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Rome Below the Winds: A Southeast Asian Timeline

In the beginning the Great God created Adam and Eve, and their sons and daughters scattered throughout the world. But they did not all go the same way. Some went to the west and became prophets of Islam; these were called the right-hand descendants. The others, the left-hand descendants, went east to the land of Java.

Among the latter was Vishnu, both god and man, who became the first king of Java. There were other great kings after him – Manumasa and Srigati, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. But all material things are ephemeral, as the Javanese have always known. Finally the gods descended upon the earth once again and turned the people into spirits. So the era of humans came to an end on Java. For seven centuries the island lay desolate.

This was all in very ancient times, and in those days the universe was united under a single throne. Its occupant was called the Sultan of Rome, and he was the sovereign of the entire earth, the king of all kings in the world. One day, as the Sultan slept, a divine revelation fell upon him.

“Java has become a deep forest; let people be planted there!” Said the voice of God. “It is the wish of the Almighty that Java become the counterbalance to Mecca, the capital of all the lands east of Persia, a country paid homage from overseas.”

Obeying the decree of the Immaterial God, the Sultan sent the Romans to settle the land of Java. And it is from this mighty race that the people of Java derive.


Thus goes the story in a Javanese court chronicle from 1813. The divinely ordained fate for the island of Java was simple; it was to be the counterbalance – and implicitly the equivalent – of Mecca and the the Holy Land themselves. Java was a sacred place, its forests and volcanoes heavy with layers of divinity and history. But not only was it a sanctified center, it was to be a political one as well. God Himself had told this legendary Sultan of Rome to turn this remote eastern land the “capital of all the lands east of Persia.” As is always the case in Javanese chronicles, the God of Islam speaks in the Javanese tongue. This time He had said kraton wetan Ngajam, the kraton west of Ajam. Ajam is an old Arabic word for Persians, but what is more interesting here is the word kraton. While kraton at its most basic sense means capital and palace, its implications are far more than those English words suggest. The kraton is the conceptual center of the state, civilization, and even the universe itself. The Javanese compare it to the middle of a brilliant torch whose light stretches far and wide.

Java was thus the center of civilization in all the Orient. Its light would shine far and wide, not only everywhere Below the Winds (as Southeast Asians called their home) but also far Above them, even in China and India. God’s words to the Sultan of Rome had been clear enough; beyond the traditional homelands of Islam, Java was unparalleled.



Of course, reality was not so optimistic. Indeed, such grandiose reimaginings of Javanese history, with these elaborate ties to the fabled Roman Empire, may well have been futile attempts to reject the gloom and darkness of the present day. In the early seventeenth century, Sultan Agung, the greatest Muslim ruler in Javanese history, had very nearly united the entire island under the banner of his Kingdom of Mataram. The last major obstacles lay to the west, where the Dutch colonial capital of Batavia and the far western kingdom of Banten still stubbornly resisted. In 1628 the King sent his armies to Batavia under General Baureksa, a man famed in the chronicle literature for his bravery. His orders were simple; take Batavia and Banten and complete the conquest of the island.

Yet the armies of Mataram shattered beneath the walls. For the next century and a half, the Dutch East India Company intervened more and more in the kingdom’s affairs. Finally, a Dutch-sponsored treaty in 1755 partitioned Java into little princely states and brought Mataram to a formal end. As one historian has said, “a pristine precolonial Java lay almost 200 years in the past, with the defeat of Sultan Agung at the gates of Batavia.” What came after was a long tale of decline.

What if things had been different?

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Hello everyone, this is my first try at a formal alternate history timeline. It will center on the repercussions of a Javanese victory in the 1628 siege of Batavia, the Dutch colonial capital. As with most TLs here, there should be a mix of narrative and descriptive prose; hopefully the former is bearable.

Footnotes

The story of Romans settling Java itself comes from a number of chronicles. These include the mid 19th century Serat Manikamaya, an epic poem recounting the history of Java from the days of Adam and Eve to the 14th-century reign of Majapahit, and the early 19th century Mangkunagaran Pendhetan saking Kitab Warni-warni, another versified history from Creation to the 16th-century history of the first major Muslim sultanate on the island. See Javanese Literature in Surakarta Manuscripts: Manuscripts of the Mangkunagaran Palace by Nancy K. Florida, p. 110 and 117. The details of this particular story comes from a copy of the Serat Babad, an 1813 history that again begins with Adam and ends with the reign of King Senapati Ingalaga at the very end of the 16th century.

It goes without saying that the Javanese had virtually no idea of what Ancient Rome was actually like. When the Javanese said "Rome" (Ngrum in Javanese), they usually meant the Ottomans or a similarly uber-powerful Islamic empire to the far west.

The "one historian" in question is Gerry van Klinken in "Why Was There No Javanese Galileo?," a chapter in the anthology Empire and Science in the Making: Dutch Colonial Scholarship in Comparative Global Perspective, 1760–1830.
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