ALSA 2025 meeting

This paper examines a forgotten part of Indonesian history involving three actors: the Sultanate of Aceh, the Italian government, and the informal emissary Celso Cesare Moreno. Between 1860 and 1873, Aceh attempted to break its diplomatic isolation by seeking protection from European powers, including France, Italy, and the United States. This search, embedded in a hybrid framework of Islamic law, adat, and regional power logic, failed due to the incompatibility of legal languages, the ineffectiveness of self-appointed intermediaries, and the indecision of emerging European actors.
Methodologically, the study combines diplomatic archival research (Italy, NL), textual analysis of Acehnese court chronicles (Hikayat Aceh, Hikayat Perang Sabil), and legal-historical evaluation. Central to the narrative is the case of Celso Moreno, a Piedmontese adventurer who married Princess Fatimah, daughter of Sultan Ibrahim Mansur Syah. Under adat and Islamic norms, this marriage created a form of symbolic adoption, allowing Moreno to act as an emissary. However, his initiative was undermined. Aceh’s initiative sounds erratic but was not completely naive: it reflected a sophisticated attempt to survive through legal innovation. Letters were sent to the Ottoman Empire, Napoleon III, and the US Secretary of State; diplomatic missions were planned and executed; strategic marriages were employed. But all these attempts failed in front of the European/Western system to recognize a non-European legal actor and for the pressure of the national interest of the Kingdom of Netherlands in the region. This paper thus reconstructs a threefold failure: Aceh’s thwarted bid for recognition, the structural limits of informal mediation, and the Italian state’s dismiss of this too much hazardous colonial opportunity. In doing so, it reframes “peace-making” not as a matter of treaty-making per se, but as a historically contingent negotiation between incompatible legal ontologies and national interest alignments.