filis cucu
Qaylasuf Rumi dan Parsi. Kata setengah raja mashrik dan maghrib bahawa raja besar dalam
dunia. Mengata orang dua orang raja Islam dua orang raja kafir. Maka Islam itu Dhū’lqarnayn
dan Sulaiman. Maka yang kafir itu Namrud dan Tajta Naṣar dan al-Dhūlqarnayn itu salah.
[Moghaser says that the name Dhū’lqarnayn [refers to] Marzaban the son of Marzazabah
al-Yunani, who is the son of Japheth. Japheth is the son of Noah. Some say his name is Alexander
13
Cook 2007. 14 Burton 2005: 15–16. 15
Jardine and Brotton 2000; Brotton 2003.
16
Jacobson 2014: 14.
the son of Philip the grandson of Qaylasuf, a Roman and Persian. Some say it is the king of the
east and west that is the great king in the world. People say that two are Muslim kings and two
infidel kings. The Muslims are Dhū’lqarnayn and Solomon. The infidels are Nimrod and Tajta
Naṣar and not Dhū’lqarnayn.]17
Competing exegeses, whether of Dhū’lqarnayn’s identity as Persian or Greek, or of

Alexander’s genealogy, offer varied interpretations. Alexander’s father is Philip, from
the Greek tradition, but he is identified as Roman and Persian. The name Dhū’lqarnayn
has multiple meanings as well: the “two-horned” refers either to world conquest in its
associations with the compass points of East and West, or to a world divided between
two Muslim kings and two unbelievers. The commentary thus weaves together histories
from several traditions: Greek, Persian, and Hebraic. For the history of Qur’ānic exege-
sis in Southeast Asia, the manuscript’s importance lies in representing the kind of writ-
ing produced in early seventeenth-century Aceh in northern Sumatra, its place of
composition, before the period when many exegetical works were destroyed by the
cleric Nuruddin al-Rānīrī, who tried to purge the land of heretical (sufistic) works.18
But its significance goes beyond a local reception of cosmopolitan forms: the manu-
script is only extant today because of the connected history of European trade in
Southeast Asia.
Several of the Cambridge Malay manuscripts came into Erpenius’ hands through
the collecting activities of an East India merchant, Pieter Willemsz. van Elbinck, known
in English records by his maternal surname, Peter Floris. He was already in Southeast
Asia by 1604. One of the Cambridge manuscripts, MS Or. Dd.5.37, a Malay version of
the history of the biblical Joseph (Hikayat Yusuf), concludes with a note indicating that
the copyist was Floris in October 1604, and another, MS Or. Gg.6.40, includes in the
fourth part a Malay-Dutch vocabulary with the note that the Malay was written in Arabic
letters by Peter Willemsz. van Elbinck on 1 June 1604 in Aceh.19 Initially employed by
the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie), Floris chafed at
their restrictions on private trade, complaining, “I cannot imagine what the Hollanders
meane, to suffer these Maleysians, Chinesians and other moores of these contries, and
17
Cambridge MS. Or. Ii.6.45, f. 105v. For the commentary tradition on the name, see Nöldeke et al. 2013:
115 n. 137. Regarding the name Dhū’lqarnayn, Ibn Kathīr mentions Marzaban: “Scholars disagreed regard-
ing his name. . . . It has been narrated in a Hadith that he was from the tribe of Himyar and that his mother
was Roman, and he was called the Philosopher for the excellence of his mentality. However, As-Suhaili
said: his name was Marzaban Ibn Marzabah. This was mentioned by Ibn Hisham who mentioned in
another location that his name was: As-Saʿb Ibn Dhi Mar’id who was the grandfather of the Tababiʿah and
it was him who gave the verdict to the benefit of Ibrahim” (Ibn Kathīr 2001: 130–1). See Arthur Schaade’s
German translation, Ibn Kathīr 1908. If the first letter of the name Qaylafus were fah (‫ )ف‬instead of qaf (‫)ق‬,
the word might be ‫فيلسوف‬, or philosopher.
18
Riddell 1990: 33, which published verses 1–3, 9, 17, 34, 47–9, 75–9; Riddell 2001: 154–60; Riddell 1989;
Riddell 2014. I would like to thank Peter Riddell for sending me a copy of the last article; in an email, he
mentioned that he is completing a full study of the manuscript. The earliest notice of this manuscript
appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, van Ronkel 1896: 9, 47–9. Malay manuscripts may have been
collected in Aceh by Peter Floris (Pieter Wilemsz. Floris van Elbinck) (see also Iskandar 1996: 315).
19
MS Or. Ii.6.45 does not indicate provenance; it is probably acquired by Floris.
to assiste theym in theyr free trade thorough all the Indies, and forbidde it theyr owne
servants, contryemen and bretheren uppon payne of death and losse of goods.”20
In 1609 he sought employment with the English East India Company, and led an
expedition on board the Globe, the East India Company’s seventh voyage, that left in
January 1611 to trade first on the Coromandel coast of India, next Bantam (Banten)
in Java, then Patani on the northern Malay Peninsula, and finally Siam. He died two
months after his return to London in 1615, leaving a journal of the voyage, written in
Dutch and translated into English, of which extracts were printed by Samuel Purchas
in his continuation of Richard Hakluyt’s work, Hakluytus posthumus, or Purchas his
Pilgrimes (1625).
It is worth pausing briefly over Peter Floris’s biography, a man whose many transla-
tions reveal the complexities of the early modern transculturated sphere. In name and
identity, he was translated from Dutch merchant to “English” (even as his surname van
Elbinck suggests an origin on the Baltic coast), entailing the crossing of national lines.
His East Indies travels meant further crossings of political boundaries, not only from
the European sphere to Southeast Asia, but also from polity to polity within Southeast
Asia. Aptly, this much-translated man would himself be engaged in copying and trans-
lating foreign texts. These geo-political crossings resulted in the transformation of his
tongue, as his facility in Malay and interest in its literature show.
Floris’s transculturated European in the Malay world is by no means unique, as
attested by East Indies archives. Europeans learnt Malay and other local languages out
of commercial necessity. Malay was particularly important as the region’s lingua
franca. In the early sixteenth century, António Galvão writes that in the East Indies
“the number of languages is so great that even neighbours do not, so to speak, under-
stand each other. Today they use the Malay tongue, which most people speak, and it is
employed throughout the islands, like Latin in Europe.”21 Two centuries later, Malay’s
importance has not waned: in 1725 François Valentijn, vicar of the Dutch Reformed
Church in Ambon, testifies to its importance: “Certainly Portuguese and the Malay
language are two languages with which one can reach all peoples directly, not only in
Batavia, but indeed through the whole Indies up to Persia.”22 English factors posted in
Java or the Moluccas, the Spice Islands, in archipelagic Southeast Asia learnt Malay to
conduct business. At the English factory in Banten, Floris met Augustine Spaulding,
who was also fluent in Malay. An interpreter for the factory, having lived in Banten for
over a decade, Spaulding, like Floris, was interested in the study of Malay, translating
the Frankfurter Gothard Arthusius’ Latin translation of Dutch Frederik de Houtman’s
20
Floris 1934: 44.
21
Galvão 1971: 75. The original reads: “São tamtas he tão desvairadas, que quasy se não emtemde[m] os
vezinhos huns ha outros, por omde parece que fforão povoadas de companhas entranhas. . . . Prezão-se
aguora do malayo e os mais ho ffalão e servem-se dela por toda terra como latim na Eyropa” (74).
22
The original quotation reads: “Dog de Portugeesche en de Maleitze taal zyn de twee taalen, waar mede
men niet alleen op Batavia, maar zelf door gansch Indiën, tot in Persiën toe, met allerlei volkeren te recht
kan raken” (Valentijn 1724–6: 4.1:367).
handbook of conversational Malay to which is given the title Dialogues in the English
and Malaiane Languages (1614).23 This work of translation was promoted by the East
India Company: their 22 January 1614 minutes mentions “a book of dialogues, hereto-
fore translated into Latin by the Hollanders, and printed with the Malacca tongue,
Mr. Hakluyt having now turned the Latin into English, and supposed very fit for the
factors to learn, ordered to be printed before the departure of the ships.”24 Even in
Japan, the English relied on translation through Malay: John Saris, who opened up
Japan for English trade in 1613, employed an interpreter who translated from Japanese
into Malay: Saris writes that his “Linquist [sic], who was borne in Iapan, and was
brought from Bantam to our ship thither, being well skild in the Mallayan tongue, wherin
he deliured to me what the King spoke vnto him in the Iapan language.”25 By the early
eighteenth century, European grammarians would recommend works like the Malay
Alexander romance, Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain, for the study of good Malay.26
Examples like Floris and his compatriots, Bertrand Romain argues, break down
the divide between amateur collectors and professional philologists.27 The work of
collecting eastern manuscripts depended on efforts of overseas merchants. The
Bodleian Library saw its collection of Arabic manuscripts grow with the patronage of
William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, Chancellor of Oxford from 1630 to 1640,
who donated over a thousand manuscripts between 1635 and 1640—including works
in Malay such as the Hikayat Seri Rama, a Malay version of the Ramayana—amassed
in part through a royal letter he obtained to require the Levant Company to bring back
23
Arthus 1614, a translation of Houtman 1603.
24
Calendar SPC/EIC, I, Doc. no 682 (January 22, 1614); quoted in Bertrand 2013: 144.
25
Saris 1900: 84. When the former daimyo of Hirado, Matsura Hōin, governing as regent for his young
grandson, gave John Saris a diplomatic letter, the latter brought it to Java to be translated into Malay:
“I procured Lackmoy and Lanching, two Chinesa Merchants, to translate the Letter which the King of
Firando in Iapan had deliuered mee to carry to our King James. It was written in China Character and
Language; they translated it into the Malayan, which in English is as followeth, viz.” (195).
26
In his introduction to Tweede Deel van de Collectanea Malaica Vocabularia of Maleische Woordboek-
Sameling, Peter van der Vorm says, “’t boek genaamd hhikaΛjat Λiskander dzuw Λ-lcarnajn, of de ges-
chiedenis van Alexander de Groot, is niet alleen van een seer goed mallays, maar ook van een klaare / en
gemakkelijke stijl / buiten dat het met weynig vreemde woorden opgetooyd is / en dierhalven om de taal te
leeren voor ieder nut” (The book named Hikayat Iskandar Dhū’lqarnayn, of the history of Alexander the
Great, is not only [composed] in very good Malay, but also in a clear and easy style, except that it is embel-
lished with a few foreign words and therefore useful for learning the language for everyone) (Vorm 1708: 8);
and George Hendrik Werndly, Maleische Spraakkunst: “De Historie van Alexander den Groten. De stoffe
van dit boek is gericht om te tonen dat Alexander de Grote, een heer van ‘t Westen en van ‘t Oosten
geworden zynde de gansche wereldt heeft trachten te brengen tot de rechtzinnige lere des geloofs in den
Godsdienst van den propheet Gods Abraham van den vriendt Gods over wien vrede zy! Dit boek is in zeer
goed Maleisch geschreven en met zeer weinig vremde woorden opgetooid als mede van een zeer klaren en
gemakkelyken styl en deshalben zeer nut om daar uit de taal te leren” (The History of Alexander the Great.
The matter of this book aims to show that Alexander the Great, who became a lord of the West and of the
East, has attempted to bring the whole world to the orthodox teaching of faith in the religion of God’s
prophet Abraham, the friend of God, upon whom be peace! This book is written in very good Malay,
embellished with very few foreign words, as well as in a very clear and simple style, and therefore it is very
useful to learn the language from it) (Werndly 1736: 345); my translations.
27
Bertrand 2013.
a manuscript on each ship.28 Other Southeast Asian manuscripts were similarly

acquired: in 1627 two palm-leaf manuscripts in Javanese and Old Sundanese came to
Thomas James, the Bodleian’s first librarian, through his mercantile relatives trading in
Java, while in 1629 another Javanese work—a version of the popular Persian tale of
Amir Hamzah—was donated by William Shakespeare’s patron, William Herbert, the
third Earl of Pembroke, probably acquired through the East India Company, which
Herbert joined in 1611 and of which he became director from 1614.29 These works
came to furnish significant national cultural institutions by way of the circuits of East
Indies trade. National cultural innovations—the Bodleian Library only opened in
1602—were deeply implicated in exchanges with the East.
It is this sort of collecting and engagements with Asia—the cultural translatio of
books and knowledge—that historian Robert Batchelor argues was instrumental to
London’s rise to a global city and influenced its modern developments. Noting the
transmission of manuscripts to London from Southeast Asia—including Malay works
such the Hikayat Bayan Budiman collected by Edward Pococke from Borneo, Laud’s
Hikayat Seri Rama, or William Herbert’s Javanese Amir Hamzah, Caritanira Amir—
Batchelor says, “almost a century before the Arabian Nights became popular in France
and England, collections of stories and plays that circulated widely in Asia in multiple
languages were arriving in London from the port cities of Southeast Asia, suggesting
transcultural models of linguistic exchange.”30 Intriguingly, he suggests that such
exchanges not only affected the development of ideas in London but also in Southeast
Asia: briefly mentioning Southeast Asian works, including those discussed in this
book, he argues, “New strategies of collecting and new kinds of history writing in
Southeast Asia in part responding to English and Dutch activities . . . all suggested not
an imposition of European models in Asia but complex emerging practices of history
writing and archiving.”31 As scholars start doing justice to the full range of materials in
early modern libraries and collections, we need to go beyond simply noting the presence
of so many Asian materials in Western scholars’ hands to reading and analyzing the
texts themselves. Historical revisionism calls for a corresponding literary comparatism.
As imported eastern books filled the shelves of English libraries newly revived after
the depredations of the Reformation, eastern matter came to transform English books,
even literary works. Cambridge MS Or. Ii.6.45’s relation to English culture does not
simply have to do with the amassing of libraries; its citation of Alexander’s Arabic
name is, in a striking convergence, consonant with similar enunciations in English
poetry. This convergence can be seen in Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), a
work of chorography, which though describing British lands—and thus has largely
been read as a writing of nation—is also inflected by the East.32 Far from an inward-
looking parochialism the genre implies, Poly-Olbion’s celebration of England expands
28
Wakefield 1994: 130.
29
For Thomas James, see Batchelor 2011: 122–3. See description of the Amir Hamzah manuscript in
Gallop and Arps 1991: 74–6; Noorduyn 1985: 58–64.
30
Batchelor 2014: 127. 31
Batchelor 2014: 127–8. 32
Helgerson 1992: 117–24.
outward to the globe, viewing eastern places, including key locales in Southeast Asia,
as the proper stage for English action. At the same time, its interest in antiquarianism
takes a global perspective by suggestively linking England to the Islamic East through
the citation of Alexander’s Muslim name, Dhū’lqarnayn, from none other than the
father of English poetry, Chaucer.
Drayton’s ambitious Poly-Olbion was so lengthy a work that while he settled on a
plan by 1598, the first part was not published till 1612 and a second only appeared in
1622.33 Although the poem, as Drayton says, “delivered by a true native Muse,” is
devoted to Britain, it is a Britain connected to the East. The first book of the second
part, “The Nineteenth Song,” on Essex and southern Suffolk, coastal counties north of
London, ventures far beyond Britain’s borders, as its Muse “poynts directly to the East”
to celebrate “Our Brittish brave Sea-voyagers” (“Argument,” 19th Song). One of the
earliest explorers, Ralph Fitch (1550–1611), was the first Englishman to visit Portuguese
Melaka in 1588:
With Fitch, our Eldred next, deserv’dly placed is;
Both travailing to see, the Syrian Tripolis.
…
On thence to Ormus set, Goa, Cambaya, then,
To vast Zelabdim, thence to Echubar, agen
Crost Ganges mighty streame, and his large bankes did view,
To Baccola went on, to Bengola, Pegu;
And for Mallacan then, Zeiten, and Cochin cast,
Measuring with many a step, the great East-Indian wast. (Song 19.237–46)
The numerous foreign place names, including Southeast Asian Melaka, Pegu (Burma),
and Cochin (Vietnam), displace English ones to signal England’s considerable invest-
ment in the overseas trade. Drayton was not the only poet to turn English voyages
into verse. His friend, William Warner wrote a poem of English history, Albions
England (1597), that extols English voyagers, telling the reader to read in Hakluyt “Of
These, East-Indian Goa, South & South-east People moe, / And of their memorable
Names those Toyles did vnder-goe.”34 Richard Hakluyt’s accounts in his Principal
Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discouveries of the English Nation (1589–1600)
were matter for poetry, influencing William Shakespeare, who alludes to Fitch in
Macbeth (1609): “Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’th’ Tiger” (1.3.6). The new
geography, as John Gillies argues in the case of Shakespeare, was central to English
poetic imagination, but he rightly observes that classical geography continued to be
influential, not the least the enduring fascination exerted by classical others populating
the margins of the new maps, and that poets like Shakespeare and Marlowe “combine
ancient and Renaissance forms.”35
33
J. William Hebel, “The Preface” to Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (Drayton 1961: 4.viii–ix). Quotations
are from this edition and given parenthetically.
34
W. Warner 1597: 297, chap. 71. 35
J. Gillies 1994: 182, 60.
This combination is strikingly brought together by Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, interested

in both geography and antiquarianism. Poly-Olbion’s antiquarianism moves beyond
places into linguistic and literary concerns to include Arabic printing: a crude wood-
cut of Alexander’s Arabic name. Drayton’s “Chorographicall Description,” as his s ubtitle
calls it, not only describes the land but also retells ancient stories associated with
place. Thus Drayton asked his friend John Selden, hailed by Milton as “chief of learned
men,” to provide annotations explaining historical allusions.36 Notable in Selden’s
preface, which discusses the reliability of sources, is his long digression on Chaucer.
Complaining that Chaucer’s “Learned allusion” has been misunderstood, he proceeds
to argue that Chaucer (acknowledged in the early modern period as the fount of
English literature) was master of Arabic learning, thus making the English literary
tradition entwined with eastern traditions from its imagined origin.
This surprising claim is based on a gloss on a neologism in Troilus and Criseyde
(c.1382–5) from lines spoken by Criseyde: “I am till God mee better mind send / At
Dulcarnon right at my wits end.”37 Selden rejects the medieval theologian Alexander
Neckam’s derivation of “Dulcarnon” from Latin to identify it instead as Arabic:
It is not Necham, or any else, that can make mee entertaine the least thought of the signification
of Dulcarnon to be Pythagoras his sacrifice after his Geometricall Theorem in finding the
Squares of an Orthogonall Triangles sides, or that it is a word of Latine deduction; but, indeed,
by easier pronounciation it was made of ‫ ذوالقرنني‬.i. Two horned: which the Mahometan Arabians
vie for a Root in Calculation, meaning Alexander, as that great Dictator of knowledge Joseph
Scaliger (with some Ancients) wills, but, by warranted opinion of my learned friend Mr. Lydyat
in his Emendatio Temporum, it began in Seleucus Nicanor, XII. yeares after Alexanders death;
The name was applyed, either because after time that Alexander had perswaded himselfe to be
Jupiter Hammons sonne, whose Statue was with Rams hornes, both his owne and his Successors
Coines were stampt with horned Images: or else in respect of his II. pillars erected in the East
as a Nihil ultra of his Conquest, and some say because hee had in Power the Easterne and
Westerne World, signified in the two Hornes.38
Chaucer’s Criseyde’s expression of perplexity in the linguistic borrowing is the earliest

attestation of Alexander’s Arabic appellation, Dhū’lqarnayn, the two-horned, to appear
in English, though Marco Polo mentions it.39 The term, as Chaucer’s sixteenth-century
36
Milton’s praise of Selden appears in Areopagitica (Milton 1953–82: 2.549).
37
Chaucer 1987: Troilus and Criseyde 3.930–1; Selden modernizes the verse.
38
John Selden, “From the Author of The Illustrations,” in Drayton 1613: sig. A3–A3v.
39
Marco Polo also mentions dhū’lqarnayn in his account of Badashan or Badakhshan (Balascian in
Latin, situated in today’s southeast Tajiskistan and northeast Afghanistan): “Badashan is a Province
inhabited by people who worship Mahommet, and have a peculiar language. It forms a very great kingdom,
and the royalty is hereditary. All those of the royal blood are descended from King Alexander and the
daughter of King Darius, who was Lord of the vast Empire of Persia. And all these kings call themselves in
the Saracen tongue ZULCARNIAIN, which is as much as to say Alexander; and this out of regard for
Alexander the Great” (Polo 1903: 1.157). By the time of early modern print editions, dhū’lqarnayn seems
to be dropping out of the texts. One of the earliest from Venice has this description: “Balassin e una prou-
incia econtrada laqual ha lingua per si & adora macometo. Lo regno de Balassia egrande e ua per heredita;
questi re sono descesi da lo re Alexandro e da lo re Dario de Persia: e quelli fi appelladi Recultari & ea dir
editor, Thomas Speght, notes, is the name for Euclid’s Book 1, 47th p roposition, the
Pythagorean Theorem, showing that a square constructed on each side of any right
triangle would have the largest square equal in area to the sum of the smaller two: the
figure looks as if it has two horns sticking out. In Troilus and Criseyde, Pandarus
wrongly associates it with the 5th proposition, known as fuga miserorum: he asserts,
“Dulcarnon called is ‘fleminge of wrecches’ ” (3.933). Previous attempts to explain the
term fell short of the mark. The first English translation of Euclid, published 1570,
offers the explanation of Pythagoras’ sacrifice of oxen, which Selden rejects in the
passage above.40 Only in the nineteenth century did Walter William Skeat in his
edition of Chaucer point to Selden’s commentary to clear up scholarly perplexity about
the word’s origin.41
Selden’s comments on Chaucer go even further. Praising him for the term “dulcar-
non” ’s aptness in describing Criseyde’s dilemma, Selden imputes to Chaucer a wider
knowledge of Arabic science: “How many of Noble Chaucers Readers never so much as
suspect this his short essay of knowledge, transcending the common Rode? and by his
Treatise of the Astrolabe (which, I dare sweare, was chiefly learned out of Messahalah)
it is plaine hee was much acquainted with the Mathematiques” (xi*). Skeat concurs
with Selden’s assessment of Chaucer’s familiarity with Messahalah—the Latin name of
Māshā’allāh ibn Atharī, an eighth-century astronomer from Persia, whose work was
known in medieval Europe—suggesting the poet’s indebtedness to Māshā’allāh’s work
in Latin translation, Compositio et operatio astrolabii (13th century), a standard teaching
text in the following centuries.42 Engaged in far more than simply source study, Selden
linked the origin of English poetry to Arabic science.
One of a pan-European group of “orientalists,” like his compatriot Thomas Lydiat
and Lydiat’s Leiden opponent Joseph Justus Scaliger, Selden’s historical research was
profoundly comparative. Two years after the first part of Poly-Olbion, Selden published
his Titles of Honour (1614), aiming to collect together all the world’s sovereign titles.
Selden’s research was based on correspondence from foreign monarchs, including
those from Southeast Asia, to England mediated through the East India Company; using
the help of friends with mercantile contacts—Archbishop Laud, Thomas Erpenius,
among others—he constructed, as Robert Batchelor calls it, his “globally comparative
in lingua nostra Alexandro amor de re Alexandri grandi” (Polo 1496: sig. c iiiiv). The first English print edition,
John Frampton’s translation, omits entirely the sentence about what they call themselves (Polo 1579: 29,
sig. C.iii). In the same year, Frampton translated an account of Portuguese voyages to the East Indies and
China that he said confirmed Polo’s account (Frampton 1579).
40
H. Billingsley’s translation of Euclid’s Geometry notes: “This most excellent and notable Theoreme
was first invented of the greate philosopher Pithagoras, who for the exceeding joy conceived of the invention
thereof, offered in sacrifice an Oxe, as recorde Hierone, Proclus, Lycius, & Vitruvius. And it hath bene
commonly called of barbarous writers of the latter time Dulcarnon” (Euclid 1570: f. 58, sig. Q.ii).
41
Chaucer 1894: 479–80 n. 931. For dulcarnoun as mathematical architecture for Troilus, see Hart 1981:
129–70. Incidentally, Skeat’s son, with the same name, was an anthropologist of Malaya.
42
Chaucer 1872: xxiv–xxvi.
work on notions of aristocratic authority and sovereignty.”43 Thirty years prior,

Scaliger’s innovative work, De emendatione temporum (1583), which Lydiat challenged
unsuccessfully, showed what comparative analysis can do, ranging across the geo-
graphical scope of ancient history beyond Greece and Rome to include Persia, Babylon,
and Egypt, and the Jewish nation.44 Scaliger’s note on dhū’lqarnayn exemplifies the
cutting-edge comparative philology of the day in assimilating Arabic sources:
Sed Arabes Muhammedani vocant ‫[ تاريخ ذي القرنني‬sic] Therik dhilkarnain. hoc est ἐποχὴν οὖ
δικέρωτος, vel ‫ تاريخ اليونانني‬aut ‫ اليونانيان‬ἐποχὴν τὦν Ελλήνων. Nam Alexandrum vocant ‫ ذو القرنني‬hoc est
δικέρωτα. Sic vocatur in Alkorano Surath ‫ الكهف‬. Et ibidem paulo inferius: ‫ يا ذا القرنني‬ὢ δίκερως, id
est, O Alexander. Et auctor valde bonus Geographiae in prima parte Climatis tertij ita scribit:
‫ ذو القرنني اعنى السكندر‬ὸ δίκερως, ἠγοῦν Αλέξανδρος. Notum est, quomodo ille Rex credi voluit filius
Ammonis. . . . Ab eo igitur Bicornis potius Alexander, quam proprio nomine a barbaris illis
vocatus est. Nam nullus est ex media faece Arabum, qui non potius agnoscat Alexandrum de
cognomine Bicornis, quam de proprio nomine.45
[But the Arab Muslims call tārikh dhylqarnayn, that is the epoch of the two-horned, either
tārikh al-yunānayn or al-yunānayān epoch of the Greeks. For they call Alexander dhūlqar-
nayn, that is two-horned. Thus is he named in the Qur’ān Sūrah al-Kahf [the Cave]. And in the
same place a little later: yā dhūlqarnayn o two-horned, which is, O Alexander. And the very
good author of Geography in the first part of the third Climate wrote thus: dhūlqarnayn ya’ani
Iskandar o two-horned, that is to say Alexander. It is noted, in which manner that king was able
to believe [himself] the son of Ammon. . . . From this, then, he is called rather Two-horned than
Alexander, the proper name, by those barbarians. For there is no one from the common dregs
of the Arabs who would rather not recognize Alexander from the surname Two-horned than
from his proper name.]
As he moves from Latin to Greek to Arabic, Scaliger’s immense erudition is on full

display. Showing how Alexander acquired the appellation from his self-representation
as the son of Ammon with ram’s horns, found on coins, he emphasizes Muslims’ other
name for Alexander, citing for proof the Qur’ān and the author of a Geography, per-
haps Muhammad al-Idrīsī (published in Arabic in Rome in 1592, and translated into
Latin in 1619), and noting almost universal Muslim use of the appellation. Although
he prefers Lydiat’s authority, later in his edition of Egyptian patriarch of Alexandria,
Eutychius (Sa’id ibn Batriq, d. 940)’s universal history, Selden grudgingly cites Scaliger’s
De emendatione temporum.46 In incorporating multilingual, and especially eastern,
sources, Selden followed Scaliger’s lead.
43
Batchelor, London, 122. See 282 n. 54 on manuscript evidence for Selden’s notes on royal correspondence
and other sources that came by way of the East India Company.
44
Grafton 1975 notes that Scaliger was not the first to combine Near Eastern and Classical studies, but
in doing so more thoroughly than anyone before he pioneered methodological innovations. The authoritative
work on Scaliger’s life and work is Grafton 1983–93.
45
Scaliger 1598: 400–1, sig. Ll 2v–Ll 3. Scaliger spells dhūlqarnayn variously.
46
J. Selden 1642: 159–60. The Arabic word ‫ قرن‬also means “century.”
Indeed, Selden took every opportunity he could to include Arabic (and other
f oreign) scripts—first using woodcuts, later metal types as they became available—to
produce works very much like the Scaliger quotation above, weaving Arabic scripts
into Roman texts. To detractors who think this “the too studious affectation of bare
and sterile Antiquity,” Selden asserted the importance of “oriental” studies for modern
historical research.47 In all these texts that converge on the name dhū’lqarnayn, there
was at least one superficial resemblance: European scholars and the Malay exegete all
performed translation and exegesis on Arabic quotations. The more significant point
to be made about the macaronic texts Selden and others produced is that through
philology they practiced a comparative history that sought to discover relations among
peoples, kingdoms, and religions usually separated by nation, which we might call
race. Arabic, of course, has its own traditions of universal history, which Muslim
scholars like Nuruddin al-Rānīrī (d. 1658) brought to Southeast Asia.
While the polyglot Selden did not read far-eastern languages, he evinced great
interest in the region. One prized possession was a Chinese map showing shipping
routes connecting China to Southeast Asian ports.48 On it Selden could have located
the coast of Johor on the Malay Peninsula where the Dutch captured the Portuguese
carrack Santa Catarina in 1603. Grotius defended this seizure in Mare liberum (1609),
which Selden challenged in Mare clausum (1635). The search for “oriental” knowl-
edge was not simply academic, despite self-effacing jokes about sterile affectations,
but also a shaping influence on international law and European foreign relations.
Even as antiquarian research was aided by eastern discoveries, it supplied ideo-
logical support for further overseas explorations. Selden’s friend Thomas Lydiat
became chronographer and cosmographer to Prince Henry as part of a group that
included Selden and Drayton who were interested in how geography articulates
empire: Lydiat himself proposed establishing colonies in Africa and East India.49
Drayton’s Poly-Olbion shows that this articulation of empire—engaged with “orien-
tal” learning past and discoveries present—can express itself poetically. With Selden’s
annotations, comparative history and philology would be its secure foundation. For
Selden and his associates, the sphere of Arabic literacy, a sphere in which Southeast
Asian texts operated, was no stranger to England.
In their turn to eastern sources to write synthetic histories, European scholars were
early practitioners of Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s connected histories. Attention to the
international contexts of early modern literature and humanist discourse is needed
not only to address contemporary critical concerns but also to place literature in a
historical context. The early moderns were more aware than ever before of the wider
horizons before them in the East.
47
J. Selden 1618: sig. a2v. On Selden’s Arabic studies, see Toomer 1996: 64–71; Brook 2013: 39–44.
48
See Batchelor 2014: 17–22; and Brook 2013. The restored map is now digitized; see the Bodleian site:
http://seldenmap.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/.
49
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. 313, f.32; cited in Cormack 1997: 125, 220–1.
Alexander’s Literary Empire

When early modern European voyages spurred material and cultural exchanges
with Southeast Asia, the regions were not completely alien to each other. Their paral-
lel receptions of the Alexander legend came out of a shared history of classical inher-
itance. Both received forms of the classical tradition preserved through the eighth- to
tenth-century ʿAbbasid translation project in Baghdad of Hellenistic (as well as
Persian and Indian) works into Arabic.50 The translation movement not only pre-
served classical learning but also built on and vitally extended it in new discoveries.
The fruits of Baghdad’s House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Ḥ ikma) was bequeathed to
Europe in a second translation movement, this time centered in Spain (and Sicily) in
the twelfth century, out of increasing contact with the Islamicate world, including
that from the Crusades, of Arabic and Greek into Latin.51 East of Baghdad, Arabic
learning and Islam were carried to Southeast Asia through trade routes in existence
since at least the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750) and that continued in the ʿAbbasid
period, with Sirafi and Omani merchants trading as far as China.52 The classical
inheritance of the ʿAbbasid translation movement emphasized science and philoso-
phy, with little literature translated. ʿAbbasid and earlier Umayyad literary transla-
tion focused on Persian works, ignored by the medieval West but transmitted to the
East.53 Greek literature translated into Arabic was largely what Dimitri Gutas calls
“popular” and “paraenetic” (advice literature).54 Among them were the Alexander
Romance and anecdotes of Alexander found in gnomic and paraenetic literature.
These Alexander materials were inherited by both Britain and Southeast Asia
through complex lines of transmission, pointing to the same origins, with striking
convergences of theme and motif. Importantly, in their connected literary histories,
Alexander became part of their imperial self-definition, imagined in the respective
English and Malay canonical literatures as a key figure in mediating cross-cultural
encounters.
Alexander’s famous conquests brought Hellenistic influences directly to northern
India, but his legend spread over even vaster territories through the Alexander
Romance, a late antique Greek composition, which Ken Dowden calls “antiquity’s most
successful novel.”55 Composed in Alexandria, Egypt sometime after 200 bce and
before the third century ce, the Alexander Romance had a run even more incredible
than Alexander’s own, spawning numerous translations, retellings, and adaptations.56
50
Gutas 1998; Rosenthal 1975; Walzer 1962.
51
Haskins 1927: chapter 9, “The Translators from Greek and Arabic,” 278–302; d’Alverny 1982;
Burnett 1997; Bayt al-Ḥ ikma’s precise nature is disputed, with some scholars terming it an academy while
others argue that it was merely a library, though one director, Salm, was involved in translation (D’Ancona 2016;
Gutas and Bladel 2009).
52
Hourani 1995: 46–50, 61–79; Risso 1995: 24–5. 53
C. Bosworth 2010.
54
Gutas 1998: 194. 55
Dowden 1989: 650.
56
For accounts of the Greek Alexander Romance, see Cary 1967 [1956]; Merkelbach 1977; Ross 1963;
“Introduction” in Stoneman 1991; Jouanno 2002; and Stoneman 2008. Jouanno’s exhaustive study traces
the transformation of the Greek romance from its beginnings to the Byzantine era. For the Syriac and
Retold in a bewildering multitude of tongues, from Indo-European to Semitic to

Turkic and Austronesian languages, its cross-cultural spread exemplified the paths of
what Daniel Selden calls the “text networks” of antiquity, whose boundaries were
defined by the Achaemenid Empire and its successor Levantine-Mediterranean tribu-
tary states.57 In the medieval and early modern period, the Alexander Romance’s prolif-
eration into the furthest peripheries of Eurasia resulted in an incredible diversity of
representations from the courtly Alexander of medieval Europe to Alexander marching
under the banner of Islam. It was incorporated not only into travel accounts like Marco
Polo or Mandeville’s Travels, but also into the Qur’ān. If, as David Damrosch argues,
world literature constitutes works that “circulate beyond their culture of origin,” and is
therefore “a mode of circulation and of reading,” the Alexander Romance, whose global
circulation has been of remarkable extent and duration, is a model of world literature
par excellence.58
Although very different in matter and tone, the Alexander Romance in English and
Malay are distant cousins; deriving ultimately from Pseudo-Callisthenes, they come
from a shared literary lineage. Both English and Malay versions are traced back to a
posited delta (δ) recension. European vernacular versions, including English, come
from the interpolated Historia de preliis, with three recensions derived from the
tenth-century Latin translation by Leo, Archpriest of Naples. Leo rediscovered the
Greek romance while on a diplomatic embassy in Constantinople; originally titled
Nativitas et victoria Alexandri Magni, his work is now best represented by a south
Italian manuscript (c. 1000 ce) in the Bamberg cathedral library.59 George Cary’s com-
prehensive survey of the medieval Alexander considers Leo’s Historia de preliis, which
spawned various derivatives with the same name, to be one of the most important
sources in Europe.60 While no Greek manuscript exists, the (δ) recension of Pseudo-
Callisthenes survives indirectly not only in Archpriest Leo’s Latin version but also in a
sixth-century Syriac prose version. From the Syriac version came the various eastern
derivatives of Pseudo-Callisthenes, including the Malay Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain.
Ethiopic Alexander, see Budge 1989 and Budge 1968. For the Persian Alexander, see Southgate 1978. For
the Arabic Alexander, see Zuwiyya 2001 and Doufikar-Aerts 2010. See also Stoneman et al. 2012.
57
D. Selden 2009; Selden argues, “Between roughly 450 bce and 1450 ce, readers across the Levant,
North Africa, and Europe were united by complex networks of interrelated texts, attested in a multiplicity of
languages, that contemporary scholars call the Ancient Novel,” and suggests, “Historically, the Achaemenid
empire was the first of a series of successive Levantine-Mediterranean tributary states, all of which not only
covered roughly the same ground, portions thereof, or territorial expansions: each adapted Dārayavauš’s
politico-economic model to changing historical circumstances and provided the parameters in which
Hellenistic metaphysics—be it in pagan, Jewish, Christian, or Islamic guise—continued to flourish”
(D. Selden 2012: 19, 33).
58
Damrosch 2003: 4–5.
59
For the Bamberg MS, see Pfister 1913; for medieval European derivatives of Pseudo-Callisthenes, see
Cary 1967: 24–61; for a survey of European sources, see Stoneman 2011: 1–20. Historia de preliis descends
from Leo of Naples’s 10th-century Latin translation of a no-longer extant Greek exemplar from Constantinople
and survives in three independent textual traditions (c. 1000 to the 13th century). For its transmission, see
Pritchard 1992: 6–12 and Merkelbach 1977: 93–108.
60
Cary 1967: 11.
Thus the (δ) recension forms a bridge between Western and Eastern Alexander
romances.
The chains of transmission from Pseudo-Callisthenes to Iran and that of the
Persianate and/or Arabic versions into Southeast Asia, however, are unclear. With
regards to transmission into Iran, scholars dispute the relation between the Middle
Persian and Syriac versions. Theodor Nöldeke traces the Syriac through Pahlavi but
his thesis is challenged by Claudia Ciancaglini, who argues for direct translation of
the Syriac from Greek and only then into Middle Persian. Arabic versions were
translated from Syriac as early as the eighth century but certainly by the ninth, and
from these New Persian versions were rendered, though none are extant and the
medieval Persian tradition itself is a conflation of sources.61 The chain of transmis-
sion from the Arabo-Persian sphere into Malay is similarly contested. P. J. van
Leeuwen, who edited extracts from the work, notes influence from such Islamic
sources as the Qur’ān, Firdawsī’s Shāhnāma (Book of Kings), Islamic legends and
hādith, but believes the work to correspond to al-Suri’s Arabic Alexander Romance,
citing two Cambridge manuscripts, Cambridge Add. MS 3770 and Cambridge Or.
MS 834, both of which refer to their source thus: “Kata Suri” (Says Suri).62 However,
comparing the Malay Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain to the Arabic Berlin MS
Wetzstein II 530, Lode F. Brakel disagrees, arguing that while the first part of the
Malay text is based on the Persian Shāhnāma, in its language it is closer to the Malay
Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiah, also translated from Persian, than to the Berlin
Arabic Alexander; he concludes that the Malay Alexander derived from a “Central-
Asian Arabic adaptation of a Persian text.”63 Sir Richard Winstedt believes the work
to be a compilation, noting that manuscripts in his possession name two authors,
al-Suri and Abdullah ibn al-Mukaffah; C. Hooykaas also believes the romance to
have an Arabic source: “De Malaise Alexander-roman moet uit het Arabisch vertaald
of bewerkt zijn; sterke overenkomst van inhoud met ons bekende handschriften en
eigenaardigheden van stijl maken dit voldoende zeker” (The Malay Alexander romance
must have been translated or adapted from Arabic; the strong agreement of the con-
tents with our known manuscripts and peculiarities of style make this sufficiently
certain)—though there are too many differences to identify a specific Arabic manu-
script as the exemplar.64 Nonetheless, he too sees Firdawsī as an important source.
Influenced by the Persian tradition, Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain gives its hero a
Persian father rather than Pseudo-Callisthenes’ Egyptian Nectanebo.
61
For the Arabic Pseudo-Callisthenes tradition, see Doufikar-Aerts 2010: 13–91, with a stemma (91);
she argues for an earlier dating of the Arabic translation (45, 78–9). Theodor Nöldeke traces the Syriac through
Pahlavi (Nöldeke 1890: 11–18), but the Pahlavi thesis is disputed by Claudia Ciancaglini (Ciancaglini 1998
and 2001); subsequently Kevin van Bladel has restated Nöldeke’s case (Bladel 2007). For overviews, see
Monferrer-Sala 2011; Zuwiyya 2011a; and Rubanovich 2016.
62
Leeuwen 1937: 14–21, 13–14. 63
Brakel 1979: 18, see 11–15.
64
Winstedt 1938a: 1. Hookyaas 1937: 162. Comparing the Arabic al-Suri to van Leeuwen’s Dutch
summary, Doufikar-Aerts 2003: 517–19 finds plot and arrangement of episodes to be very similar.
But Pseudo-Callisthenes was not the only link between European and Southeast
Asian Alexanders. Arabic literary influence meant that the lineages of English and
Malay Alexanders reconnected in the Middle Ages. Alexander stories circulated to
both Britain and Southeast Asia through versions that originated in medieval Arabic
works of the paraenetic sort. The genre of mirrors for princes, or in Arabic, advice for
kings (naṣīḥat al-mulūk, ‫)نصيحة امللوك‬, of Arabic composition—and in particular Secretum
secretorum, known in Arabic as Kitāb Sirr al-asrār (‫كتاب رس الرسار‬, The Book of Secret of
Secrets), and included in Cary’s survey under “The Arabic Group of Texts”—were
transmitted to both ends of Eurasia in whole or in part. The Arabic h eritage coming
out of the ʿAbbasid translation movement mediated an earlier Greek one, and was
shared by Europe and Southeast Asia. Ancient and medieval histories had continuing
effects in the Renaissance, calling out, as Ania Loomba says, for literary practice “to
engage with a longer temporal framework.”65
In both Eastern and Western traditions, though revered for his military exploits,
Alexander remains an ambivalent figure. He was widely imitated by his Hellenistic
successors—the Antigonid, Ptolemaic, Seleucid, and Attalid dynasties—and by Roman
rulers.66 But equally there were hostile responses. Roman stoics like Lucan and Seneca
were antagonistic to him.67 At the end of his Civil War, Lucan depicts Caesar visiting
the tomb of Alexander, describing the latter in savage terms: “There lies the mad son of
Macedonian Philip, that fortunate freebooter, cut off by a death that avenged the
world” (Illic Pellaei proles vaesana Philippi, / Felix praedo, iacet terrarum vindice fato /
Raptus).68 The Younger Seneca uses him as a model of excessive ambition and of
drunken violence.69 Alexander’s overweening ambition is particularly highlighted in
the well-known and oft-retold anecdote of his meeting with the Cynic philosopher
Diogenes of Sinope in Corinth: when Alexander offered Diogenes whatever he
wished for, the sleeping philosopher asked him to “stand out of his sunlight” (ἀπὸ τοῦ
ἡλίοθ δὲ ἀπελθεῖν); Alexander’s reply was said to be “Had I not been Alexander,
I should have liked to be Diogenes” (εἴπερ Ἀλέξανδρος μὴ ἐγεγόνειν, ἠθέλησα ἂν
Διογένης γενέσθαι).70 Also circulating in the early modern English texts I discuss in the
second half of this book, the anecdote contrasts the insatiable tyrant against the
enlightened philosopher who has learnt to give up desire. It is exemplary of the genre of
stories criticizing Alexander: Alexander’s reply suggests admiration of the philosopher.
Such anecdotes were open to complex interpretations. Heinrich Niehues-Pröbsting
traces the story’s growth into more elaborate forms where the fourth and final layer is
anti-Cynic parody, while Richard Stoneman cautions that “Cynic treatments use
Alexander as a ‘tool for thinking with’, not simply as an object of praise or blame,” for by
65
Loomba 2007: 595. 66
Bohm 1989; Spencer 2002; Kühnen 2008.
67
Stoneman 2003a; Fears 1974 argues that there were also positive Stoic representations of Alexander in
Dio and Arrian.
68
Lucan 1962: 591, book 10.20–2. 69
Seneca 1961–2: Epistles 53.10, 53.12, 83.19.
70
Arrian 1976–83: book 7.2.1–2; Diogenes Laertius 1950: book 6.32.
the late Roman Empire, “The figure of Alexander as at once philosopher and a king . . .
comes to the fore.”71
Of the Eastern tradition, the Persian, important as source texts for the Malay
Alexander, has a particularly strong negative strand, unsurprising given Alexander’s
conquest of Persia. As Josef Wiesehöfer notes, there are two Iranian Alexander t raditions:
the first, influenced by Pseudo-Callisthenes, “presents Alexander as a Persian prince
and mighty king, a Muslim sage or even a prophet, whereas the second one character-
izes him as evil incarnate, the ‘devil’s’ henchman and a person who, like no-one else,
brought death and destruction to Eranshahr [the Sasanian Empire],” while the second
is a “Middle-Persian one found in religious (Zoroastrian) and didactic literature,” in
which Alexander is gizistag (accursed) and accused of “ruthlessly persecuting the
Zoroastrian religion and the land of Iran.”72 In the negative tradition of the accursed
Alexander, as Pierre Briant shows, “The great political theme is the shift from the unity
of Iran (under Dārā) to its division (from Iskandar on)” until “Dārā’s true successor,
Arda[s]ir” brought restoration about.73 But the Sasanian Empire also promulgated a
positive image of the conqueror through the reception of the Syriac Pseudo-Callisthenes,
views that are combined in Firdawsī’s Shāhnāma.74 Niẓāmī’s later reworking is even
more positive yet: as Julia Rubanovich notes, in Niẓāmī “The disenchanted peregrinator
of Firdausī is transformed into an accomplished conqueror, unaffected by an Iranian
sensibility. His conquests, however, are propelled by the urge to bring justice to the
oppressed rather than by the ultimate goal of dominating the world.”75 Finding a philo-
sophical emphasis in Islamic literature, Pierre Briant too notes the significant shift in
Alexander’s representation with Islamicization: “It has long been noted that, unlike the
image of Aliksandar in the Pahlevi tradition, that of Iskandar [in the Arabo-Persian
tradition] is positive overall. In fact, he became a hero of Iran.”76 Despite this shift,
Briant argues, there were continuities between the two traditions and the Alexander
Romance may have been adapted in the Sassanid period and integrated into the Middle
Persian chronicle Xvadāy-nāmag (Book of Lords).
The Malay Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain’s Persianate features suggest derivation
(or at least borrowing) from the Iranian tradition, though the chain of transmission is
speculative. If it borrows from Firdawsī, as Brakel and others suggest, it is indebted to
the positive portrayal in the Iskandarnāma (Alexander Book) that derives from
Pseudo-Callisthenes rather than the negative Zoroastrian view from X vadāy-nāmag,
another of Firdawsī’s sources.77 This positive portrayal is shaded by the philosophical
critique of the limits of worldly desire at key points: in the motif of the journey to the
land of darkness from the Islamic exegetical tradition on Dhū’lqarnayn from Sura 18
71
Niehues-Pröbsting 1988: 111–23; Stoneman 2003a: 343, 335; for a positive reading of the anecdote,
see Bosman 2007.
72
Wiesehöfer 2011: 114, 124; see also Abel 1966; Southgate 1977; D. Selden 2013; Gignoux 2007;
Briant 2015: 363–93.
73
Briant 2015: 366–7. 74
Rubanovich 2016. 75
Rubanovich 2016: 219.
76
Briant 2015: 376. 77
For Firdawsī’s amalgamation see Rubanovich 2016: 212–14.
and in the lament of philosophers at Alexander’s funeral from wisdom literature.

Nonetheless, unlike early modern England, which received and recirculated both
positive and negative images to create an ambiguous Alexander, early modern Southeast
Asia tended to tilt towards a decidedly positive representation of the imperial
Alexander.78 In Malay literature, we do not get, for instance, a drunken Alexander
murdering his friend Cleitus; Alexander’s weaknesses are minor lapses from which he
quickly recovers. The idealization of Alexander, as A. B. Bosworth notes, began in
antiquity: even the “historical tradition . . . has been seriously distorted by the practi-
tioners of rhetoric and popular philosophy,” and Plutarch (46–145)’s encomiastic On
the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander, painting a picture of Alexander as “the universal
conqueror who is simultaneously the civilizer and benefactor of mankind,” though
belied by his killing fields, “has been extraordinarily potent in shaping modern views
of Alexander.”79 The Greek Alexander Romance also idealizes Alexander, as Corinne
Jouanna notes, depicting him as reasonable in contrast to a proud Darius.80 Alexander’s
idealization was equally a strand in the Islamic tradition, one that the Malay Alexander
extends with its generally positive portrait of the conqueror who brings Islam and civ-
ilization to the world’s far corners. In Malay, this positive portrait is nuanced by another
strand of the philosophical Alexander, also idealizing, but which considers and debates
questions of rule; this strand influences the ending of the Malay Alexander Romance by
presenting the laments of philosophers on the futility of ambition at Iskandar’s death.
Despite linguistic and cultural divergences, the kinship of English and Malay
Alexander traditions is reflected in striking similarities of narrative motifs and
themes. Both their figurations of Alexander—though one with an ambiguous and the
other with an imperial Alexander—responded to the problematics of cross-cultural
interactions. The Alexander legend offers rich material for the poetics of contact.
Focusing on Alexander’s encounters with the foreign, whether Amazons or the gymn-
osophists of India, the legend is at its core a travel narrative. Even more of a travel text
is the Alexander Romance transmitted through the Arabo-Persian tradition to Southeast
Asia with extended interpolations of Iskandar’s global journeys. It is no surprise that
early moderns would redeploy the Alexander story, a master narrative of contact, to
make sense of new encounters.
Reading for the early modern literary networks traced out by the peregrinations of
the legendary Alexander to the Eurasian peripheries reconceptualizes ideas of the
European Renaissance.81 Two traditional narratives of the Renaissance were that it was
78
Vladimir Braginsky notes that of all the Malay Raja Rum (king of Rome), Alexander was “absolutely
exceptional” (Braginsky 2015b: 78).
79
A. Bosworth 1996: 1, 4; Bosworth notes that Plutarch lies behind the German idea of
Verschmelzungspolitik (policy of fusion) and that of a universal brotherhood promoted by Tarn 1948.
80
Jouanno 2002: 31–3.
81
My borrowing of D. Selden’s term acknowledges his point that “Ancient narratives had a precise
historical function that resists incorporation into any standardizing history of the novel” and that “When
European writers . . . returned to ancient fictional devices . . . they no longer understood what such narra-
tives had meant” (D. Selden 2009: 50).
a European period of recovery of the classics and that it was a European age of
exploration leading to colonialism. Both these narratives have undergone revision
for some time now. The history of literary and cultural transactions between Europe
and the Islamicate world is being recovered, while current studies of Euro-Asian or
Euro-Islamic encounters emphasize transcultural interactions in “contact zones,”
Mary Louise Pratt’s resonant term for “social spaces where cultures, meet, clash and
grapple with each other.”82 In literary studies, David Damrosch identifies a “tectonic
shift . . .from a largely European-oriented discipline to a truly global perspective.”83
By examining how Alexander stories offer a shared frame for British and Southeast
Asian interactions with each other and with the world and how that frame shaped
their literary imaginations, this work contributes to both strands of the ongoing
revision. Responding to Ania Loomba’s observation that while “the relationship of
English literature to Greek or Latin has received sustained attention . . .the ways in
which that relationship was mediated by Arab or Jewish scholarship and traditions
have received very little attention within English studies,”84 this work contributes to
the growing body of scholarship that “re-orients” the Renaissance, rediscovering the
cultural hybridity of the past from East–West transactions and trafficking. Rather than
absolute alterity, East–West relations were marked by cultural exchange and diffusion.
Trading Networks
Parallel East–West receptions of the Alexander legend crossed each other in the early
modern period as European long-distance voyaging took them to Southeast Asia. At the
two ends of the Eurasian trade routes, the myth of Alexander became linked to alterity
and foreign relations; his empire became the model and standard for comparison.
Alexander also became associated with long-distance trade, a link that would be fully
developed in the next century in Enlightenment works that rewrite the history of com-
merce, as Pierre Briant shows, to claim that Alexander initiated the trading revolution
that opened up the East.85 Europeans were not the first to reach Asia, nor did they
introduce long distance trade. Early modern European explorations were built on earlier
classical conquests and trade, but there was already a thriving Indian Ocean trade net-
work. This trade network provided the paths for Alexander’s literary transmission, but
just as importantly, as economic historians have shown, cross-cultural trade stimulated
state-building and thus regional imperial formations.86 Emerging maritime empires
turned to Alexander to shape their self-representation. A brief overview of trade con-
tacts between Britain and Southeast Asia contextualizes my study of their connected
literary histories of Alexander.
82
Pratt 1991, from the term “zona de contacto” first coined by Adorno 1987: 1.xvii–xviii.
83
Damrosch 2006: 99. 84
Loomba 2008: 210. 85
Briant 2017.
86
Abu-Lughod 1991; Chaudhuri 1990; K. Hall 1985; Hodges and Whitehouse 1983.
The Eurasian continent and parts of Africa have long been connected through the
silk routes, both by land and by sea. Long-distance trade voyages between Persia and
China go back to the pre-Islamic Sassanid period; trade between the Middle East and
China continued during the Umayyad and ʿAbbasid caliphates.87 Patricia Risso shows
that with the rise of Islam Muslim merchants expanded into the Indian Ocean, with
such diverse groups as Uighur Turks, Nestorian Christians from Persia, Arab merchants,
and Hindus and Buddhists from South and Southeast Asia found in Tang China
(618–907 ce).88 Janet Abu-Lughod’s seminal work describes a Eurasian world system
from 1250–1350 with “increased economic integration and cultural efflorescence” that
centered in the Middle East and Asia.89 Questioning Immanuel Wallerstein’s claim for
a first world system emerging in fifteenth-century Europe, Abu-Lughod’s work has been
extended by economic historians such as Andre Gunder Frank, Kenneth Pomeranz,
and R. Bin Wong to show the continuing centrality of Asia in this world system, with
Europe gaining an edge only in the late eighteenth century or later.90
The Malay Archipelago was connected to this system by the maritime silk roads. Its
location, straddling the sea route between the two great markets of China and India,
made its coastal cities ideal entrepôts. Southeast Asian port cities were open to cultural
exchanges brought by traveling merchants and sailors, visited, for instance, by the
seventh-century Chinese Buddhist scholar I-Tsing who stopped in Sumatra to study
Sanskrit on his way to India, and by the fourteenth-century Moroccan judge Ibn Baṭūṭah,
who visited Melaka and Sumatra. Europeans entered an active and long-established
trading system criss-crossing the Indian Ocean.
By the time Malay works came to Cambridge in 1632, Britain had been conducting
trade in Southeast Asia for several decades. In his circumnavigation of the world, Sir
Francis Drake reached the Maluku in 1580, where he concluded a trade agreement
with the king of Ternate, who sought English alliance to recover Tidore from the
Portuguese. In Ternate the English found a transnational court, which included four
old men “attired on their heads not much vnlike the Turkes; these they called Romans,
or strangers, who lay as lidgiers there to keepe continuall traffique with this people:
there were also two Turkes, one Italian, as lidgiers: and last of all one Spaniard.”91
Already in this first contact, the English understood the importance of language:
appended to the account of Drake’s voyage in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations is a short
list of “Certaine wordes of the naturall language of Java, learned and observed by our
men there,” many of the words Malay.92 This voyage was celebrated in Dutch engraver
Judocus Hondius’ world map, known as the Hondius “Drake Broadside” map, which
exaggerates the size of the Maluku islands and gives prominent place to Drake’s
Southeast Asian adventures (Figure 0.2).
87
Hourani 1995: 46–50, 61–79. 88
Risso 1995: 24–5.
89
Abu-Lughod 1991: 4; Wallerstein 1974; Fernand Braudel 1992. See Risso 1995: 50–4.
90
A. Frank 1998; Pomeranz 2000; Wong 2000.
91
Drake 1854: 143; for Drake’s account of the Maluku visit, see 137–45. For William Herbert’s involvement
with overseas commerce, see O’Farrell 2011: 152–8.
92
Hakluyt 1969: 11.132–3.
Figure 0.2 Judocus Hondius, Vera totius expeditionis nauticae: description D. Franc. Draci, Amsterdam?: I. Hondius, 1595 (“Drake
Broadside”).
Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, https://www.loc.gov/item/92680608/.
Of the four corner cartouches, while one shows his ship the Golden Hind at anchor
somewhere north of San Francisco Bay, the other three depict it in Southeast Asia. In
chronological order, the bottom left cartouche shows the sultan of Ternate’s canoes
towing the Golden Hind to anchorage (with individually-labeled Maluku islands in the
background); the bottom right depicts the ship running into rocks near the island of
Celebes; and the top right shows the English anchored at a Javanese port.93
However, early diplomacy came to nothing. When the English returned in 1605,
Ternate had already granted the clove monopoly to the Dutch, who were more prompt
with military help: Sir Henry Middleton brought back to King James I a letter from
Sultan Said Syah that pointedly noted the English’s long absence: “for over twenty years
no news at all was received, during which time the late one [the previous king] returned
to the mercy of God. Now I am on the throne, and in the course of my reign I have sired
eleven children, and right till the present there was never any sign from the English of
their desire for an alliance with the people of Maluku.”94 In fact, the English had
attempted a voyage to the Maluku in 1591, but only one of the three ships reached the
Malay Peninsula, where they largely engaged in piracy.95
The English would get a more secure trading foothold in the western archipelago
with the pioneering 1601 voyage of the East India Company led by James Lancaster,
spurred by new information on Portuguese Indies revealed by Jan van Linschoten’s
Dutch Itinerario (1596), translated into English in 1598.96 Reaching the significant
trading center of Aceh in Sumatra, Lancaster found a cosmopolitan port populated by
foreign traders, including earlier Dutch arrivals informing them that “we should be
very welcome to the king, who was desirous to intertaine strangers; and that the
Queene of England was very famous in those parts, by reason of the warres and great
victories which she had gotten against the king of Spaine.”97 News of English defeat of
the Spanish Armada traveled and their reputation had preceded them. Diffusion of
information through long-standing networks of trade meant that the European
encounter with Asia was already structured by prior knowledge. In Aceh they unex-
pectedly found cultural commonalities. At their departure, the sultan invited them to
an exchange of poetry recitation:
And when the generall tooke his leaue the king said vnto him: haue you the Psalmes of David
extant among you? The generall answered: Yea, and we sing them daily. Then said the king:
I and the rest of these nobles about me will sing a Psalme to God for your prosperities, and so
they did very solemnly. And after it was ended the king said: I would heare you sing another
Psalme, although in your owne language.98
Rather than linguistic incomprehension, this episode shows considerable shared

culture between an English monarch, who herself translated the Psalms, and the
93
Hondius 1595.
94
National Archives, SP 102/4/24, quoted in full in Gallop 2003: 417, her translation.
95
Keay 1991: 10–13. 96
Linschoten 1598.
97
Lancaster 1877: 74. 98
Lancaster 1877: 97.
Sultan of Aceh. The ability of both parties to recite in their respective languages lyrics
ascribed to a Hebrew king who ruled a small Middle Eastern kingdom nearly three
millennia ago indicates how both traditions incorporated classical history through
their monotheistic religions—Christianity and Islam—sharing a common descent
from Judaism. Through Islam, Greek and Hebraic stories reached Southeast Asia long
before Europeans arrived.99 While trade drove early modern English exploration and
interest in the East, shared culture aided the cementing of trading partnerships.
Asking for protection of her agents left to establish a factory, Queen Elizabeth’s letter
wishes for “factors. . . [to] learne the language and customes of your subiects, whereby
the better and more louingly to conuerse with them.”100 The first of many, this voyage
left, among others, Augustine Spaulding, in Banten, Java, who produced a handbook
of Malay for English merchants. The conversation—at least at court—is not just of
bullion, balance sheets, and contracts, but also included the performance of canoni-
cal poetic texts in a display of cultural capital.
When the English (and Dutch) arrived in Southeast Asia at the end of the sixteenth
century to bypass the spice trade’s Ottoman and Italian middlemen, the Portuguese had
been there for nearly a century following their 1511 conquest of Melaka. So i mportant
was Melaka that Tomé Pires remarked, “Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on
the throat of Venice.”101 In the fifteenth century, Melaka was the region’s preeminent
trading center with maritime links in the region and with China, India, and beyond.
A prosperous entrepôt, it attracted numerous foreign traders. Shortly after the
Portuguese conquest, Tomé Pires lists more than sixty different ethnicities trading in
Melaka, including many from the Middle East, while the Javanese sailed as far as Aden
in Yemen.102 Southeast Asians were adept sailors: historian Anthony Reid notes, “The
first Portuguese chroniclers described the Javanese around 1500 dominating the
trade in Indonesian waters, including Melaka in the west and Maluku in the east. . . .
Their Melaka-based vessels regularly made the voyage to China,” where they were
feared.103 The fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries were a period of intensive maritime
trade in Southeast Asia that Reid names “the age of commerce.”
Asian maritime trade continued to flourish independent of Europeans. The
Portuguese were unable to monopolize trade. Before the seventeenth century, there
was no increase in the quantity of spices reaching Europe, and Portuguese share of
the clove market was only an eighth of Maluku’s total production; Michael Pearson
99
The sixteenth-century Portuguese adventurer Mendes Pinto encountered natives in Sumatra who
“tell of reading in their chronicles that the queen of Sheba once had a trading post there which supplied her,
presumably, as some claim, through the intermediary of an agent of hers by the name of Naussim, with a
large quantity of gold, which she contributed to the temple of Jerusalem when she visited King Solomon,
by whom she is said to have begotten a son who later became emperor of Ethiopia—commonly known here
in Europe as Prester John” (Pinto 1989: 34–5). Rebecca Catz, Pinto’s editor, suggests that there might be
some truth to the story as Minangkabau was an important source of gold in ancient times (Pinto 552 n. 17).
100
Lancaster 1877: 80. 101
Pires 1944: 2.287. 102
Pires 1944: 2.268, 1.174.
103
Reid 1988–93:2.39; on Southeast Asian shipping and transport, see 2.36–61.
sees the Portuguese as irrelevant since the bulk of spices was consumed in Asia.104
European monopolies were fragile. Existing Asian networks persisted and simply
rerouted to bypass the loci of European control, as was the case after Portuguese cap-
ture of Melaka. Before the Portuguese, trade was concentrated in Melaka, but after
several other ports in the region rose to prominence in the sixteenth century—Patani,
Johor, Pahang, Aceh, and Banten—as did Dutch Batavia in the mid-seventeenth.105
The English themselves pursued trade in these several places. The newly-prominent
states also produced literary works responding to the reconfigured trading networks,
for instance, Johor’s Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals) and Aceh’s Hikayat Aceh, which
I discuss in this book.
As many scholars have argued, this period was far from the start of the British
Empire. Rather, English and other Europeans insinuated themselves into well-
established Asian networks. Even as late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
European participation in Asian trade depended on bullion: “Asians wanted few
goods from Europe” so that “all Europeans in Asia were in the position of having to
purchase with cash.”106 Even for the most successful European case, the Dutch East
Indies Company, Jonathan Israel notes that “there were limits to what the Dutch
could achieve in Asia by force and diplomacy,” having to contend with not only other
European powers but “also a plethora of powerful Asian states which were by no
means willing simply to acquiesce in Dutch trade supremacy.”107 This was instead, as
Holden Furber calls it, an “age of partnership.”108
The “distant” nature of language and culture did not mean utter incommensurability.
Already in the Middle Ages, under the influence of Ptolemy’s Geography, the archipel-
agoes were perceived to be each other’s antipodes. In the early modern period they
bore structural similarities.109 Both archipelagoes contain small maritime kingdoms
with large imperial ambitions channeled through their appropriations of Alexander
the Great. They are what I call peripheral empires, defined not by territorial conquest
but by trade, with commercial rather than geographical borders. Rather than forming
a barrier, the sea, as Fernand Braudel tells us, drew its different shores into a connected
world; like Mediterranean coastal cities, the maritime states of Britain and Southeast
Asia were incredibly open to oceanic influences. Building on Jacob van Leur’s analogy,
Georges Coedès considers archipelagic Southeast Asia “a veritable Mediterranean
104
Steensgaard 1974: 95–103, 157–69; Thomaz 1981: 101; Pearson 1987: 90.
105
Reid 1988–93: 2.208–14. For the polycentered and delocalized nature of Southeast Asian political
authority, see B. Andaya 1999.
106
Israel 1995: 941. Om Prakash shows that even between 1660 and 1720, with a successful intra-Asian
trade, goods comprised only 12.4 percent of Dutch imports into Bengal and 20.6 percent of English
imports to all of Asia, with bullion making up the rest (Prakash 1994).
107
Israel 1989: 185–6.
108
Furber 1969: 711–21; and Furber 1976. Sushil Chaudhury and Michael Morineau revised Furber’s
characterization to the “Age of Competition” to account for rivalry as well as cooperation (Chaudhury and
Morineau 1999: 9).
109
Leur 1955 identifies similar trading patterns in the ancient Mediterranean, in the Middle East, in
South and Southeast Asia.
formed by the China Sea, the Gulf of Siam, and the Java Sea. Despite its typhoons and
its reefs, this enclosed sea has always provided a link, rather than an obstacle, between
the peoples settled on its shores.”110 In viewing the shores from the sea rather than
seeing landmasses as isolated, we shift from national histories to histories of regions,
connected histories that bring together the far edges of Eurasia.
Peripherality depends on perspective, of course. My use of the term refers to their
imagined relation to (and removal from) the cultural and imperial centers of antiquity
located in the eastern Mediterranean. In the case of Britain, as Kathy Lavezzo shows,
marginality became part of national identity, even virtue.111 While Southeast Asians
did not see themselves as marginalized, they too defined themselves as a world apart,
naming their region the land below the winds. The geographical designation of “land
below the winds” (negeri di bawah angin) has a corollary term, “land above the winds”
(negeri di atas angin), to refer to places elsewhere.112 These terms referencing the
monsoon winds that enabled long-distance travel across the Indian Ocean, as Michael
Laffan notes, are of long-standing usage.113 They parallel but do not duplicate the
East–West dichotomy in European terminology. Rather, like English insular discourse,
archipelagic Southeast Asia thought of their own geography as exceptional. Peripherality
did not mean isolation. Connected to a transcontinental literary culture inherited
from antiquity, the small archipelagic kingdoms of Britain and Southeast Asia appro-
priated cosmopolitan Alexandrian literary idioms to participate imaginatively in ideas
of empire.
Connected Literary Histories

Britain’s encounter with Southeast Asia has for some time now been integral to our
reading of early modern English literary culture—whether as historical contextualiza-
tion or providing texts, in accounts from Hakluyt or Purchas, for analysis. Although its
place has been obscured by the general term “East Indies,” Southeast Asia’s importance
as the source of spices meant that much early exploration focused efforts there. Trade
was cultivated in India to obtain cloth and piece goods easily vendible in Southeast
Asia as European goods were in poor demand, a problem that London directors of the
East India Company discovered even by the Second Voyage.114 The historical turn in
literary studies means that this history of trade has become as important to literary
interpretation as the history of genre. Contextual readings that blur the line between
110
Coedès 1968: 3–4. 111
Lavezzo 2006.
112
Hugh Clifford and Frank Swettenham’s colonial dictionary notes that the phrase di atas angin refers
to “the western countries, with respect to the Malays—India, Persia, Arabia, Europe” while the phrase di
bawah angin refers to “the eastern countries—i.e., the Malay Archipelago, Malay Peninsula, etc.” See entry
for “angin” in Clifford and Swettenham 1844: 63.
113
Michael Laffan argues, “widespread usage of the phrase in Malay texts suggests that the concept is of
long standing and eastern Malay origins” (Laffan 2009: 43).
114
Chaudhuri 1999: 16–17.
literary and historical texts have been particularly important for the literature of
cross-cultural encounters.
However, while the history of contact involved at least two parties, literary inter-
pretation has all too often focused only on the textual productions of one side. Sanjay
Subrahmanyam calls for historians to attend to multiple voices, to “listen closely to
texts, whether in Persian, Sanskrit, or the Indian vernacular languages” when writing
India’s history.115 Likewise, for English studies, Jonathan Burton argues that we need to
“attend to both sides of these [Anglo-Islamic] relationships, and not just metropolitan
English histories.”116 Literatures of non-Europeans were produced out of the same
historical context of encounter and constitute a richer archive than is often assumed.
In his study of European representations of the East Indies, Shankar Raman points to
an episode from Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals), saying, “For there do exist texts—
though unfortunately very few—that document European encounters with Eastern
peoples from indigenous perspectives, thereby opening up related metaphors whose
functions cannot be gleaned from European texts alone.”117 In fact, Sejarah Melayu,
examined in this book, is but one of a not inconsiderable number of Malay works com-
prising an alternative archive of encounter. This encounter is not only with Europeans
but also with significant early modern imperial powers: the Ottomans, the Mughals,
and the Mings. Rather than simply a brief mention, these works deserve a full com-
parative reading. A committed historicism reads English literary works not only in
relation to the English archive but also alongside non-Western literature produced out
of that shared history. Like the historical archive, Malay literature—and not just single
anecdotes—should form part of what Hans Jauss calls the Erwartungshorizont, or
horizon of expectation, of English literature’s aesthetic reception.
The shared literary history of English and Malay Alexanders points to a comparative
literature that reads transculturally in the contact zone, decoupled from the constraints
of national consciousness. History speaks many languages, as does literature. Literary
cultures are not circumscribed by linguistic border patrols, but literary criticism has
too often been balkanized into national language zones. Literary studies favor com-
parisons of languages that are “close”—linguistically or geographically—rather than
“distant” even when some literary crossings have entailed long oceanic journeys. How
can we, as Gayatri Spivak proposes, take “the languages of the Southern Hemisphere as
active cultural media rather than as objects of cultural study”?118 To escape the linguis-
tic colonial trap, we cannot merely listen to Shakespeare’s Welsh MacMorris but must
cross language borders, and develop, in Homi Bhabha’s phrase, an alternate “space of
translation,” to go beyond representations and images.119 As Patricia Palmer argues, to
attend only to English language texts, even when using Edward Said’s “contrapuntal
analysis,” cannot give voice to the marginalized native.120
115
Subrahmanyam 2005: 14. 116 J. Burton 2005: 14. 117 Raman 2001: 25–6.
118
Spivak 2003: 9. 119 Bhabha 1994: 25. 120
P. Palmer 2006: 382; Said 1993: 51.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free

distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or
any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and

Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree
to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be
bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from
the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in
paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be

used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people
who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a
few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic
works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.
See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with
Project Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the
collection of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the
individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the
United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in
the United States and you are located in the United States, we do
not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing,
performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the
work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of
course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg™
mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely
sharing Project Gutenberg™ works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg™ name
associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of
this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its
attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it without
charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also
govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most
countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the
United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms
of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying,
performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this
work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes
no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in
any country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must
appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™
work (any work on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or
with which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is
accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is derived

from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not contain a
notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the copyright
holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in the
United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must
comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through
1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted

with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works posted
with the permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of
this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project

Gutenberg™ License terms from this work, or any files containing a
part of this work or any other work associated with Project
Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this

electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form,
including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you
provide access to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work
in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in
the official version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing

access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the
method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The
fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty
payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on
which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your
periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked
as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information
about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who

notifies you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that
s/he does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and
discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of Project
Gutenberg™ works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of

any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in
the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90
days of receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg™

electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend

considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe
and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating
the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the medium on which they may
be stored, may contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to,
incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a
copyright or other intellectual property infringement, a defective or
damaged disk or other medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except

for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph
1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner
of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party
distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work under this
agreement, disclaim all liability to you for damages, costs and
expenses, including legal fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO
REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH OF
WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE
FOUNDATION, THE TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY
DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE LIABLE
TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL,
PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE
NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you

discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it,
you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by
sending a written explanation to the person you received the work
from. If you received the work on a physical medium, you must
return the medium with your written explanation. The person or entity
that provided you with the defective work may elect to provide a
replacement copy in lieu of a refund. If you received the work
electronically, the person or entity providing it to you may choose to
give you a second opportunity to receive the work electronically in
lieu of a refund. If the second copy is also defective, you may
demand a refund in writing without further opportunities to fix the
problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth in
paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied

warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted
by the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the
Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the
Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any
volunteers associated with the production, promotion and distribution
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless from all liability,
costs and expenses, including legal fees, that arise directly or
indirectly from any of the following which you do or cause to occur:
(a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b)
alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any Project
Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of

Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.
It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and
donations from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the

assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a
secure and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help,
see Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project

Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,

Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to

the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without
widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can
be freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the
widest array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small
donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax
exempt status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating

charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and
keep up with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in
locations where we have not received written confirmation of
compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of
compliance for any particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where

we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no
prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in
such states who approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make

any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of
other ways including checks, online payments and credit card
donations. To donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project

Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed

editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,

including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how
to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.

Alexander The Great From Britain To Southeast Asia Peripheral Empires in The Global Renaissance Su Fang NG Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Alexander The Great From Britain To Southeast Asia Peripheral Empires in The Global Renaissance Su Fang NG Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Alexander the Great from Britain to

Southeast Asia: Peripheral Empires in

Alexander the Great

for permission to reuse earlier work. An earlier version of Chapter 9 appeared as

List of Maps and Figures xi

Introduction: Intimate Strangers—Peripheries in Global Literary Networks 1

Part II. Invocations

Timeline of Texts and Events 343

List of Maps and Figures

xii List of Maps and Figures

4.1 Miniature of Aristotle instructing Alexander the Great, from

2 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia

Instead of absolute alterity, the Portuguese found commensurability in shared literary

Introduction: Intimate Strangers 3

­ istories”—Sanjay Subrahmanyan’s term to refer to “supra-local connections,” wherein

4 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia

Introduction: Intimate Strangers 5

Introduction: Intimate Strangers 7

8 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia

Competing exegeses, whether of Dhū’lqarnayn’s identity as Persian or Greek, or of

Introduction: Intimate Strangers 9

10 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia

Introduction: Intimate Strangers 11

a manuscript on each ship.28 Other Southeast Asian manuscripts were similarly

12 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia

Introduction: Intimate Strangers 13

This combination is strikingly brought together by Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, interested

Chaucer’s Criseyde’s expression of perplexity in the linguistic borrowing is the earliest

14 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia

Introduction: Intimate Strangers 15

work on notions of aristocratic authority and sovereignty.”43 Thirty years prior,

As he moves from Latin to Greek to Arabic, Scaliger’s immense erudition is on full

16 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia

Introduction: Intimate Strangers 17

Alexander’s Literary Empire

18 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia

Retold in a bewildering multitude of tongues, from Indo-European to Semitic to

Introduction: Intimate Strangers 19

20 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia

Introduction: Intimate Strangers 21

22 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia

and in the lament of philosophers at Alexander’s funeral from wisdom literature.

Introduction: Intimate Strangers 23

24 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia

26 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia

Rather than linguistic incomprehension, this episode shows considerable shared

Introduction: Intimate Strangers 27

28 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia

Introduction: Intimate Strangers 29

Connected Literary Histories

30 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free

Section 1. General Terms of Use and

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is derived

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing

• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who

istories”—Sanjay Subrahmanyan’s term to refer to “supra-local connections,” wherein