Chess Break!

A moment of great tension: The Portuguese captain Diogo Lopes de Sequeira arrives in Malacca in 1509 with five large ships and leaves the local king and his advisors in great suspicion. The Portuguese captain receives a message then, saying that he has been offered clove and other spices, to be made available for collection ashore on a specific date. And so it happened. Forty days later, thirty Portuguese men were sent to the beach while the son of Utimutiraja, the richest and most powerful person in town, approached with his boats to start the attack. The Javanese men climbed onto the captain’s ship only to find Diogo Lopes de Sequeira playing a board game and stopping to welcome his visitors. The son of Utimutiraja asked him not to. Watching the different pieces and the way they moved, he concluded that the same game was also played in Malacca but with less pieces. The game in question was chess.

The story was told by João de Barros, who believes that the son of Utimutiraja was only trying to save time before the attack. But that moment when the two actors pause, right before the battle, to discuss the pieces and rules of chess inspires even the sixteenth-century chronist to pause his narrative in order to reflect on the invention of the game, according to a Persian source he had read.

Barros mentions how a book written in Farsi called Tarīgh tells the story of the philosopher Acuz Farlu, who had brought the game to a great ancient Persian king, having as many pieces as the number of magistrates that used to rule those lands: “as he wanted to represent, through these pieces, the political government of the kingdom where the game was played. Time, then, decreased and increased the [number of] pieces, forgetting the theory that this philosopher wanted to place in the spirit behind those who rule.” Eventually the game passed on from the Persians to the Arabs, and the latter –according to Barros– were so industrious in it that they even played with no board or pieces, because the movements were known to them by heart.

Time passed and the pause finished. The lookout standing at the top of the ship raises his look away from the game and towards the beach to find the Portuguese men being attacked. “Treason!”, he shouts. Diogo Lopes de Sequeira stands up, the chess board falls and the battle begins. [Inês Bénard]