Sultan Mir, or Amiruddin Iskandar Dulkarna'in (c. 1511 ― 1550s) was the third Sultan of Tidore in Maluku Islands. He had a long and troubled reign from 1526 to the 1550s where he tried to counter the hegemonic ambitions of the Portuguese and their Ternate allies. The global rivalries between Spain and Portugal characterized the period, and the two Iberian powers indiscriminately involved the spice sultanates Tidore and Ternate in their power game.
Succession to the throne
In the 16th century Tidore was the second most important polity in North Maluku after Ternate. The Malukan sultanates generated some wealth through the trade in cloves which attracted merchants from other parts of Asia, and eventually European seafarers. The best cloves supposedly grew in Tidore. The Portuguese, coming from Melaka, established a base in nearby Ternate and, allying with the local elite, made war on Tidore. After a temporary peace agreement in 1526, Sultan al-Mansur was apparently poisoned by a Portuguese physician. He left a large number of children of whom a young man of fifteen years was placed on the throne. This was Mir, whose full royal titles were Sultan Amiruddin Iskandar Dulkarna'in. As soon as al-Mansur was dead, the Portuguese broke the peace and made an armed incursion to Tidore. According Malukan custom, no hostilities should be initiated as long as a ruler lay unburied, and the Tidorese did not expect an attack. The inhabitants fled to the hills while the royal settlement was torched. The behavior of the Portuguese increased local resentment against the Christian Europeans, not only among the Tidore people.
Spanish assistance and further struggles
Bonds of friendship had been tied with the Spanish since the visit of the Magellan expedition in 1521. Spain believed that Maluku fell within its sphere of interest as laid down in the treaty of Tordesillas, and dispatched a new expedition for the Spice Islands under García Jofre de Loaísa in 1524. A large part of the crew including Loaisa himself died during the passage over the Pacific. Of seven ships, only one reached Tidore on 1 January 1527, where they were welcomed as saviours. The ruler of Jailolo on Halmahera also held with Spain against the Portuguese. The two Iberian groups had a few skirmishes but then left each other in peace for the moment, and the Spaniards and their Tidore allies built a fortification on the island. They received a small reinforcement in 1528 when the expedition of Álvaro de Saavedra Cerón reached Tidore via the Philippines. With their support, Tidore and Jailolo expanded their territory at the cost of Ternate, but could not prevent that the Portuguese again attacked and burned the royal settlement in 1529. Sultan Mir's personal reign started in 1529, while the leading politician was his able and respected brother Kaicili Rade. Two of his sisters, including the well-known Nyaicili Boki Raja, were mothers of a succession of Ternatan Sultans, a circumstance that did not prevent the perennial rivalries between the two island kingdoms.
The dwindling Spanish garrison finally left Tidore in 1534, and a new confrontation with Ternate soon followed. The deposed Sultan Dayal of Ternate fled to Mir who was his mother's brother. Mir refused to return him to the Portuguese; on the contrary an alliance began to form between Dayal and the other three Malukan rulers: Mir of Tidore, Alauddin of Bacan and Katarabumi of Jailolo. However, a new and energetic Portuguese captain in Ternate, António Galvão, led a small invasion force that attacked the superior forces of the four kings, which by this time had access to firearms and other European weaponry. Dayal was mortally wounded in the struggle and the other kings were forced to sue for peace. Kaicili Rade conducted the negotiations as his brother's representative. Galvão told him that he would prefer to depose the recalcitrant Mir and appoint Rade as Sultan in his stead, but Rade indignantly refused to betray his brother. It is mentioned that the elite in Tidore already spoke Spanish and Portuguese by this time.