The Factory Restriction Rules
The specific terms binding the Portuguese Restricted Factory since 1511: a fixed trade quota, a ban on stone fortification, no missionary activity outside the compound walls, and no seat on the Merchants' Compact.
The Factory Restriction Rules were negotiated as part of the settlement ending the Strait Stand and have been formally revised only once since, in 1514, to tighten rather than loosen their terms after a dispute over unauthorized compound repairs. Their core provisions have remained constant: a fixed annual trade quota set well below what an unrestricted Portuguese presence would likely achieve; a hard ban on any construction exceeding a single story or using stone rather than timber above the foundation course; a prohibition on missionary activity, or any religious construction, beyond the compound's own walls; and explicit exclusion from the Merchants' Compact's membership.
The Rules are enforced primarily through the same mechanism that funds everything else in Malacca: a Directorate clerk logs every entry and exit at the Factory gate, cargo passing through the compound is subject to Tribute Hall inspection at a higher rate than any other factory on the row, and any construction work is subject to a standing inspection right the other factories do not face.
Successive factors have argued, with some historical justification, that the Rules were written under duress in the immediate aftermath of a military defeat and no longer reflect the current balance of power between Portugal's broader Indian Ocean position and Malacca's local strength. Successive Directorate-Sultanate hearings have consistently held that the terms remain in force until formally and mutually renegotiated -- a position the current Tariff Dispute of 1519 is testing more directly than anything has in nine years (see: Tariff Dispute of 1519).
The Rules' authors, few of whom survive to 1520, are generally credited by the Sultanate Council's own histories with an unusually clear-eyed judgment: that a contained rival, however resentful, was safer than an excluded one with nothing left to lose.
Diverges from: none (a fictional legal instrument specific to this timeline's 1511 settlement, which itself did not occur historically).
Related elements
- The Tariff Code— The annually revised schedule of trade duties that funds the Directorate, the Sultanate's treasury, and the Merchants' Compact's administration in fixed, publicly posted proportions.