Ayutthaya had been able to take advantage of growing
maritime commerce as a result of administrative
reorganization under King Trailok (r. 1448-88). A new
ministry, the Mahatthai, was established to supervise civil
matters and to oversee foreign affairs and trade.
• In the early sixteenth century some Portuguese ranked
Ayutthaya with the most powerful continental empires in
Asia, and its prosperity was such that later Thai chroniclers
regarded this period as a golden age.
• the rise of small but thriving exchange centres gave a new
impulse towards the development of larger groupings,
especially in the Philippines and eastern Indonesia. In these
areas there had previously been little need or incentive to
move towards the formation of 'kingdoms', but a more
commercialized environment made increasingly obvious
the value of some form of economic and political
cooperation in order to strengthen links with wider trading
networks• The economic climate of the early sixteenth century
nurtured the movement towards political consolidation, a
movement apparent not only among coastal ports, but
among prominent interior centres as well.
• In the Tai-speaking world Ayutthaya may have dominated
the Menam basin among Lan Na with its important cities of
Chiengmai and Chiengrai, while eastwards lay Lan Sang
which included much of modern day Laos and was focused
on two muang at Luang Prabang and Vientiane. But
throughout Southeast Asia an equally important factor in
the centralizing process was the reputation for religious
patronage which normally accompanied the rise of a
commercial centre.
• The leadership of Demak on Java's north coast, for
example, was based not only on its trading prosperity but
on its fame as a centre for Islamic studies and protector of
the venerated mosque associated with the first Muslim
teachers on Java.