I was reading a popular account of the history of the Venetian Republic recently and I noticed that the author appeared to have mixed up Melaka and Maluku. They're really rather different places...

"The spices of Melaka" or something like that - an anachronism when you're talking about 1204 anyway, as the city of Melaka was only founded in c.1400.

Melaka is a city in Malaysia, and it was probably the biggest city in maritime SE Asia in the fifteenth century (although that isn't certain). It was extremely multicultural and a vital link in trade and exchange across Afro-Eurasia at the time.

Medieval Melaka's main homegrown export was probably tin, which is common in the Malay Peninsula, but it was most well-known as a place where commodities from across Afro-Eurasia could be purchased - Chinese ceramics, Indian textiles, Moluccan spices, even Venetian glass.

Maluku is totally different. It's the name for a region near New Guinea in eastern Indonesia, now split into two Indonesian provinces - Maluku and North Maluku. The name seems to have originally referred to the clove-producing islands around Halmahera.

The word is probably from a local Galela or Tobelo word for 'mountain' (Moloko, a form found in the earliest textual references) and not from Arabic, as is sometimes supposed. In English Maluku is often referred as 'the Moluccas'. (Melaka tends to be known in English as Malacca.)

This is where Maluku is. Cloves were produced only on the small islands to the west of Halmahera (where it says "North Maluku" on the map). Nutmeg and mace came from the Banda Islands, which are too small to appear on a map of this scale but which are in the Banda Sea.

Melaka/Malacca is over here in Malaysia - about 2800 kilometres away from Maluku.

For comparison's sake, that's a little further than the distance between Venice and Tromsø:

These kinds of errors are common in historical writing, as is the omission of maritime Southeast Asia entirely. It's hard to know why that is, really: it's not an unimportant or under-populated region.

Indonesia is the fourth biggest country in the world by population. About 270 million people live there. 100 million people live in the Philippines, 32 million in Malaysia, plus several million others in Singapore, Brunei, and Timor Leste.

Java alone has more inhabitants than Japan and about as many as Russia.

And yet the average educated person outside the region has no idea about any of this - not even the most basic knowledge of SE Asian geography, history, or language. That's only going to get worse as SE Asian studies university departments are dismantled across the West.

I suppose the most common way of referring to Maluku in historical writing in English is "the Spice Islands", which is a pretty useless phrase. Other places these days are also referred to as "Spice Islands", including parts of the Caribbean.

Is "Spice Islands" a reference to Indonesia as a whole? To Maluku specifically? It's generic enough that it can serve as cover for the writer's ignorance, and I suppose that's why it pops up more often than it should.

It's hard to find out about Southeast Asia if you don't know local languages (and even if you do). But. Even so. Elementary blunders that wouldn't pass muster when describing Europe or America are routinely made in popular works featuring Southeast Asia.

I don't think that's just ignorance; it's also a certain kind of not-caring. It doesn't matter too much because, well, who's going to object? Someone on Twitter a decade later? Hardly likely to affect sales or reputation...

Anyway, to summarise:

MALUKU: small clove-producing islands in eastern Indonesia

MELAKA/MALACCA: multicultural city in what is now Malaysia founded c.1400 CE

The word "Melaka", incidentally, comes from the Sanskrit word "amlaka", which refers to a species of fruit tree (*Phyllanthus emblica*, a kind of myrobalan).

So the words "Melaka" and "Maluku" are completely unrelated.

Without googling:

Which of these islands is Java?

(poll in next tweet)

Java is...