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In the 16th century, cloves grew only on a small number of islands in the North Maluku archipelago, of which Tidore and Ternate were the most important. European demand for cloves was so intense — for preserving meat, for medicine, for perfume — that a ship's hold full of cloves was worth a fortune in Lisbon or Amsterdam. The Sultanate of Tidore controlled access to this trade and used that control to extract concessions, weapons, and diplomatic recognition from every European power that arrived in the Maluku.

A fantasy in which the clove trade is the central economic and political engine — in which the Sultan who controls the clove harvest controls the European powers rather than the reverse — gives the maritime economy a power structure that inverts the colonial narrative readers expect. iWrity connects your Tidore fantasy with readers who are ready for that inversion.

The Sultanate of Tidore and the Sultanate of Ternate were neighboring islands separated by a narrow strait, and they were rivals for centuries — for clove dominance, for Portuguese alliance, for Spanish alliance, for Dutch alliance, for control of the smaller islands of the region. The rivalry was structured around the kaicili system: the royal princes who governed satellite territories and who owed loyalty to the Sultan but maintained their own military and political power.

A fantasy in which the two sultanates are locked in a rivalry that is simultaneously destructive and stabilizing — that each needs the other to exist in order to maintain the balance of power that keeps the Europeans from conquering either outright — gives the inter-island politics a structural complexity that readers of maritime fantasy will find immediately gripping.

When Ferdinand Magellan was killed in the Philippines in 1521, his expedition's surviving ship — the Victoria — continued to the Maluku under Juan Sebastian Elcano and arrived at Tidore. The Sultanate of Tidore provided the Victoria with cloves, food, and diplomatic support in exchange for a Spanish alliance against Ternate. The Victoria then sailed westward across the Indian Ocean and around Africa, completing the first circumnavigation of the globe with a cargo of Tidore cloves.

A fantasy set in the period of the Victoria's arrival — when the Sultan of Tidore was negotiating a Spanish alliance that he understood would bring a European war to his islands within a generation — is a story about a ruler who makes a choice with full knowledge of its consequences. iWrity delivers readers who will engage with that choice at the depth it deserves.