Our third period began when Bone and Soppeng, the two important Bugis kingdoms which suffered most under greater Gowa, joined forces with the VOC. The allies occupied Makassar in 1667 and destroyed Gowa’s entrepôt palace of Somba Opu in 1669. In 1677 the Bone leader Sultan Sahaduddin finally snuffed out all resistance when he occupied Gowa itself. Until his death in 1696, he continued to combine diplomacy and thuggery in monopolizing power within South Sulawesi affairs to an unprecedented degree. Sahaduddin himself was childless but before his death chose a successor in his nephew Alimuddin, who along with his offspring maintained Bone’s pre-eminence in local politics until the mid-eighteenth century (Andaya 1981; Bulbeck 1990).

After the Makassar War, greater Gowa virtually ceased attracting women from external status lineages and instead provided wives (Table 9). Greater Gowa’s Bugis ally, Bulo-Bulo, which was immediately absorbed by Bone after the Makassar War (Andaya 1981), falls in the same pattern. The Bugis kingdoms which greater Gowa had previously dominated, some of whom had also provided greater Gowa with wives, now married greater Gowa’s daughters (Table 9). In accordance with Sahaduddin’s pre-eminence, Bone was dominant, but Soppeng, Siang, Agongnionjok, Sawitto and Sidenreng also drew wives from greater Gowa. So did the eastern Indonesian sultanates, now including Ternate.

Marriage patterns within greater Gowa reflect the reorganization of its internal power structure. The Gowa royalty and nobility provided wives while the Tallok royalty and especially Lekokbodong attracted wives. The Tallok nobility was especially active in both spheres (Table 9). The last point identifies the Tallok nobility as greater Gowa’s “power broker”, a rôle centred on Karaeng Karunrung (TBB6 in Figure 1) who was then the regent and the single most powerful Makassar man. Thus after the Tallok sultan Harrunarasyid fled in the wake of Gowa’s 1677 military debâcle, Karaeng Karunrung managed to maintain the royal Tallok patriline by installing the boy sultan Abdul Kadir (Andaya 1981; Patunru 1983).

Gowa’s eclipse and the rise of Tallok and Lekokbodong reflect the specializations of the various factions within greater Gowa. As detailed elsewhere (Bulbeck 1992) territorial control was primarily the province of Gowa, whereas the noble administrative posts were mostly vested in Tallok and Lekokbodong (Figure 2). The Makassar War and its aftermath grievously diminished the area under greater Gowa’s jurisdiction, but without simplifying greater Gowa’s administration (Bulbeck 1992). Consequently Gowa had become largely redundant to the survival of an organization whose strength now lay in its capacity to accommodate the new territorial overlords, Bone and the VOC.

The rot set in Gowa’s succession when Hasanuddin (G16/TBB4) abdicated after the destruction of Somba Opu. His chosen successor, Amir Hamzah (G17), died in 1674. Amir Hamzah’s half brother, Muhammad Ali (G18), was expelled following Sahaduddin’s occupation of Gowa in 1677. Stability was restored only when Muhammad Ali’s full brother, Abdul Jalil (s10/G19), accepted Gowa’s reduced status as the necessary price (Bulbeck 1990).

Furthermore, Hasanuddin’s three successors either died as young adults or were constrained from taking many wives. They produced few children, none of them a son who survived to maturity (Figure 1). Amir Hamzah was childless. Muhammad Ali left two daughters, one of whom (Karaeng Parang-Parang, “k”) married the Tallok Sultan Abdul Kadir (T11) and gave birth to Tallok’s Sultan Sirajuddin (T12/G21). Abdul Jalil’s only mature child, Karaeng Pattukangang (1), married Sahaduddin’s chosen successor Alimuddin (B16/S17). As the (adopted) son of a Soppeng female raja, Alimuddin later absorbed the Soppeng rule. His three sons by Karaeng Pattukangang serially ruled Bone, and two also came to rule Soppeng (Bulbeck 1990).

When Abdul Jalil died in 1709, Hasanuddin’s other sons were either dead or close to death, and Gowa’s surviving princesses were aged (Bulbeck 1992). The Gowa royalty was vanquished as a patrilineal core and had to include princesses’ sons. As South Sulawesi’s most powerful lineage, Bone-Soppeng forced its claims, and Sultan Ismail (B19/S19/G20) ruled Gowa as the first of his three royal titles. But Bone-Soppeng’s authority waned with the approaching death of Alimuddin. In 1714 Ismail was forced to abdicate in favour of Karaeng Parang-Parang’s daughter, Sirajuddin (T12/G21). Thus the Tallok Sultan Sirajuddin, as a matrilateral grandson within the Gowa royal core from a higher status lineage, ultimately absorbed the Gowa rulership within the Tallok royalty (Bulbeck 1992).

Sirajuddin was preferred over Ismail because a Makassar royal constituted a far more palatable ruler of Gowa than a Bugis royal did (Patunru 1983:76). A fuller explanation notes the depth of Sirajuddin’s ties with the Gowa royalty, compared to Ismail’s which extended back only a generation (Figure 1). Further, very many Makassar nobles were related one way or another to Sirajuddin, and the late seventeenth century flurry of marriages between Bone-Soppeng and greater Gowa was inadequate to repair the difference. This point highlights a key strength of the bilateral component of élite Makassar kinship. Usurpation of a royal title from above could be briefly successful, but it could only be sustained if the appropriate breadth and depth of relationships with the subjects were also established.