Makassar's rise as a trading power began with someone else's catastrophe. When the Portuguese seized Melaka in 1511, displaced Malay merchants needed a new hub, and they found one at Sombaopu, near the mouth of the Jeneberang River, about ten kilometers south of the present city center. Portuguese traders followed from at least the 1540s, using Makassar as a base for reaching the Spice Islands of Maluku farther east. The English East India Company established a post in 1613; the Danish arrived in 1618. By the time the Dutch conquered Portuguese Melaka in 1641, Makassar had become the most extensive Portuguese settlement in Southeast Asia, with several thousand residents served by Franciscan, Dominican, and Jesuit churches. The dual monarchy of Gowa and Tallo maintained eleven fortresses and a fortified sea wall along the coast. The city pulsed with languages, faiths, and currencies -- a global crossroads perched on the southwest corner of Sulawesi.

Makassar's golden age owed much to one man who never held the throne. Karaeng Pattingalloang served as chancellor of the Gowa-Tallo dual kingdom from 1639 until his death in 1654, and he was unlike any statesman the archipelago had produced. Educated partly by Portuguese missionaries, he spoke their language "as fluently as people from Lisbon itself" and read voraciously in Portuguese, Spanish, and Latin. A French Jesuit, Father Alexandre de Rhodes, described Pattingalloang's consuming passion for mathematics and astronomy. Even a Dutch adversary conceded he was "a man of great knowledge, science and understanding." Under his stewardship, Makassarese influence stretched across most of Sulawesi, into East Kalimantan, Lombok, Sumbawa, and parts of Maluku and Timor. When Pattingalloang died, the dual monarchy began to fracture -- and the Dutch, who had waited decades for their opening, were ready.

The end came swiftly after 1654. Sultan Hasanuddin of Gowa dismissed the Tallo chancellors and tried to rule alone. Internal conflicts erupted, the Bugis of Bone rebelled under Prince Arung Palakka, and the VOC threw its full military weight behind the rebellion. In 1667, Dutch forces captured the northern fort of Ujung Pandang. Two years later, they stormed and destroyed Sombaopu in one of the largest battles of 17th-century Indonesia. The VOC rebuilt the captured Ujung Pandang fort, renamed it Fort Rotterdam after their commander's hometown, and made it the center of a reordered city. The free-trade port was finished. A walled Dutch settlement called Vlaardingen grew around the fort, though Arab, Malay, and Chinese merchants gradually returned to trade outside its walls, defying the monopoly in small ways. The town settled into its colonial role as a collection point for copra, rattan, pearls, trepang, sandalwood, and the oil pressed from bado nuts -- an oil so popular as men's hair dressing in Europe that Victorian households draped their chair backs with cloths to protect against the grease. Those cloths were called antimacassars. The city had given its name to furniture accessories an ocean away.

Makassarese mariners did not confine themselves to the archipelago. Beginning around 1700, fleets of perahus -- wooden sailing vessels -- began riding the northwest monsoon south to what is now Arnhem Land and the Kimberley coast of Australia, harvesting trepang, the sea cucumbers prized as a delicacy in Chinese cuisine. In February 1803, the British explorer Matthew Flinders encountered six perahus carrying twenty to twenty-five men each, and their fleet chief Pobasso told him sixty such vessels were then working the north Australian coast. These were not tentative explorers but seasonal professionals who navigated with simple compasses, processed their catch on shore, and rode the southeast trade winds home in April. Their contact with Indigenous Australians predated European settlement by decades, leaving traces in Aboriginal languages, art, and oral histories. Yolngu people from northeast Arnhem Land later traveled to Makassar on the trading boats, and their recollections of the relationship have been preserved through interviews and radio documentaries.

Modern Makassar carries the marks of every hand that shaped it. In 1942, Japanese forces landed and swept aside the thousand-man Dutch garrison. After Indonesian independence in 1945, the city briefly became capital of the State of East Indonesia before the Makassar Uprising of 1950 folded it into the republic. In 1971, the government renamed the city Ujung Pandang, after the old fort the Dutch had captured three centuries earlier. The name stuck for twenty-eight years before Makassar was officially restored in 1999. Today the city is home to nearly 1.5 million people, the largest urban center in eastern Indonesia and one of the country's four principal cities. The old Paotere harbor still hosts pinisi, the wooden sailing ships that are among the last vessels anywhere used for regular long-distance trade. Street vendors along Losari Beach sell pisang epe -- bananas pressed flat, grilled, and drizzled with palm sugar sauce. The coto makassar stew simmers in every neighborhood, rich with spices and offal. Makassar's identity remains what it has always been: a port city where everything arrives, mingles, and becomes something new.