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Chapter 2: The Conquests of Sultan Agung
The campaigns of Sultan Agung up to the conquest of Batavia. The newly acquired territories to the east, including Jipang and Madura, were won from Mataram's archenemy Surabaya.
* * *
The Javanese realm of Majapahit, the last and greatest of all Hindu empires of Southeast Asia, collapsed in the fifteenth century. Java would be mired in chaos and disunity until the early seventeenth century. During these two hundred intervening years came momentous changes that would mark the course of history.
The most important of them all, of course, was the coming of Islam. The process by which the faith of Muhammad came to this distant isle remains little-known to this day. It seems reasonable that the proselytizers of the new faith were political leaders as well as religious ones, for they founded little theocratic kingdoms that lasted well into the seventeenth century. It also seems clear that there was great institutional, political, and religious continuity between the Hindu-Buddhist era and the Islamic one. The veneration of regalia (including the greatest of them all, the crown of the kings of Majapahit) continued unabated. The general system of law was much the same, still influenced by ancient Sanskrit laws. Lord Krishna and Lord Rama, too, were still fondly remembered. The indigenous deities – the most important being the Ratu Kidul, or the Goddess of the Southern Ocean – probably remained the most widely worshipped supernatural beings even in the early nineteenth century.
Nevertheless, the transformation was remarkable. By the year 1600, it is certain that most of the island was Muslim, or at least ruled by one. As one Javanese noted: “Already embracing this holy religion is every blade of grass in the land of Java, following the Prophet who was Chosen.” There were no more pigs, and the tinkling bells of the mosque orchestra reverberated all throughout.
Another crucial change was a shift in the geography of power. The very first states on the island had been centered in the fertile rice-fields of Mataram, the south-central portion of Java. But since the tenth century AD, the center of authority had moved away to the eastern third. No longer. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, warlords from Mataram steadily accumulated power to the detriment of both Hindu remnants and Muslim city-states. Even in 1590, one chronicle recounts,
Rongsang brought his dynasty’s project to completion. After fending off attacks early in his reign, he soon turned his attention to the eastern kingdom of Surabaya. Surabaya was the most powerful of all the port cities of Java, a striking contrast to Mataram in many ways. Mataram’s power was in the rice fields of the south, while Surabaya’s future lay in the northern seas; Mataram was an agrarian state, while Surabaya had hedged its bets on commerce; Mataram was steeped in Javanese tradition, while cosmopolitan Surabaya was a center of Islamic scholarship. Perhaps conflict was inevitable.
The Mataram-Surabaya war was gradual, gruesome, but most of all grueling. For a brief few years, the two kings seemed equally matched as they exchanged raids on each others’ territories. Yet the general trend was unmistakable. Mataram raiders escaped or routed their pursuers, while their Surabayan counterparts were beaten off again and again. Mataram alone was successful in besieging and taking towns, while Surabayan troops looked helplessly on. By 1619, when Rongsang sacked and conquered the important port of Tuban, the armies of Mataram were at Surabaya’s very gates.
Surabaya itself was a tougher nut to crack, defended as it was by the mighty River Brantas. Over a course of two hundred miles across the eastern third of Java, the Brantas brings the cool water of the high volcanic valleys all the way down to the lush rice paddies that feed the people of Java and beyond. The river, then, was the economic lifeline of Surabaya. Even militarily, the city lay between multiple branches of the Brantas delta that made it so much harder to take the walls by storm.
Ironically enough, it was this very river that turned out to be the kingdom’s downfall. Mataram’s armies dammed the Brantas and poisoned its tributaries with rotting carcasses. We have no contemporaneous sources from Surabaya, but it must have been Hell on earth. There would have been so little to drink; the odor of rotting flesh and decomposure could hardly have been missed in what little there was. If drinks were so scarce, the situation with food must easily have been even worse. The besiegers had destroyed the rice paddies that supported the tens of thousands of people trapped within the city walls.
The old and blind king of Surabaya surrendered in 1625. He was deported to Karta, capital of Mataram, where he died in obscurity. From that day on, there was no plausible contender to Mataram’s imperium.
With the conquest of the north done and finished, Rongsang looked west with hardly a pause. The west of Java had never been ethnically Javanese. The people there belonged to the Sundanese, a nation closely related to their eastern cousins but always distinguishable from “true Javanese.” Western Java was virtually a world onto itself, with its stony terrain that had resisted even the armies of Majapahit. Yet history and geography were no obstacles for the ambitions of Mataram.
Baureksa, one of the leading commanders of Mataram, soon led an army west to receive the surrender of the Dutch East India Company citadel of Batavia. Batavia was still a small port isolated from its hinterland, positively tiny in size or population compared to Surabaya. But the Dutch were a wild card, a sort of enemy whose tactics and weapons were little known to the Javanese. The little that Baureksa did know about the Dutch must have been quite intimidating. Had they not won victory after victory over the Portuguese, formerly the greatest naval power in the Indian Ocean? Had they not massacred some 12,000 Bandanese – the sole cultivators of nutmeg and a nation whom even the Portuguese could not subdue – just so they could have a little extra flavor on their casseroles? And had they not gone so far to destroy every ship in Mataram’s biggest port?
On August 25, 1628, a vast Javanese fleet arrived in Batavia. The Dutch garrison was alarmed, but relaxed somewhat when they learned why the ships were here. Thank God – they had just come for the trade. Look, gentlemen, the Javanese crew might have said, we have brought all these goods just for the market here. 150 cattle, 12,000 sacks of rice, 27,000 coconuts – we have nothing but good intentions. The Dutch let the ships dock, just one at a time. The Company garrison watched uneasily on guard. Then something seemed awry. More and more Mataram ships arrived from the east, each and every one clamoring loudly that they just wanted to trade. Batavia was still a small town. Were the Javanese so stupid to think that eight thousand people could ever eat a hundred thousand coconuts? Or were the Dutch missing something?
Then other ships arrived from Mataram. This time, they unloaded neither cattle nor coconuts. No – they brought Javanese troops instead, all armed with dagger and musket and in full battle array. This was it. The ships were not here for trade; they were a squadron of Trojan horses, and the Dutch had nearly fallen for the ruse. Jan Pieterszoon Coen, Governor-General of the East Indies (he who had ordered the genocide of the Bandanese), ordered all men drawn back to the castle and opened fire on the Javanese. The suburbs were evacuated and burnt to the ground. The siege had begun. Within a week, Baureksa’s troops were within a pistol-shot of the walls.
A bolder general might have ordered a general assault on Batavia’s walls, and such a tactic would undoubtedly have been catastrophic. Baureksa was rather more astute. He kept up the pressure on the town to try and stop the Dutchmen from finding food outside. In the meantime, his troops discretely dammed the Ciliwung River that flows into the colonial town and polluted the water that still flowed through the embankments. Frustrated and increasingly unnerved by apparent Javanese inaction, Coen led a sortie on October 1 to drive the Javanese from their advanced positions. Baureksa had anticipated that the Dutch would try to break the lines; his artillery and his best musketeers were already amassed around the gates. Several hundreds, including Baureksa’s eldest son, died in the ensuing battle before the Dutch were forced back. Coen himself was severely wounded by a bullet and died the next day. So fell Jan Pieterszoon Coen, founder of Batavia, butcher of Banda.
The rainy season came in November, yet Batavia still had not fallen. Time was running out for the Javanese. Perhaps the surviving Dutchmen dared to hope that Providence had not abandoned them. Then, in December 3, Baureksa burst the banks of the Ciliwung. The river had been dammed for three months, two dry and one wet. Now all its accumulated water was free to run its natural course to the sea – no matter what might lie in its way.
Batavia flooded. Its palms were swept aside, like spiderwebs before elephants. The little brick houses trembled before the river’s sheer force; every chair in the church, it was said, was already on its way to the sea. As the assault of rain befuddled the defenders, Baureksa ordered at long last the assault of the soldiers. Javanese water and Javanese troops attacked the colonial town in unison. In their disarray, the Batavians tried their best. Yet the Dutchmen saw Fort Hollandia fall, saw the gates open, saw the city burn.
It is said that that day was as if some fire spirit had invited the Ciliwung to a dance. Fire, fire was everywhere, spreading and spreading from roof to roof – but water reigned supreme just below the flames, washing away both canal and sea, cleansing the land of all traces of Batavia in its relentless push to the sea.
In 1629, the soldiers of Mataram attacked the kingdom of Banten. Its king, Pangeran Ratu, surrendered in return for as much mercy as possible. What else could he have done? The king was deported to Karta the next month. For the first time in history, all Islamic Java was united now.
* * *
First descriptive entry in the timeline. Woohoo! The next update will probably take longer than a day -- I'm thinking about it being a primary source, probably a Balinese chronicle.
Feel free to criticize the plausibility here if you feel so inclined.
Everything is historical up to and including the arrival of the Javanese ships at Batavia, and even the events before the flooding have some parallels; Coen did indeed attack the Javanese positions with his entire force to drive them further from the walls, though this was October 21 and it was Baureksa and not Coen who was killed. Most of my account comes from an English synopsis of the classic Dutch work "De regering van Sultan Agung, vorst van Mataram, 1613-1645, en die van zijn voorganger Panembahan Seda-ing-Krapjak, 1601-1613" by H. J. de Graaf. For general overviews of Javanese Islam before 1800, see Mystic Synthesis in Java: A History of Islamization from the Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries by M. C. Ricklefs. The quote about Senapati and fireflies is cited in State and statecraft in old Java: A study of the later Mataram period, 16th to 19th century by Soemarsaid Moertono, p. 71.
The campaigns of Sultan Agung up to the conquest of Batavia. The newly acquired territories to the east, including Jipang and Madura, were won from Mataram's archenemy Surabaya.
* * *
The Javanese realm of Majapahit, the last and greatest of all Hindu empires of Southeast Asia, collapsed in the fifteenth century. Java would be mired in chaos and disunity until the early seventeenth century. During these two hundred intervening years came momentous changes that would mark the course of history.
The most important of them all, of course, was the coming of Islam. The process by which the faith of Muhammad came to this distant isle remains little-known to this day. It seems reasonable that the proselytizers of the new faith were political leaders as well as religious ones, for they founded little theocratic kingdoms that lasted well into the seventeenth century. It also seems clear that there was great institutional, political, and religious continuity between the Hindu-Buddhist era and the Islamic one. The veneration of regalia (including the greatest of them all, the crown of the kings of Majapahit) continued unabated. The general system of law was much the same, still influenced by ancient Sanskrit laws. Lord Krishna and Lord Rama, too, were still fondly remembered. The indigenous deities – the most important being the Ratu Kidul, or the Goddess of the Southern Ocean – probably remained the most widely worshipped supernatural beings even in the early nineteenth century.
Nevertheless, the transformation was remarkable. By the year 1600, it is certain that most of the island was Muslim, or at least ruled by one. As one Javanese noted: “Already embracing this holy religion is every blade of grass in the land of Java, following the Prophet who was Chosen.” There were no more pigs, and the tinkling bells of the mosque orchestra reverberated all throughout.
Another crucial change was a shift in the geography of power. The very first states on the island had been centered in the fertile rice-fields of Mataram, the south-central portion of Java. But since the tenth century AD, the center of authority had moved away to the eastern third. No longer. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, warlords from Mataram steadily accumulated power to the detriment of both Hindu remnants and Muslim city-states. Even in 1590, one chronicle recounts,
The rulers of the Eastern territories, who were not yet subject to Mataram, planned an attack on the capital of Mataram, because Senapati [the king of Mataram] could be compared to a fire the size of a firefly’s. It was better to put it out with water as soon as possible, so that it would not spread into a conflagration.
But Mataram’s victory seemed fated by God. This eastern alliance was defeated in battle and quickly spluttered out. Not only did the flames of Senapati survive, it would spread with all of wildfire’s intense vigor. By 1613, when Prince Rongsang (later titled Sultan Agung) came to the throne of Mataram, his fledgling kingdom was by far the largest in Java and arguably the most powerful in all Indonesia.Rongsang brought his dynasty’s project to completion. After fending off attacks early in his reign, he soon turned his attention to the eastern kingdom of Surabaya. Surabaya was the most powerful of all the port cities of Java, a striking contrast to Mataram in many ways. Mataram’s power was in the rice fields of the south, while Surabaya’s future lay in the northern seas; Mataram was an agrarian state, while Surabaya had hedged its bets on commerce; Mataram was steeped in Javanese tradition, while cosmopolitan Surabaya was a center of Islamic scholarship. Perhaps conflict was inevitable.
The Mataram-Surabaya war was gradual, gruesome, but most of all grueling. For a brief few years, the two kings seemed equally matched as they exchanged raids on each others’ territories. Yet the general trend was unmistakable. Mataram raiders escaped or routed their pursuers, while their Surabayan counterparts were beaten off again and again. Mataram alone was successful in besieging and taking towns, while Surabayan troops looked helplessly on. By 1619, when Rongsang sacked and conquered the important port of Tuban, the armies of Mataram were at Surabaya’s very gates.
Surabaya itself was a tougher nut to crack, defended as it was by the mighty River Brantas. Over a course of two hundred miles across the eastern third of Java, the Brantas brings the cool water of the high volcanic valleys all the way down to the lush rice paddies that feed the people of Java and beyond. The river, then, was the economic lifeline of Surabaya. Even militarily, the city lay between multiple branches of the Brantas delta that made it so much harder to take the walls by storm.
Ironically enough, it was this very river that turned out to be the kingdom’s downfall. Mataram’s armies dammed the Brantas and poisoned its tributaries with rotting carcasses. We have no contemporaneous sources from Surabaya, but it must have been Hell on earth. There would have been so little to drink; the odor of rotting flesh and decomposure could hardly have been missed in what little there was. If drinks were so scarce, the situation with food must easily have been even worse. The besiegers had destroyed the rice paddies that supported the tens of thousands of people trapped within the city walls.
The old and blind king of Surabaya surrendered in 1625. He was deported to Karta, capital of Mataram, where he died in obscurity. From that day on, there was no plausible contender to Mataram’s imperium.
With the conquest of the north done and finished, Rongsang looked west with hardly a pause. The west of Java had never been ethnically Javanese. The people there belonged to the Sundanese, a nation closely related to their eastern cousins but always distinguishable from “true Javanese.” Western Java was virtually a world onto itself, with its stony terrain that had resisted even the armies of Majapahit. Yet history and geography were no obstacles for the ambitions of Mataram.
Baureksa, one of the leading commanders of Mataram, soon led an army west to receive the surrender of the Dutch East India Company citadel of Batavia. Batavia was still a small port isolated from its hinterland, positively tiny in size or population compared to Surabaya. But the Dutch were a wild card, a sort of enemy whose tactics and weapons were little known to the Javanese. The little that Baureksa did know about the Dutch must have been quite intimidating. Had they not won victory after victory over the Portuguese, formerly the greatest naval power in the Indian Ocean? Had they not massacred some 12,000 Bandanese – the sole cultivators of nutmeg and a nation whom even the Portuguese could not subdue – just so they could have a little extra flavor on their casseroles? And had they not gone so far to destroy every ship in Mataram’s biggest port?
On August 25, 1628, a vast Javanese fleet arrived in Batavia. The Dutch garrison was alarmed, but relaxed somewhat when they learned why the ships were here. Thank God – they had just come for the trade. Look, gentlemen, the Javanese crew might have said, we have brought all these goods just for the market here. 150 cattle, 12,000 sacks of rice, 27,000 coconuts – we have nothing but good intentions. The Dutch let the ships dock, just one at a time. The Company garrison watched uneasily on guard. Then something seemed awry. More and more Mataram ships arrived from the east, each and every one clamoring loudly that they just wanted to trade. Batavia was still a small town. Were the Javanese so stupid to think that eight thousand people could ever eat a hundred thousand coconuts? Or were the Dutch missing something?
Then other ships arrived from Mataram. This time, they unloaded neither cattle nor coconuts. No – they brought Javanese troops instead, all armed with dagger and musket and in full battle array. This was it. The ships were not here for trade; they were a squadron of Trojan horses, and the Dutch had nearly fallen for the ruse. Jan Pieterszoon Coen, Governor-General of the East Indies (he who had ordered the genocide of the Bandanese), ordered all men drawn back to the castle and opened fire on the Javanese. The suburbs were evacuated and burnt to the ground. The siege had begun. Within a week, Baureksa’s troops were within a pistol-shot of the walls.
A bolder general might have ordered a general assault on Batavia’s walls, and such a tactic would undoubtedly have been catastrophic. Baureksa was rather more astute. He kept up the pressure on the town to try and stop the Dutchmen from finding food outside. In the meantime, his troops discretely dammed the Ciliwung River that flows into the colonial town and polluted the water that still flowed through the embankments. Frustrated and increasingly unnerved by apparent Javanese inaction, Coen led a sortie on October 1 to drive the Javanese from their advanced positions. Baureksa had anticipated that the Dutch would try to break the lines; his artillery and his best musketeers were already amassed around the gates. Several hundreds, including Baureksa’s eldest son, died in the ensuing battle before the Dutch were forced back. Coen himself was severely wounded by a bullet and died the next day. So fell Jan Pieterszoon Coen, founder of Batavia, butcher of Banda.
The rainy season came in November, yet Batavia still had not fallen. Time was running out for the Javanese. Perhaps the surviving Dutchmen dared to hope that Providence had not abandoned them. Then, in December 3, Baureksa burst the banks of the Ciliwung. The river had been dammed for three months, two dry and one wet. Now all its accumulated water was free to run its natural course to the sea – no matter what might lie in its way.
Batavia flooded. Its palms were swept aside, like spiderwebs before elephants. The little brick houses trembled before the river’s sheer force; every chair in the church, it was said, was already on its way to the sea. As the assault of rain befuddled the defenders, Baureksa ordered at long last the assault of the soldiers. Javanese water and Javanese troops attacked the colonial town in unison. In their disarray, the Batavians tried their best. Yet the Dutchmen saw Fort Hollandia fall, saw the gates open, saw the city burn.
It is said that that day was as if some fire spirit had invited the Ciliwung to a dance. Fire, fire was everywhere, spreading and spreading from roof to roof – but water reigned supreme just below the flames, washing away both canal and sea, cleansing the land of all traces of Batavia in its relentless push to the sea.
In 1629, the soldiers of Mataram attacked the kingdom of Banten. Its king, Pangeran Ratu, surrendered in return for as much mercy as possible. What else could he have done? The king was deported to Karta the next month. For the first time in history, all Islamic Java was united now.
* * *
First descriptive entry in the timeline. Woohoo! The next update will probably take longer than a day -- I'm thinking about it being a primary source, probably a Balinese chronicle.
Feel free to criticize the plausibility here if you feel so inclined.
Everything is historical up to and including the arrival of the Javanese ships at Batavia, and even the events before the flooding have some parallels; Coen did indeed attack the Javanese positions with his entire force to drive them further from the walls, though this was October 21 and it was Baureksa and not Coen who was killed. Most of my account comes from an English synopsis of the classic Dutch work "De regering van Sultan Agung, vorst van Mataram, 1613-1645, en die van zijn voorganger Panembahan Seda-ing-Krapjak, 1601-1613" by H. J. de Graaf. For general overviews of Javanese Islam before 1800, see Mystic Synthesis in Java: A History of Islamization from the Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries by M. C. Ricklefs. The quote about Senapati and fireflies is cited in State and statecraft in old Java: A study of the later Mataram period, 16th to 19th century by Soemarsaid Moertono, p. 71.
- Every Grass in Java
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