Rome Below the Winds: A Javanese Timeline

[Every Grass in Java]

The Tijgersgracht, a prominent canal in the 17th-century colonial city of Batavia. Within decades of taking control of the port, the Dutch East India Company built canals to divert the Ciliwung River.

* * *

Batavia, Java. Shaka year 1550 [1628 AD].

It was September, yet the day was still stuffy and sweltering. There are no seasons in Java, after all, just eternal alternation between dry heat and humid heat. And this month was when dry heat reigned over all. The sky was clear and blue; there were not the faintest traces of clouds in sight. Even the sun seemed bigger than usual, blazing in all his splendor as he rained down light so harsh and blinding that the troops struggled to keep their eyes open. Then there was the heat – the irksome and intolerable heat that slips into every corner of the body and saps the strength of every joint and muscle. They said that the sun-god Surya was a beneficent being, but sometimes General Baureksa could not help but doubt.

There were other things that Baureksa doubted. For one thing, why was he here? Yesterday he had reviewed the troops in the camps; with little surprise he noted that their faces were all thin and drooping, haggard with fatigue. And perhaps despair, too. The soldiers are peasants, simple men with simple lives whom we dragged in chains out of their little village lives. His men, he knew, did not want to come so west. Nor did he, really. Baureksa’s home was the quaint seaside town of Kendal, where he had reigned as lord for the better part of his life. If only he could lie and relax today under the shades of the coconut palms that lined Kendal’s streets, with his wife and children and no one else! If only he could leave his army here and now and ride back to Kendal, where he would climb the minaret and see the little boats sink beyond the horizon…..

But such thoughts were dangerous treason. If I leave now, what shall I tell my lord, the King of Mataram? Did I not swear my life to him? Did I not vow to him that the Dutchmen would be ousted before the end of this year?

Officials are born to serve. All power in the island of Java came from His Highness the King. Baureksa’s lands in Kendal were but a conditional loan, a gift from His Highness under the assumption of loyalty. How could he repay his lord for such generosity and favor if not by service? And lest one forget, service was a virtue in itself. The dry wind seemed to whisper faintly remembered words from his childhood: “there is nothing that can be compared to the service of the king; this is like being a piece of wood in the ocean, going where the waves bring you.” Baureksa had never been quite sure what that meant, but the saying always seemed to portend some mystic truth.

Desertion is futile, the general told himself. War, war, war – there would be war even if he mutinied this very moment. The only difference would be that the indomitable warhost of Mataram would be turned towards Kendal instead of Batavia. His beloved little town could hardly resist the thunder of Mataram artillery, and mercy was little known to the King.

So Baureksa would have to stay and fight and win.

What was there to be known about the infidels he was facing here, these people who called themselves the Hollanders? They had first descended Below the Winds some thirty years ago, in hot pursuit of their archenemies the Portuguese. They were an avaricious race with scant sense of honor. The general still remembered that day seven years ago when merchants from the east had arrived in Kendal. Their faces had been solemn, their words macabre. When he had gone down to meet them, they had whispered that they could bring no nutmeg from now on.

“Why?” Baureksa had asked. The reply was as short as it was shocking. Nutmeg, the finest of spices, was only found in the small Bandanese archipelago. Recently, thousands of Dutch mercenaries had descended upon Banda and massacred all its inhabitants. Then they built slave-run plantations on the isles. From now on, the Dutchmen alone would own the nutmeg trees. By the Immaterial, Baureksa had thought then, these Hollanders are an evil race. Woe that they have now come to Java.

That was not all. Strange rumors persisted and proliferated about this queer race of pale-skinned men (yes, men – unlike the Javanese the Dutchmen did not sail with their women). It was said that their cannons were more destructive than even those of the Romans, that the artillery in just one of their ships could fit in four Portuguese vessels, or that their forts were impregnable to every mortal weapon in existence and resistant to all but the greatest magical feats.

He had put some of those rumors to the test a few days ago, when his army and navy had congregated here. As it turned out, they were much too close to reality. He had tested the strength of Batavia’s walls with both the fury of Mataram artillery and the mettle of Mataram soldiers. The Dutchmen, the Javanese soon discovered, were much better shot than them; perhaps it was unavoidable, considering that the Company hired professional soldiers while His Highness raised peasant levies. Their artillery, too, was of a more powerful design than Baureksa had ever faced. In the end, the conclusion was unavoidable; the fort seemed nigh-impregnable without a lengthy war of attrition. But any war of attrition was in the infidels’ favor, for when the rainy season came in November, his army would have to retreat or starve.

To overcome any strong position, necessity demanded strong stratagems. But which one was right here? That was the question.

The general looked down at the little town which the infidels called Batavia. It was beautiful in a way, he supposed. The Ciliwung River gleamed and shimmered as it reflected the dry season sun, winding and meandering on its way to the coast like a thick yarn of thinly beaten gold. As it joined with the Java Sea, the yarn split into spidery shimmering threads, some unusually straight. He surmised that the Franks had diverged the Ciliwung into canals. Perhaps they had built them to facilitate their trade. Or maybe they were there just to make Batavia that much prettier, for they split the city into neat little districts and brought perfect symmetry – between land and water, between building and reflection – to so much of the town. Red brick houses lined the town in orderly rows, with palm trees waving their fronds right beside them. All around were the Frankish fortifications, so famous for their impregnability. There were some unfamiliarities. The houses were of brick, for example, and not of wood as was normal here. But the order inherent in Batavia’s design reminded him too uncannily of Javanese towns. A pity he would have to destroy it all.

Perhaps in some alternate timeline, the Dutchmen were busy burning Kendal.

Baureksa sat in thought for a long, long time. Then a bittersweet smile spread across his face. Batavia, and all its order and beauty that lay below him now, would be razed to the ground before the end of this year. For the general had a plan.

* * *

Hopefully this wasn't so bad.

I will use the Javanese era (Anno Javanico, AJ for short) throughout this timeline, a lunar calendar which follows the Islamic system of months but begins in the year 78 AD instead. However, for this very first post, I use the Indian-derived Shaka era because Sultan Agung did not create the AJ system until 1633 AD. AJ is essentially a variant of the Shaka era using Islamic months instead, to allow for easy conversion to the Islamic era starting from the Hijra.

We know very little about Baureksa, governor of Kendal and leading general of Sultan Agung; Javanese historical sources simply emphasize his bravery. IOTL he and his two sons were killed in a skirmish outside Batavia in October 21, 1628. Most of his personality here is a literary imagination.

The merchants' reference here is to the Bandanese genocide of 1621.

 

[Every Grass in Java]

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]

The territories of the Kingdom of Gèlgèl at its height, prior to the Mataram conquest of the 1630s.

When the venerable empire of Majapahit collapsed, its heritage transformed into Islamic Java. The old religion (which the Muslim Javanese would rather curiously call the buda or “Buddhist” faith) faded away, though it was always fondly remembered. Over every peak and gully, Muhammad’s faith prevailed.

Well, not every. Not everyone deigned to follow the religion of the Prophet. On the little eastern island of Bali, so culturally similar to Java yet still separated by the sea, Hinduism survived, transmuted, and thrived. It also persisted with Balinese support in the little eastern peninsula at the end of Java (the Eastern Salient). By the mid-17th century, Bali and her neighbors were united under the kingdom of Gèlgèl, considered so sacred and powerful that the main title of its king was Dewa Agung, or “Great God” in Balinese. Bali was the land of the gods – a place where the gods were still worshipped and where a Great God (Dewa Agung) literally ruled over mankind.

This came to an end following a long and arduous invasion of Gèlgèl by the powerful Muslim sultanate of Mataram, which could scarcely stomach such a potent challenge to its claim to Majapahit’s legacy (the dynasty of Gèlgèl was much more elevated than that of Mataram). The conclusion of the war, when generals Baureksa and Mandudareja conquered the capital of Gèlgèl in 1633, would dramatically terminate the Balinese Old Regime.

The following Balinese chronicle depicts the conquest of Bali and its buda kingdom by the arrogant Ratu Susuhunan, an exalted title meaning “King who is obeyed” and used here to refer to Sultan Agung of Mataram. The phrase the weapons of evil rolled over the earth is repeated a number of times in the text. This is because it is a chronogram, a way to represent years (in this case 1555 AJ, or 1633 AD) as short mystical phrases by assigning a numerical value to each word. This phrase, of course, has particular relevance to the story; the army of Mataram could be nothing but “the weapons of evil” to the Balinese.

* * *

What follows is the Chronicle of the Fall of Bali,
Wherein is described how the weapons of evil rolled over the earth. [1555 AJ chronogram]
Great and gleaming in grandeur, gilded glory,
Such is the land of Gèlgèl in the buda [pre-Islamic] times.
Yea, among all the kshatriya [warrior caste], most honored is the king of Gèlgèl.
To him is accorded universal obeisance, most magnificent munificence.

Too exalted is he to be called “man” – nay, he is a Dewa Agung [Great God].
The Supreme and Inconceivable God casts a shadow on the world of men;
Let all in Bali know that this shadow is His Highness the Dewa Agung.
The sublime nature of His Highness the Dewa Agung
Is akin to Mount Meru [abode of Hindu gods] soaring high above the wide open plains.

And Five Gods are all immanent in His Majesty’s character:
By the help of Ishvara the Dewa Agung learns honesty,
Vishnu gifts him the blessings of happiness.
Most majestic Mahadeva ensures his munificence.
To the king, Brahma grants most virtuous mercy,
And bringing high justice is all-auspicious Shiva.

So numerous are the Dewa Agung’s perfections,
That his writ is proclaimed in all of Bali,
That his words are obeyed by all Balinese.
Indeed! Even in hallowed Java, down by the Eastern Salient,
The Javanese reverence the palace of Gèlgèl.
Indeed! Far in Lombok, far in the Muslim lands,
The Muslims reverence the palace of Gèlgèl.

[…..]

So jealous, greatly envious was the Ratu Susuhunan [Sultan Agung of Mataram]
When he heard of the homage due the Dewa Agung,
Of how the people of Java gave praise to Gèlgèl.
Oh, how the king was enraged! There was fire in his eyes,
He was like Lord Krishna in his Thousand-Headed Form,
He was like a tigress before the hunter of her cubs.

How laughable! How ironic! Know that the House of Mataram
Is a lineage of peasants, of lowly humble folk.
What right do they have to the Majapahit realm,
When the lineage of Gèlgèl is most exalted in Java?

On the Birthday of Muhammad, in 1555 [AJ],
All the princes of the blood and officials high and low,
All the wali [priest] lords and every pious scholar in the mosque,
All the governors and vassal lords, even from beyond the seas –
They gathered altogether at the city of Karta.

To his congregated subjects the Ratu Susuhunan said:
“Let my state be expanded; let infidelity die!
“In Java, every shrub and pebble humbly bows to me;
“The Dutch Company is routed all the way to icy Europe –
“Is it right that the Balinese infidel princeling,
“That naked man in Gèlgèl who reigns over his pretensions,
“Shall ever dare resist me, the Susuhanan Ratu?
“Is it right that while every grass in Java bends down
“His feeble green blade before the Mercy of the Lord,
“The people of Bali only know of lesser gods?”

Said General Baureksa, “No, it is not right.”
Said Prince Mandudareja, “A simple solution, Your Highness.
“Let all the commanders take out their big guns,
“Let the people of Mataram march to the east.
“Bali shall fall to the might of Your Highness,
“And Majapahit’s name is yours and yours alone.”

The king’s face was colored with haughty red pride,
And with great anticipation of glory and triumph.
The Susuhunan Ratu said, “Yes, take out the arms!
“Let the guards draw their kris [dagger], let us bring out our muskets!
“My bow is devotion, the Qur’an are my arrows.
“No forged weapon is strong enough for me!”

[…..]

Over land, over sea, Mataram’s war hosts proceeded,
Troops of numbers untold, myriad and infinite,
As numerous as the grains of sand on the Ganges’s banks.
Indeed, they were the weapons of evil which rolled over the earth.

Yet His Highness the Dewa Agung had armies of his own;
The heroes of Bali, finest kshatriya, all most trained in the chivalrous arts –
They came in mail, gleaming kris in their scabbards, trotting out on horse and on foot.
And the people of Bali now whispered together:
“In full solar splendor Shiva is arriving, the gods are arriving to bring us victory.”
The armies met in battle on the field of Marga,
The Javanese with their Islamic magic, the Balinese with their buda magic.

Mataram’s artillery thundered and shook; their roars reverberated,
It was worse than the storms of the Southern Ocean Goddess –
It was as if the god Indra had descended from the heavens with his thunderbolts
To strike and smite the stricken Balinese.
“What is this thing,” cried the Dewa Agung, “round like a ball yet sharp enough to kill?”
All amidst this cacophonous clamor
The Javanese stood and charged with ease and seeming comfort;
Then the Balinese knew that the day would be lost.
Then Baureksa’s cavalry ran like a sandstorm down the Marga plain,
Sweeping the field of the brave Balinese.
Then the blade and the bullet each brought down our bodies.

Baureksa and Mandudareja were common sort of men,
Yet the Susuhunan Ratu had raised them up so highly
So their minds were full of ostentation and foulest pretension.
They knew nothing of true service, even less of the ascetic ways.
How tragic, how calamitous, to be vanquished by such men!

Oh, terrible was that day! That day when we knew which side the gods favored,
That day when Bali’s destiny was sealed like a scroll,
That day when the flower of Bali was shriveled,
Shriveled by the bitter western winds.
The Dewa Agung fell that day, some say in personal combat;
One never knows the truth; his body was not found.
But with bravery he died, with temerity, with not the least trepidation.
Yea, that Dewa Agung was worthy to be last of the kings.

[…..]

The court of Gèlgèl received the news in consternation.
“The gods may have left us,” said Gèlgèl’s Prime Minister,
“But Yama, God of Death, is not here for us yet.
“We still have things to do before we pass away.
“The world is but a shadow-play, I say!
“And we the puppets that tell of the bygone day –
“Now let us play our roles, then to Lord Yama make our way,
“Such is the demand of the story of this play.

“Let us show those upstarts, those Mataram folk,
“Whose lineage is barely a hundred years old,
“What it means to be noble and to be kshatriya,
“What it means to perish with dignified honor.”

That day the Dewa Agung’s little son was crowned,
Full royal honor accorded to this child.
He was the last of the kings in Bali.
Then Mandudareja came with his uncountable armies.
All knew that Gèlgèl would not live another day.

* * *

General Baureksa stood on the road to Gèlgèl.

The war had been hard-fought. Even with all of Mataram’s overbearing might, it had taken three long years for his armies to finally come here at the gates of the palace of Bali’s highest king. This war was different from his battles against the Dutch or Banten or even Surabaya that way. Those latter three were port-states; when the port-capital fell, the whole kingdom was ripe for the taking. In Bali, though, the power of the king (the “Dewa Agung” or “the Great God,” as the buda infidels here called their ruler) lay in the verdant fields of rice and the thick population of the villages. There was no single place that one could capture for immediate victory.

It was very possible that this war would have been unwinnable had the Dewa Agung not been so foolish to concentrate his armies in a little village called Marga. It was simply impossible for the outnumbered and outgunned Balinese to win a set-piece battle on the open field, especially with the sheer force of Javanese artillery. The Balinese were routed, thousands killed. The Dewa Agung himself had died, or so he heard. He was perhaps among one of the hundreds of kshatriya that Baureksa’s cavalry had mowed down like rotting wood. None of them had been identified. Death is the great equalizer, the general mused. In death we are all reduced to rotting corpses, no matter whether we are little peasants or Great Gods.

“Sire,” said his secretary, “a Balinese army is approaching.”

Baureksa frowned. “What army? Their army died at Marga.”

“I’m not sure, sire. But if my eyes do not deceive me, there is some sort of force coming to us now. They’re dressed all in white.”

Baureksa had expected this. “That’s no army, boy. Do you know what a puputan is?” The secretary said no. “The word puputan means “ending” in Balinese. When a puputan is held, it signifies the ending of a kingdom – it’s a ceremony that officially shows that the kingdom has been extinguished by an enemy, and rather than passively watching their court fall, the Balinese would rather destroy it themselves.”

“What’s it like, then, Sire?”

“You’ll see.”

And Baureksa spurred on his horse to the puputan.

There was indeed a Balinese host on the road, but the secretary had been wrong to call it an army. Like all puputan, it was more of a parade than anything. The entire procession was dressed in flowing white robes that could not and did not serve as armor. At the forefront of it all, four slaves held aloft a wooden palanquin, its base colored black and white in checkerboard pattern. On both sides it was guarded by tastefully carved feathered dragons, their muscles strained and their mouths wide open, as if they were just about to fly away and breathe devastation into the enemy. Each corner of the roof showcased an ogre, and on top (and on the dragons’ heads too) a crown was carefully carved. Even this far away, Baureksa could make out a garuda, the legendary feathered mount of Vishnu, on the crowns. With the bird-dragons and now this, I could almost believe that the Balinese were trying to fly away. A little doll sat in the middle of it all.

Then the doll moved his hand.

No, it was no doll. It was a child. Then it struck him – it had to be the little prince that the Balinese had crowned as Dewa Agung, the week before. The general shuddered. Could they be here to formally surrender? He knew this was impossible, that a puputan was unavoidable now, but a man could hope.....

In unison, every Balinese in the procession drew their kris daggers and charged towards the Javanese.

The puputan – the ritualized mass suicide of a defeated Balinese kingdom – had begun.

"Fire, fire," said Baureksa. "But do not charge yet." Arrows and bullets at once filled the air. The general scanned the charge of the white-clad Balinese. He saw long arrows impale the chests of three venerable men, their faces folded into a landscape of creases and wrinkles. Priests, it seemed from the look of them. He expected them to fall to the ground in pain. But they kept charging on, kris in hand. More arrows and arrows tore through the white fabric – no, it was not white any more, it was as brightly red as the finest Chinese silk. But they kept charging on. When they were about twenty yards away, a volley of bullets sliced into their stomachs almost like a knife cutting into tofu. The three trembled in pain; the middle one put their hand to their belly to stop the guts from spilling out. But they kept charging on, their bodies swaying nervously, their faces curiously devoid of expression. Then the priest to the left slipped and fell; his guts had slipped out and tangled around his legs. His companion to the right tripped on the leg of his fallen comrade and fell to the ground, landing headfirst on sharp volcanic rock. He shrieked, just once. Then he was silent.

The last of the three kept walking on and on, dragging his entrails behind him like some repulsive fleshy tail. A trail of blood-soaked earth traced his arduous path to the Javanese positions. Then one of Baureksa's soldiers pushed a javelin through his chest. He fell backwards, slipping on the blood and mucus of his small intestines. His head crashed into the same volcanic rock; there was a sharp sound; the brain spilled out like some deathly paste.

"The men felt nothing," one of the soldiers said quietly. "They were all dazed with opium. Their senses were inebriated."

Baureksa looked at other parts of the road. Everywhere reigned the orgy of death. He saw a red ogre slowly advance. No, this was no ogre. This was a burly soldier dyed the vivid crimson hue of blood. Arrow shafts protruded like grisly feathers from every corner of the body; tears in the red fabric slowly oozed blood like hellish mountain springs. Elsewhere, an old woman marched onward like some undead ghost, a long javelin going in her back and coming out the other side. As he watched, the woman grabbed the point and tried to pull the javelin out of her torso. She swayed as she grabbed the javelin and palpitated as she pulled. There was a long shudder. And then she fell, face prone like some toppled idol.

There were women dressed in white and yellow silk, the fabric embroidered with brilliant bits of gold. Below their heads were jade and diamond necklaces, joined together with shining metal; as they moved, a dozen golden bracelets chimed and flashed and jingled. Then they laughed like madwomen – they were madwomen – as they threw all the treasures on their body towards his soldiers. "Take it, Mataram!" They cried. "This is the treasure of the kingdom of Gèlgèl, this is the fortune of all of Bali; take it, and know that Gèlgèl does not die as a pauper." Baureksa only watched in horrified fascination. From what felt very far away, he heard Prince Mandudareja shout, "My lads, shoot the lunatics. Their treasure shall be yours anyways." So the women died.

Then there were all the children. He saw the Balinese cut the throats of their own little boys and girls, God knows the reason why; he saw his own troops place bets on how many skulls of little children they could crack open with a musket; but worst of all were the shrieks that every little child made as arrow and bullet and kris cut them down, the shrill and chilling cries that shook the very marrow of the bones.

Why? Why were the Balinese doing this? Was it all simply to make Baureksa feel remorse? Was there some deeper purpose?

He had known of, even anticipated, the ritual of the puputan. But he had not thought this was what it would be like. Baureksa wanted – needed – to desert this scene. But he could not. He remembered again: There is nothing that can be compared to the service of the king; this is like being a piece of wood in the ocean, going where the waves bring you. The waves of the ocean had brought him here and he could not disobey, not any more than a flotsam piece of wood could disobey the Goddess of the Southern Ocean.

At least he could close his eyes.

When he reopened them after what seemed an infinity, most of the Balinese were dead. Their bodies littered the road, mingled with the fallen survivors lying here and there, moaning and shuddering on the way to death. The palanquin now stood atop the bodies of the four slaves who had once carried it high. The general spurred his horse to move. Was it possible that the little boy Dewa Agung was still alive? He would like it if he was..... He would like it if he could take the boy away and raise him as his. It would be an apology of sorts to the people of Gèlgèl.

He went to the palanquin and found the body of a boy, around seven or so, his silken robes soaking up a pool of collected blood. His head was missing, his neck cleanly severed.

This is the cost of conquest, Baureksa thought.

A map of Mataram's empire in the year 1634 AD. Orange represents the "Javanese core" of the empire, primarily those areas in and around Java that were actively conquered by Sultan Agung. Yellow represents the overseas vassals who paid regular tribute to Karta, most prominently the sultans of Jambi, Palembang, and Banjarmasin. KARTA is capitalized to show its prominence as capital.

Lombok, traditionally contested between Gèlgèl and the kingdom of Makassar (not shown on the map), was fully conquered by the latter while Mataram was invading Gèlgèl. Hence the Javanese could only conquer up to the Salient and Bali.

* * *

Hope both my fake chronicle and the narrative writing wasn't too bad. (And I realize they probably are! I never said I was good at writing stories.)

For a general introduction to Bali in the Early Modern era, I would refer you to Adrian Vickers's Bali: A Paradise Created. For a discussion of Balinese politics, H. S. Nordholt's The Spell of Power. A History of Balinese Politics, 1650-1940 is probably best. The puputan ritual of honorable mass suicide in the face of certain defeat is a well-documented phenomenon in Bali, but I've been unable to find a good source for it.

My reference to the king manifesting the attributes of five different gods, Vishnu, Brahma, Ishvara, Mahadeva, and Shiva, comes directly from Balinese views of kingship. By the Early Modern era the Balinese seem to have moved away from directly equivocating the gods and the king, instead considering the virtues of the gods to be immanent in an ideal king. (And to be more technical, these five gods aren't actually different gods. In Balinese theology, and I am vastly oversimplifying, the Divine Oneness primarily manifests itself as Shiva. Vishnu the Preserver, Brahma the Creator, Ishvara the god of purity, and the yellow god Mahadeva are all lesser incarnations of Shiva, who is himself an incarnation of the Divine Oneness.)

I apologize for the shitty MS Paint maps. Later I'll get a better photo editing program and do a better job.

 

[Every Grass in Java]

An update about the scholarly currents just beginning to emerge in the newly founded Mataram empire. Might not be particularly exciting.

Synopsis is at the very end, in a quote box.

* * *

The Gate of Felicity, the last of the gates of the New Palace of Constantinople that Sultan Agung's envoys entered during their audience before the Ottoman sultan.

In 1624, the king of Mataram assumed the exalted title of susuhunan. It derived from the action of suwun, to join one’s hands and lift them to the face in humble reverence. A susuhunan was a man who received the honor of suwun. The very word, then, commanded obedience. It was also a word laid with religious implications; the great Muslim proselytizers of the island had all called themselves sunan, a variant of susuhunan. By taking the title susuhunan, the king was implicitly assuming a sacrosanct role as religious leader.

Yet the king had wider ambitions. Sultan, the most widely recognized honorific throughout the Abode of Islam, still eluded Mataram. Problematically, it was a foreign title closely associated with the wider Islamic world Above the Winds. It would be laughable for the king to proclaim himself sultan all on his own, would it not?

A mission was sent from Karta to Arabia in 1635, seeking to receive recognition as sultan from the Sharif of Mecca. This they achieved, but the Javanese chose to go further. They travelled from Mecca to Medina, then from there to Jerusalem and Damascus, and finally from Syria all the way to the Ottoman capital of Constantinople.

The Ottomans – “the Land of Rome,” as most Muslims knew it by – was the greatest empire on earth. Every nation large and small submitted to the Sublime Porte: Aceh and Java Below the Winds, the opulent Mughals of Hindustan, Christian kings from across Frankish Europe, even Bornu in the distant Land of the Blacks. “Great is the torch of Rome, radiant its realm, high-rising its smoke, far-reaching its pride.”

The Sultan’s capital was Constantinople, City of the World’s Desire. Almost an order of magnitude larger than Karta, it must have seemed unimaginably bustling and wondrous to the Javanese. And not just to the Javanese. With an estimated 750,000 inhabitants in 1642 of every imaginable faith and creed (less than 60% of the population was Muslim), Constantinople dwarfed every other city outside East Asia and was very possibly the largest metropolis in the world.

The New Palace, residence of the sultan, was yet something of its own. As the Javanese entered from the east, the first thing they must have seen was the massive outer castle fortress. The fortifications would in fact have been of little use in an actual siege, but the Javanese could not have known that. To them as to most observers, the castle was but the most visible proof of the idiom Devlet-i ʿAlīye muzaffer dāʿimā (“The Ottoman Empire is forever victorious”).

Then our Javanese would have crossed the First Courtyard of the New Palace (a vast square capable of holding some 30,000 people), passing by lines and lines of solemn and silent janissaries. Next was the Second Courtyard where the emissaries might have gaped with wonder at the Outer Treasury, the Ward of the Guards, or the Grand Vizier’s Council Hall. Here was the most visible reminder of the Circle of Justice that underpinned Ottoman rule. The people paid the taxes that filled the Treasury; the Treasury paid the soldiers that occupied the Wards; the soldiers protected the Council Hall’s dignitaries; the Council Hall provided the justice that allowed the people to prosper and pay taxes.

At last, there was the Gate of Felicity leading to the final Third Courtyard where the sultan resided. Nobody dared cross its threshold without the explicit permission of the Sultan of Rome.

That day, the Javanese passed the Gate and met Murad IV in the Chamber of Petitions.

We have no reliable account of what transpired between the sultan and the Javanese that day. But we do know that from that day on, the king of Mataram called himself Sultan ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad Mawlānā Mataranī – “Servant of God, Our Master Muḥammad of Mataram.” Most people, though, would come to know him as the Great Sultan: Sultan Agung in Javanese. We also know that the envoys returned to Java with most splendid gifts from the Porte: three Ottoman warships, stocked with weapons (siege cannons, muskets, and other firearms) and an assortment of expert craftsmen (shipwrights, goldsmiths, architects, weavers of both cloth and carpet, and gunpowder makers, gunsmiths, and cannon makers). Sultan Agung would make good use of both later on.

But these were not the only Ottomans to accompany the return voyage. Two critical figures in Middle Eastern intellectual circles also chose to hedge their bets on Java. One was Mullā Maḥmūd, a Kurdish philosopher who had been teaching in Damascus for about three decades. The sexagenarian, according to some accounts, was swayed by Javanese pleas that he become mentor to the sultan. Others claim that the ambassadors deceived the old man, lying to the effect that every day in Java was like a cool day of Damascene spring, just perfect for an old and retiring man. In any case, Maḥmūd packed his books one day and departed the Middle East forever. The other was Muḥammad al-ʿAbbāsī, one of the most promising novice Sufis (Muslim mystics) in all of Syria. If Maḥmūd sought personal glory in his golden years, ʿAbbāsī was a proselytizer. His mission was clear; to ensure that even the Javanese could one day attain the Station of No Station, that perfect human condition that so many Sufis vainly sought to reach.

When old Maḥmūd arrived in Java in 1637, Sultan Agung himself came to the port to offer his greetings to the Kurdish philosopher. The Javanese chronicles recount that the sultan cried out, “Oh exalted guru, impart on me your knowledge.” Maḥmūd, according to the chronicle, replied, “I refuse, Your Majesty.” Dumbfounded, the sultan asked the reason why. The Kurd said, “It would be impossible for any mortal to give you knowledge. For true knowledge comes from two things alone: God, and one’s desire to learn.”

This story is probably a later fabrication. But what is undeniable is that the story reflects the veritable revolution in scholarship that Mullā Maḥmūd brought. Every Wednesday evening, every prince and the sons of all the dignitaries at Karta came to Maḥmūd’s house to hear his lessons. (The sultan himself had irregular private sessions.) The children must have assumed that Master Maḥmūd would be just like all the others, a harsh teacher who forced his pupils to memorize the most endlessly trivial jargon, a man who claimed to have all the answers and publicly humiliated those who dared disagree. So imagine their surprise at their first Wednesday lessons! Master Maḥmūd always spoke in terms of “Perhaps this and that” or “It seems to me that this is that” or “Do you see that this can be understood like that?” Whenever he was questioned he stopped and took the time to explain his views in full depth, no matter how minor or ridiculous the inquiry.

Maḥmūd’s subjects were also new to Java. He claimed to teach all of the Nine Islamic Sciences: Quran exegesis, the study of the Prophet Muḥammad’s sayings and deeds, jurisprudence, Arabic grammar, rhetoric, metaphysics, logic, astronomy, and geometry. The old scholar was most certainly very qualified in all nine of them. But what he loved the most were rhetoric and logic, both fields very new to Javanese thought. Consider how Master Maḥmūd explained the most basic structure of proper argumentation to his younger students:

In any debate, there must be someone making a claim (the claimant) and someone who objects to said claim (the questioner). There are three ways by which the latter can challenge the former.

The first is to object to a premise or definition used in the argument. This is permissible only when the premise is not obviously true and the two parties do not concede its truth. The questioner may or may not provide support for his challenge. However, the claimant must always defend the premise with appropriate reasons.

The second is to object to the evidence or reasoning used in the argument. The questioner must always support the objection with logical reasons. To simply say “Your proof is obviously wrong” would be not only meaningless, but outright rude. The questioner’s support could be, for example, demonstrating that the claimant’s argument could also be made for a proposition that the claimant himself does not accept, or showing that the argument consists of circular reasoning and is therefore absurd.

The last is to offer an alternative interpretation of the facts that contradicts the original claim. In this case, the questioner becomes the claimant and the original claimant must now be the questioner, challenging the new claim that is being made.​

When Master Maḥmūd packed his belongings and bid Damascus farewell, he had carefully wrapped and bundled his most beloved volumes with fine Chinese silk. These tomes included Aristotle’s Organon (his six major works on logic) and Avicenna’s Eastern Philosophy. Once he arrived in Java, the master would give passionate lessons in logic to whoever in Karta cared enough to listen. “Someone who has no share in debate and logic,” he would cry out before a crowd of perplexed Javanese, “will hardly be able to understand advanced scholarly enquiries.”

Was this all obvious? Perhaps. But until now, rhetoric and logic had never been systematically classified in Java. Master Maḥmūd was no scientist, and he never claimed that he would expand the boundaries of physical knowledge. But his lessons allowed the new generation of Javanese elites to look at the world around them in very different ways. Was a senior official’s claim always true, even if the arguments seemed like circular reasoning? Was it really possible that a king’s spiritual power could be transmitted by sucking the penis of his corpse? The Javanese would once have easily responded to both questions with “yes.” But now, they began to doubt.

Mullā Maḥmūd never gave any fish to his students. But he had taught them the proper ways to fish.

(The other Ottoman immigrant, ʿAbbāsī, played a very different role in Javanese scholarship. His is a story for another day.)

Synopsis: Sultan Agung is officially recognized as sultan by the Ottoman emperor in 1635 and receives some military and economic support from Constantinople; Mullā Maḥmūd, Ottoman Kurdish scholar, introduces the studies of rhetoric and logic to Java.

* * *

The New Palace is just Topkapı.

Mullā Maḥmūd was a real Kurdish scholar in seventeenth-century Damascus. He arrived in the city in the first decade of the seventeenth century, fleeing the Safavid Persians and their persecutions of the Sunni Kurds. He taught the rational theologies and sciences for the better part of a century until his death in 1663, and virtually every seventeenth-century intellectual from Damascus was his student. A local biographer notes Maḥmūd's importance in the intellectual life of the city:

He mostly taught the books of the Persians, and he was the first to acquaint the students of Damascus with these books, and he imparted to them the ability to study and teach them. It is from him that the gate of verification in Damascus was opened. This is what we have heard our teachers say.​

In other words, Maḥmūd was among the "verifying scholars" (muḥaqqiq) who rejected theological imitation and repetition in favor of critical thinking and reasoned assessment. He studied the "books of the Persians." These are works by Persian philosophers who often had sympathies with the rationalist Muʿtazilite school of early Islam, like Dawānī (who kept Islamic philosophy alive in the fifteenth century) or al-Isfarāyinī.

While I don't know of any direct evidence of Maḥmūd's teaching styles, Ibrahīm Kūrānī (perhaps the most important seventeenth-century Ottoman philosopher and a fellow Kurd who probably studied with Maḥmūd at some point, since he lived for some time in Damascus) is said to have taught in the following way:

His lecture on a topic reminded one of discussion and parley, for he would say “Perhaps this and that” and “It seems that it is this” and “Do you see that this can be understood like that?” And if he was questioned on even the slightest point he would stop until the matter was established.​

Of course this could be just Kūrānī's idiosyncrasies, but I choose to believe this isn't the case. Note that Maḥmūd is claimed to have imparted some sort of "ability to study and teach."

The various classifications of refutations in debate come directly from a manual on dialectics by the sixteenth-century Turkish scholar Ṭāşköprīzāde. Maḥmūd's views would probably have been more developed than Ṭāşköprīzāde's, though, since Ottoman studies of rhetoric became increasingly precise in the seventeenth century.

Khaled el-Rouayheb's Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb is a pretty good, if very dense, source for all this.

ʿAbbāsī was also real; he was a popular Sufi in seventeenth-century Damascus.

 

[Every Grass in Java]

Another piece on religious and intellectual developments. This is all leading up somewhere, I swear. After this I will move back to geopolitics, featuring various sorts of brown people and white people.

Synopsis is at the end, as always.

***

The Tarik Tanah Jawi.

When the empire of Majapahit collapsed, many of its leading scholars and aristocrats fled to Bali with their Sanskrit books and Hindu statues, refusing to accept the new faith. Now, even Bali – that last refuge of the old gods – was well within the Abode of Islam.

After Sultan Agung’s conquest of Gèlgèl, the leading priests were deported to Karta to participate in interreligious debates with leading Muslim divines. There are still many competing theories as to why Agung chose to do so. Perhaps the sultan had heard of the celebrated Mughal emperor Akbar and his House of Worship, where debates were held between all the myriad faiths of Hindustan. Or perhaps it had to do with Mullā Maḥmūd and his penchant for rational theology.

In any case, the Javanese debates revived the island’s interest in Hinduism. For one, the Balinese priests presented their religion as being quite compatible with the monotheism of Islam. Consider the following excerpts from a chronicle account of the debates:

The Javanese asks, “Hear my inquiry, Balinese. Is it not the belief of you Balinese that there are multiple gods and that there is no One Great God? What is your justification for such a belief?”

The Balinese responds, “Now hear my reply, Javanese. You are misled; we have no such belief. It is instead our belief that there is a single supreme Godhead. We call Him the Divine Poet, for he is the being that wrought creation from the void, just as a poet crafts beauty from empty sounds. We also style Him the Divine Oneness, for He is One and all the other gods are but a manifestation of Him. We finally name Him the Inconceivable and the Slippery One, for He cannot be manifested nor comprehended in visible or tangible forms – just as one cannot hold on to a slippery surface. He is everything at once. The Slippery One is He whose body is invisible, He who is short and small and He who is tall and large, He who wears fine clothing and He who is naked. We revere Shiva and Vishnu and Brahma only as conceivable and lesser manifestations of the Divine Oneness. Indeed, we Balinese are monotheists at heart. And you see, these divine manifestations of the Oneness are present everywhere in the world. Consider Sri Dewi, goddess of rice and incarnation of the Slippery One – she can be found in every little sheaf of rice.”

The Javanese asks, “Hear my inquiry, Balinese. Is it thus your belief that your Divine Oneness and our Great God are one and the same? Do you believe that Shiva is a manifestation of our God, the God of Islam?”

The Balinese responds, “Now hear my reply, Javanese. There are some differences in worship and ritual between your faith and mine. However, you and I are followers of the same Divinity at heart. Indeed, I contend, all the gods of Bali are incarnations of your Islamic God!”

The Javanese asks, “Hear my inquiry, Balinese. How do you believe that the world was created?”

The Balinese responds, “Now hear my reply, Javanese. In the beginning, there was but the Void. Then the Divine Oneness created the Four Kumaras [primeval sages in Hindu cosmology] through ascetic meditation. Yet the Kumaras were so deeply engrossed in sacred yoga exercises to the point that they did not wish to take wives. So the Divine Oneness dreamt, and from his dreams He created the universe and all the gods and men within it.”​

The court of Karta was apparently confounded by such Balinese claims to follow a monotheistic Creator. Should the Balinese be forcibly converted, left to their own devices, or something in between? Naturally, they requested advice from the most knowledgeable scholars of Islam available: Mullā Maḥmūd and Muḥammad al-ʿAbbāsī. The former refused to answer the question, declaring that his training in theology had not given him enough knowledge of Hinduism to make the proper judgments.

This left only ʿAbbāsī. He was a Sufi mystic trained in the monist tradition of the Andalusian scholar Ibn ʿArabī, he who had famously declared that even Hell would ultimately become a place of bliss because Mercy was the defining trait of God. When the Javanese came to ask for his advice, ʿAbbāsī replied with the following lecture based on ʿArabī’s thought:

In Quran 39:3, the infidels explain why they believe in gods other than God, may He be praised and exalted. They say, “We only worship them because they bring us nearer to God.” To infidels who make such excuses, the Prophet is instructed to say, “Name them” (Quran 13:33). Once the infidels name their gods, it becomes clear that they worship none other than God. For the names of God are infinite in number and every name in every universe is also a name of God; He has a Nondelimited Imagination and thus all names that could possibly be imagined are His. The names of the infidel's gods are the names of God.

Furthermore, consider the following verses in the Quran: “Your Lord has commanded that you should worship none but Him,” (Quran 17:23) “I created jinn and mankind only to worship Me.” (Quran 51:56) Given that God created us to worship Him, and given that He is All-Powerful and All-Knowing, it follows naturally that all mankind in all the Seven Climes is worshiping God this very moment. Thus every infidel is in fact a worshiper of God; their crime is believing that other supernatural beings can bring them nearer to God. This is a pardonable sin, for in the end they are still obeying God.

I have heard what the Balinese have said to you, and I tell you that the Balinese indeed speak the truth. It is true that the Godhead is incomprehensible to most mortals, save to those who have reached spiritual perfection. It is true that the manifestations of the Divine are found everywhere in the world, even in the smallest kernel of rice. Consider what the Lord has said to Muhammad, peace be upon him: “The East and the West belong to God: wherever you turn, there is His Face. God is all pervading.” (Quran 2:115)

Therefore let the Balinese worship in peace. Simply teach them the tenets of Islam, that there is no God but God and that Muhammad is His messenger, so that they may understand better the true object of their worship.​

So in 1637, Sultan Agung promulgated his famous Edict on Religion. The sultan officially recognized that the “Great God” of Islam and the “Divine Oneness” of Balinese Hinduism were one and the same. Islam was not a new and disruptive force, but rather a perfection of the old Hindu-Buddhist religion; the followers of the old faith could only have worshiped the lesser manifestations of the Divine Oneness, but with Islam, people could directly focus their worship on God Himself. The existence and power of the supernatural world – the world of Shiva and Vishnu and the Goddess of the Southern Ocean – were recognized. The subjects of Mataram were allowed to worship all these beings so long as they recognized the primacy of Islam and the fact that all spirits and gods were but ephemeral creations of the Great God. Indeed, Sultan Agung himself had ritually married the Goddess of the Southern Ocean, the greatest of Javanese deities.

Turning to more practical matters, the Edict specified that all existing Balinese temples which had received state patronage were to be converted into mosques. Pork, cremation, and sati (burning the widow at her husband’s funeral) were strictly prohibited, while the Five Pillars of Islamic ritual (declaration of faith, prayer, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage) were firmly established. By contrast, village shrines were left undisturbed. Balinese priests were encouraged to convert to Islam, undergo a training in Islamic mysticism by ʿAbbāsī and his followers, and ultimately live a life as Muslim scholars in their own right. We know that most Balinese Brahmans did so, willingly or not.

Finally, the Edict put ʿAbbāsī in charge of converting the population of Bali at large and accorded him high titles as royal pandit (scholar). Most peasants were probably unimpressed by the incomprehensible jargon of ʿAbbāsī, but his theology triumphed in the Javanese scholarly consciousness. Clerics all over the island were now convinced that God was all of Existence; that God’s Infinite Names were found in all of nature, but that only humans had the capacity to know all the Names; that Hell could eventually be a place of happiness because Mercy was the defining trait of God. The Nine Saints of Java, the original proselytizers of the island, had once warned of the foul heresies of Ibn ʿArabī. As it turned out, their warnings would be quickly forgotten.

The Balinese and ʿAbbāsī combined to bring new trends in Javanese Islam. Other than the issue of pantheism, the major issue of contention in the 1640s was the relationship between the Islamic God and the Hindu gods. What was Lord Shiva, for instance? Some said that Shiva was (an incarnation of) God, but this seemed impossible. Shiva’s many human imperfections could hardly be reconciled with omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence. Then, what were the Hindu gods?

The official Mataram answer to the question would appear not in a theological compendium, but in a work of history.

Among the books that Sultan Agung carried away from Gèlgèl after the mass suicide of its inhabitants were several precious works of history, long lost in Java since Majapahit’s fall. They included the Pararaton, a chronicle of Javanese history from 1222 to 1481, the Nagarakertagama, a description of Majapahit around 1360, a number of Balinese genealogies and histories tracing the connection between Gèlgèl and Majapahit, and various works in Sanskrit that nobody proved capable of competently understanding.

These books launched a challenge on the legitimacy of Mataram. How could Sultan Agung claim a connection to Majapahit, even when the dynasty of Gèlgèl had been so much more genealogically closer to the ancient empire, even when the religion of Majapahit had been inherited wholesale by Bali while Mataram had turned to Islam?

There was only one way to demonstrate that Mataram was the one and only heir to Majapahit. In 1635, Sultan Agung ordered the publication of an immense history of Java and Bali titled Tarik Tanah Jawi (History of the Land of Java). The work began with God’s creation of Adam and Eve, recounted the Hindu legends in a Javanese setting, continued to the first historical kingdoms of Central Java a thousand years ago, and thence to the Hindu kingdoms of East Java, culminating in the splendor of Majapahit. Then it detailed the decline and fall of that mighty empire, the simultaneous mass conversion to Islam, and finally the reunification under Mataram concluding in its conquest of Bali. It was truly a work of magisterial proportions; no such thing had ever been attempted before in Java, possibly in all of Southeast Asia.

Completed sometime in the 1640s, the Tarik Tanah Jawi accomplished three major objectives that secured Mataram’s place as the rightful heir to Majapahit. First, Islam was indisputably established as the natural successor of Javanese Hinduism. Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, and all the heroes of the Hindu epics made their appearance as key players in the story – but all of them were presented as prophets of Islam. Islam was thus not a novel religion, but a simple completion of all that the old gods and old heroes had spoken of so long ago.

Second, the cosmological and mythological justifications of legitimacy were provided. Much stress was placed on the fact that Sultan Agung now wore the golden crown of Majapahit, "a crown of gold, Garudas [legendary eagle-like beasts] facing front and back, striking their breasts, with ear ornaments." Just as much emphasis was put on other mysterious signs. The Nine Muslim Saints of Java had risen from the grave to herald the news that God had decreed the rise of Mataram. Senapati, founder of Mataram, had seized the royal regalia of the king of Pajang, successor to the sultan of Demak, himself successor to the Majapahit empire. A glowing halo radiated from the heads of the Mataram dynasts. Sultan Agung and his predecessors had made love with the Goddess of the Southern Ocean, who had promised them the support of her spirit armies and taught them all the arts of war and governance. All these stories would have proved to any Javanese readers that the rise of Mataram had been ordained by fate.

Most importantly, a grand theory of Javanese history was crafted. This was very new in Southeast Asia. For the first time, people were actually writing history with their own theories and interpretations, as opposed to an accolade to the ruler or a simple narration of facts. The authors of the Tarik say:

It is the contention of the Indians that history is like going round a pond. No matter how many times one circles a pond, one can never escape the same cycle. This, in their view, is history. The state rises, collapses, and rises anew, and this cycle continues for all eternity. It is the contention of the Arabs that history is rather more like a straight road; it develops in a fixed direction towards Islam and the Judgment Day, just as a man on a highway looks only towards his destination. Our journeys in the search of knowledge have shown that it is both. History is indeed a circle; with every passing century, a dynasty falls and their palaces are left to wild dogs while new kings and new palaces rises in their place. But it is also like a line; religion is perfected with the passage of years, and every new dynasty is greater than all their predecessors. History is an upward cycle. In the span of a human lifetime there is a rise and a fall, but in the span of centuries, there is always progress on the road.​

The clearest illustration of this cyclical-linear theory was in Java itself. In the beginning of history, Central Java was the base of power. In those days, the Javanese kingdoms were still small, squabbling, disunited. Then the Central Javanese kingdoms collapsed. The kingship moved to East Java, whose rulers – as exemplified by the emperors of Majapahit, whose authority was felt over two thousand miles of land and sea – held far greater power than their Central predecessors. But in accordance with the cycle of history, Majapahit too collapsed. Authority returned to Central Java under the guise of Mataram, just as the cycle of history had predicted. Now the linear nature of history demanded that Mataram become far more glorious than Majapahit had ever been, just as Majapahit had outshone the Central Javanese.

The Tarik Tanah Jawi thus promised great tidings for Mataram, a future where Java took its rightful place as Rome of the Orient. But would the historians be right?

Balinese priests deported to Karta debate with the Javanese. Their prowess in debate and the intercession of the Syrian Sufi Muḥammad al-ʿAbbāsī convince Sultan Agung to formally protect the worship of lesser gods in his realm, so long as the primacy of Islam is ensured. Islam is cast as a perfected form of Balinese religion. Meanwhile, monist and pantheist ideas spread under the influence of ʿAbbāsī. Agung also publishes a magisterial history of Bali establishing the connections between Majapahit and Mataram.

* * *

My portrayal of Balinese Hinduism probably has some modern influence in it; Balinese religion has generally become more monotheistic due to the pressures of the modern Indonesian state. Still, I don't think it's awfully far off from the beliefs of high-caste priests in precolonial times. All quotes and references about the Balinese Divine Oneness are from Margaret J. Wiener's Visible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali, p. 50-52. Balinese creation story is directly from the Balinese Brahmanda Purana.

Muḥammad al-ʿAbbāsī's views are little-known IOTL because he did not write much. We do know that he was a follower of the Khalwatiyya Sufi order, which espoused Ibn ʿArabī's monist/pantheist thoughts, and that ʿAbbāsī is described as "the one at whose hands God most High brought forth the Khalwatī order in Damascus." So all the arguments below are directly from Ibn ʿArabī's views and interpretations (from William Chittick's Ibn Arabi: Heir to the Prophets, a short anthology of articles). If you've never heard of Ibn ʿArabī before, read up on him. It's not for nothing that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls him "the greatest of all Muslim philosophers."

The Tarik Tanah Jawi is TTL's counterpart to the history book that Agung published IOTL, the Babad Tanah Jawi. But the TTJ is much more rationalistic and much more theoretically developed than the actual BTJ. The BTJ has no linear-cyclical theory, for example, nor is the relationship between Islam and the pre-Islamic religion ever made entirely clear. I decided that the TTJ would simply have all the Hindu gods and heroes become prophets of Islam. This is partly for simplicity's sake, partly because it has certain Javanese parallels (I seem to recall a Javanese story about the Hindu hero Arjuna meeting the Prophet Muhammad), and partly because this is exactly what happened in Bengal, a similar locale with a Hindu-influenced population undergoing mass conversion to Islam. The best example is Nabi-Bamsa, a sixteenth-century Bengali Muslim epic, which discusses (among other things) how the Prophet Krishna encouraged monotheism and was angered when he saw people worshiping his image. See Richard M. Eaton's The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760, p. 285-288.

 

[Every Grass in Java]

A map of the Alam Melayu (Malay World) c. 1635, before the fall of Portuguese Malacca. Capitalized names mark major empires; italicized names mark vassals or otherwise constituent parts of empires; Patani, with a non-capitalized and non-italicized name, was neither a genuine vassal (though it paid tribute to Thailand) nor a genuine regional power.

In dark orange is Aceh, the leading Malay empire. The Acehnese capital of Kutaraja, with its population very possibly in the hundreds of thousands, is also marked. In lighter orange are the peninsular vassals of Aceh (such as Pahang and Perak), with red lines marking their approximate borders. The sultanate of Johor is in blue, while the sultanate of Patani is colored pink. Purple stands for the Javanese empire of Mataram and their two Malay vassals, Jambi and Palembang. Thailand is shaded brown north of Patani, though most of the Buddhist kingdom does not appear in the map.

* * *

The Portuguese had once been the lords of the sea. Then the Dutch East India Company had swooped down upon them and pursued them from their ports and hounded them from their haunts. No more clearly was their fall from grace evident than in Southeast Asia, where the Portuguese had once profitably traded in cloves and gold and pepper. One by one, their forts fell to the Company; their trading ships were hunted down and reduced to flotsam; Lisbon’s native allies saw their towns and cities burn.

To the Portuguese, the fall of Batavia must have felt like a welcome round of rain in the midst of scorching drought. The Viceroy of India immediately sent a congratulatory embassy to Karta in 1630, including a cargo ships packed with Indian luxury goods that the Portuguese presented as largesse to the conqueror of Batavia. The king, of course, graciously accepted their gifts. The Portuguese then requested a formal alliance against the Dutch.

Sultan Agung rebuffed them. “Has your nation,” the king said, “not been the foremost tormentor of Islam these past hundred years?”

So the Portuguese returned to Goa, one cargo ship the poorer.

Ever since its conquest from the Malays in 1511, the center of Portuguese power in the East Indies had been the city of Malacca. Now it too was in dire straits before the indomitable advance of the Dutch. The Portuguese had recently maintained defensive alliances with Johor (a small sultanate whose territory encircled Malacca) against the regional hegemons of Aceh and Thailand. Yet in these dangerous days, priorities must change. Aceh and Thailand were too big to ignore, especially if one of them chose to align with the Company. Portugal abandoned its little ally in the mid-1630s and tried to find friends in either Kutaraja or Ayutthaya.

Neither the Sultan of Aceh nor the King of Thailand was interested in saving their erstwhile foe. But the deed was done. The sultan of Johor had already replaced his treacherous Portuguese associates with a clearly more powerful ally: the Dutch East India Company. Portugal was friendless now.

The Company, for its part, was running into difficulties. The loss of Batavia in 1628, made worse by the death in battle of Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen, was a humiliating setback for the world’s largest corporation. It also added urgency to its operations; it was imperative that a new central hub be established as soon as possible. As a temporary measure, the Company headquarters was relocated in 1629 to the fortified Indian city of Pulicat.

With some measure of security restored, the Dutch sent fine gifts to Sultan Agung: two cargo ships’ worth of the finest Indian textiles according to the most fashionable Javanese styles, then personal gifts for His Highness – a Venetian mirror, two Arabian horses, red and green robes of silk and a lacquered palanquin from China, two shields and ten drawers from Japan, and finally two honey birds and two birds of paradise. The sultan accepted all these gifts and seemed well pleased. Encouraged, the Dutch dared request that Company be allowed to trade in Java once again. Agung realized the economic potential of the Dutch, and they were hardly likely to make trouble now given their thorough humiliation at Batavia. Dutch ships made a reappearance in Java’s ports just three years after their expulsion, though this time they came as mere merchants, never with the support of arms.

Peace with Mataram was secured. Johor and the Dutch could focus freely on the conquest of Malacca.

The Dutch wanted Aceh to enter the anti-Malacca alliance, but the sultan of Aceh rejected the Dutch terms that Johor be recognized as independent. So it was a combined force of Company troops and Johorese that attacked Malacca in 1636. The brunt of the fighting was done by the former. The latter transported the material and supplies, constructed batteries and trenches, and prevented the Portuguese from ever leaving the besieged city. For twelve long months the garrison persevered in the face of cannons and gunshots, disease and starvation. So celebrated was the strength of Malacca’s fortress and the courage of its defenders that the Portuguese had nicknamed the place A Famosa, “the Famous.” A Famosa had refused to yield to decade after decade of Acehnese attack. If the garrison surrendered now, how would history remember them as? Cowards, traitors to a century of history and reputation.

But things do not always go as history and reputation would suggest. Starvation loomed upon the city, and with it came the specter of capitulation. In July 1637, the survivors surrendered and were permitted to leave in peace with their banners and arms. The next day, the Dutch Governor-General Anthony van Diemen entered on horseback the smoldering gates of the fort. Amidst the ruins of the Portuguese governor’s residence, van Diemen proclaimed to the congregated crowd of Dutchmen and Malays that Malacca was to be the new overseas capital of the Dutch East India Company.

Perhaps that crowd celebrated and cried out in huzzahs. Not so Iskandar Thani, Sultan of Aceh. The Acehnese had long prided themselves as heirs to the ancient kings of Malacca. The founder of Malacca had said as he chose the site of the city, “This is a good place!” And a good place it had been indeed. It had once served as the main port on the narrow Strait that led to China, the principal link between the East and the rest of the world – so much so that the Strait itself is now known as the Strait of Malacca. The Acehnese knew this well. One Malay chronicle recounts:

From Below the Wind to Above the Wind Malacca became famous as a very great city, the king of which was sprung from the line of Alexander the Great, so much so that princes from all countries came to present themselves before him.​

Malacca fell to the Portuguese in 1511, and the world was never the same. Aceh tried again and again to retake the city, and again and again, they failed. Now the Portuguese were gone, yet plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. What did it matter that Portugal had surrendered? The most precious city of all the Malays was still in the hands of an infidel and foreign race.

Worse, the Dutch had allied with Johor. Johor had once been a mere vassal to the Acehnese, yet the Company dared safeguard its independence. By the late 1630s, Johorese confidence – or, in Acehnese eyes, arrogance – had reached such a height that Johor was now trying to oust the Acehnese from Pahang. Spies were forever present there, always fomenting rebellion. They snuck about in the shadows of the palace of Pahang, whispering reminders that Pahang had long been a vassal of Johor and that it was fair time for old days to return.

A most intolerable state of affairs, or so it seemed to Kutaraja.

In 1639, Sultan Iskandar Thani marched with 10,000 troops to Pahang. He met Sultan Abdul Jalil Shah III of Johor in battle. A bloody battle was fought. The Johorese were routed. Iskandar Thani then marched towards Johor. To every observer, the outcome was obvious. Johor would fall; Iskandar Thani would return with great loot, proving his worth as a sultan.

Governor-General van Diemen issued a warning. If Iskandar trespassed into Johor, the Company would intervene.

Iskandar Thani was a man of great pride, almost excessively so. He called himself “king of the whole world, who like God, is glittering like the sun on midday, whose attributes are like the full moon.” But even prideful men sometimes yield. The sultan must have judged the costs and benefits with meticulous care; perhaps he spent many sleepless nights, tormented by the shame of his decision; but in the end, he heeded van Diemen and withdrew. Johor was safe.

This single incident demonstrated to all that Johor was a virtual protectorate of the Dutch, helpless before Aceh without European backing. It proved to the many little princes of the Indian Ocean that the Dutch were a strong ally, reliable enough to secure their existence. The loss of Batavia had been traumatic for the Company, but its successful intervention in Johor renewed its lease on life.

The Portuguese are diplomatically isolated and lose the city of Malacca to the Dutch in 1637. Malacca is transformed into the Dutch colonial capital, a second Batavia of sorts. The Dutch are also quickly embroiled in regional conflicts, essentially becoming the protector of the local sultan of Johor.

* * *

For the very final years of the Portuguese presence in Malacca, including the diplomatic shift that led to the Dutch-Johor alliance, see G. B. Souza's The Survival of Empire: Portuguese Trade and Society in China and the South China Sea, 1630-1754, p. 93-99. For the Dutch-Johor alliance OTL and its repercussions, see The Kingdom of Johor, 1641-1728: A Study of Economic and Political Developments in the Straits of Malacca. The OTL relationship was somewhat different from what's depicted here, though there are some parallels (details about the siege of Malacca are lifted straight from the OTL siege). In real life, the Johorese were always much more independent of the Dutch even to the point of blockading Dutch factories when the Company was being stubborn in trade deals. By contrast, ATL Johor is already looking to the Dutch for protection. The reasons are twofold. First, Aceh in 1637 is quite stronger than Aceh in 1641, and it has a warlike ruler, Iskandar Thani. Second, the Company is far more invested in the Malay world than was ever the case OTL.

The specific gifts given to Sultan Agung by the Dutch is actually taken from the list of gifts given to the Shah of Iran by the Dutch East India Company in 1651.

The Malay chronicle cited is the Malay Annals, the national history of the Malays which was begun in Johor and finished in Aceh. Its basic content should have been familiar to any educated Acehnese.

How's the new map like?

 

[Every Grass in Java]

“A most terrible scandal, sire,” the servant said.

Baureksa could not but agree. Rumors were rife in the capital these days. Not that this was anything new; Karta was the city of whispers. The whispering began at the very top – the high ministers and generals quietly interpreting some new royal idiosyncrasy, some change in the harem’s pecking order, some cryptic utterances from His Majesty. Then it trickled down to the lower echelons of government, the clerks and secretaries, who in turn spread the news to the shopkeepers and servants they encountered. It might take hours or it might take months, and one would never speak of these rumors in the open, but in the end, the people of Karta knew everything worth knowing.

So it was with these particular rumors. Everyone knew. Even the half-naked porters carrying jugs for their masters quietly chuckled as they went on their ways, and even the women bargaining over chickens in the marketplace laughed aloud as the story went around. A most terrible scandal indeed. The prestige of the state is in ruins.

The Crown Prince of Mataram had been born in the Javanese year 1541 [1619 AD]. The year was now 1559; His Highness was now eighteen, in the height of his youth. Baureksa was more than fifty now, but he remembered his own youth quite well. When he was sixteen, he had left his father’s home with a band of trusted men. He had wanted to be a bandit chief famed across Java – a voyager who would track across valley and volcano, a hero who would return ill-acquired wealth to peasants in need, a seducer who would sire dozens of children like the gods of old. That adventure had turned out badly; his father had caught him and punished him badly. He still had scars from then. Baureksa understood the Crown Prince. Young men scorn all authority, after all, and most of them let their passions loose.

Yet understanding is not forgiving, while royal children have higher standards. The prince’s youth might provide an explanation for the scandal, but in no way did it provide any justification. If the Crown Prince had so little self-restraint… then what, once he was king?

“Call for General Wiraguna,” said Baureksa, and the servant scuttled away. He returned a few hours later, saying that Wiraguna was too deeply ashamed to meet a colleague. Understandable.

“Then leave. I will write a letter for the General and call for you then.”

Baureksa was now alone in thought. He closed his eyes and tried to recall better days – only to return to Wiraguna, mouth contorted with dishonor. Wiraguna, you poor man, how shall you live from now on? How variable fate had always been! Wiraguna was a high minister here in Karta, so trusted and so favored that he was made personal tutor to the Crown Prince. Baureksa remembered well how the face of his colleague had lighted up that day that Sultan Agung had assigned his own son to his care. What better proof of royal favor could there be?

How ironic, then, that this tutorship should prove his downfall.

The Crown Prince had seduced Wiraguna’s wife. A servant had caught the two together in flagrante delicto, caressing each other as warmly as two lovers ever did, both naked as the day God had made them. Some said that the Crown Prince had been found in Wiraguna’s very own chamber. Others, more salaciously minded, said that the servant had found the two only when the woman cried out in sheer ecstasy, screeching that she had never felt such pleasure before. Which, considering Wiraguna’s age and that of his wife, was perhaps not far from the truth.

Rumor had it that this was no adulterous romance. The Crown Prince had no love for Wiraguna’s wife. He had seduced and taken her – in her husband’s room – out of pure spite. His teacher had scolded him from time to time, and this was the Prince’s revenge.

Wiraguna had been assigned to lead the Crown Prince to moral rectitude. Instead he was cuckolded by his own student. He had failed as a teacher, a husband, and a man.

Wiraguna is a good man. He does not deserve this. And what of the Crown Prince? The old maxims and morals made it clear what the duty of a king must be. The sovereign is the Screen of God, the intermediary through which He speaks to the world. The mandate that the Great God has accorded him is the preservation of order and justice in this world. He holds a dignified, an exalted, even a sacred position; like the Perfect Man in mystic thought, the king holds the balance of the cosmos together. Some even said that the king should leave actual governance to his underlings. The petty affairs of politics would but serve to blemish his honor.

There were rumors in the air about His Highness, and not just about Wiraguna’s wife. Stories told of how he had rebuked Master Mullā Maḥmūd and called him a vile Turkish tadpole. Secular officials whispered in unison that the Crown Prince had promised to “purge the court in Karta of every old minister and their cohorts of traitors.” Religious officials told rumors of their own. The Crown Prince, it was said, had openly declared his contempt for God and His prophets and threatened to confiscate clerical property down to a single coin and behead every cleric who dared resist. The innkeepers of Karta regaled their clients with salacious tales of the Prince’s dalliances, and the guests replied in kind, chuckling as they passed around gossip from the many brothels that His Highness frequented.

Could such a man really be the Screen of God? Could such a man really guard order and tranquility in this world? Even were the Crown Prince enthroned as king, would the Javanese – the people here at Karta, all mocking the Prince and his latest antics – ever follow him?

The servant came again. A letter had come from Wiraguna’s household. Baureksa opened the seal and perused it all. He frowned as the letter went on. He inhaled deeply at the end, scarcely believing the words he was reading. He had to read them out aloud to assure himself that he was not imagining them all:

My dear brother Baureksa, it is thus clear that the Crown Prince could not be more unfit to be king. In the Ramayana, it is said that the King must be akin to eight of the gods. His Majesty must be beneficent like the sky god Indra and equitable like the death god Yama; he must be persuasive like the sun god Surya and loving like the moon god Chandra; he must be wise like the wind god Vayu and generous like Kubera, lord of fortune; he must be intelligent like the sea god Varuna and brave like the fire god Brahma.

Do you think that the Crown Prince is beneficent and equitable, this man who sates his spite by making a cuckold of his teacher? Do you think he is persuasive and loving, scorned as he is by every man in Karta? Do you think he is wise and generous, proclaiming as he does that he will confiscate every glebe land in Java? Do you think he is intelligent and brave, this man who freely utters all these inanities?

When Sultan Agung departs to meet his Creator, let us all keep an eye on the new king. When he carries out what he has threatened to carry out – when he senselessly executes a high-ranking minister, for example, or when he illicitly steals the clergy’s rightful property – let us remove him by the sword and install a better ruler in his place.

The sovereign of Java holds a most exalted position. It is wrong that a sacred line of kings should be tainted by meddling in earthly politics. Once Sultan Agung ascends to Paradise and the Crown Prince is removed from power, the new king shall be in his proper position. The king shall reign, but he shall not rule. Let matters of state be left to us. We, nobility and officialdom, shall hold the reins of power in the name of the king.​

The Crown Prince of Mataram has an affair with the wife of General Wiraguna, his tutor. Wiraguna conspires to remove the Crown Prince when he ever becomes the king and change the government of Mataram to a sort of constitutional monarchy where the king only reigns but does not rule, while actual power is in the hands of the nobility-dominated officialdom.

* * *

Back to narrative, again hoping it wasn’t so bad as to be unreadable.

IOTL, in 1637, the Crown Prince of Mataram (later Amangkurat I) did have an affair with the wife of his tutor, General Wiraguna. This was a major scandal in Karta at the time, not only because Wiraguna was a respected minister in high positions but because the Crown Prince’s actions flagrantly violated the sanctity of the teacher-student relationship. We don’t know as much as we would like about this scandal, but it seems to have cemented the Prince’s hatred of his tutor. When Sultan Agung died in 1646, Amangkurat was at first forced to appoint Wiraguna as Prime Minister. But the king soon sent him to eastern Java in a war against the Balinese, where royal agents quietly disposed of the minister. Wiraguna’s entire family was later purged.

Amangkurat I was the quintessential tyrant, very possibly the worst king in Javanese history. In his first decade as ruler, he purged his court of virtually the entire leading figures that had marked his father’s reign. The Dutch remarked, perplexed, about “[this] strange manner of government… whereby the old are murdered in order to make place for the young.” Not only that, to curtail the power of merchant magnates on the north coast, he turned the administrative divisions of the coastline into a huge gerrymandered mess (with the main ports governed by officials who didn’t reside anywhere near their jurisdictions) and repeatedly banned all sailing, even fishing boats. Amangkurat thus spelled doom for a millennia-long tradition of Javanese long-distance trade.

Amangkurat clearly wanted to centralize the island under his absolute dominion, but he tried to do so by massacring the elite and alienating the aristocracy. He never tried to peacefully incorporate regional and autonomous elites into a centralized order, like Louis XIV in France or the Tokugawa shoguns in Japan. Instead, he chose to sacrifice both aristocratic support and administrative efficiency to sate his need for absolute power. Amangkurat’s policies fundamentally disrupted the elite consensus and support that were the bedrock of the Javanese state, leading to civil war and ultimately beginning Dutch colonialism on the island.

The elimination of Amangkurat I is thus a necessity for a Javanese TL. I did so by having Wiraguna conspire with Baureksa to overthrow him in a coup if the prince turned out to be trouble, which of course could not happen IOTL since Baureksa died in 1629. This will remove Amangkurat and allow for a more efficient government in mid-seventeenth century Java.

Wiraguna here proposes a novel form of government for Java. The king would reign but not rule; actual power would lie in the hands of the aristocracy-dominated officialdom. This never happened in Java IOTL, where the ideal government always remained an absolute monarchy ruled by a just and enlightened sovereign. This does have some parallels in actual Javanese thought, however. To quote Soemersaid Moertono, State and Statecraft in Old Java: A Study of the Later Mataram Period,

Thus the king is placed at the pinnacle of the social order, far beyond the reach of the common people. This point of view at one time gave rise to the idea of the king as a politically inactive power, the ratu pinandita (the sage king), from whom emanated beneficent influences, permeating his whole realm. Active participation in the affairs of the state was left to his dignitaries, especially the patih (the grand vizier) whose usually non-royal descent conformed with his special technical task.​

I hope this justifies the sort-of-constitutional oligarchic monarchy that may or may not appear in the 1650s.

For Amangkurat, the best English-language source unfortunately remains an old synopsis of Dutch sources, Islamic States in Java, 1500-1700: A Summary, Bibliography, and Index by Pigeaud and De Graaf.

 

[Every Grass in Java]

Throughout the 1630s, Aceh remained the greatest power in all the Malay world. But the Dutch had already dealt it smarting humiliation. In 1637, the city of Malacca – that history-laden town whose conquest had been the dream of every Acehnese sultan – fell instead to the Dutch East India Company. Two years later, the simple threat of war from the Company had been enough to force an Acehnese withdrawal from its archenemy Johor.

Sultan Iskandar Muda had ruled Aceh at the height of her glory, from 1607 to 1636, and the king’s very name had resonated with power. “Iskandar” was the Muslim pronunciation of “Alexander,” that ancient Macedonian world-conqueror. “Muda” was the Malay word for “young.” Iskandar Muda was the young Alexander, the world-conqueror reincarnate. Now Iskandar Muda was gone; in his place was the new sultan, Iskandar Thani. Iskandar Thani was no Iskandar Muda, but he was still an Alexander – an Iskandar – nevertheless. Would he simply sit and watch as his power ebbed away?

Not so.

Iskandar knew that alone, he was helpless. But what allies could there be? In 1640 the sultan courted the friendship of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. Yet both men were much too obstinate. Iskandar Thani was a boastful man, assured of his position as independent sovereign. “His Majesty the Holy Sultan,” the king proclaimed in his royal decrees, “is the Great Ruler and Illustrious Khagan, the Sovereign Champion of the World, Shadow of God on the Earth and Caliph of God.” Mughal pretensions were no less grand. The very name of Shah Jahan meant “world king” in Persian and his titles were yet more presumptuous: “Conqueror of Kingdoms and Master of the World, whose commands are like the decree of Fate and whose grandeur is like the firmament.”

Shah Jahan naturally expected Iskandar to become his vassal; Iskandar naturally expected the Grand Mogul to treat him as an equal. Neither were willing to concede. And so the dream of Mughal-Acehnese alliance never materialized.

The Mughals were not the only Muslim great power, but the other two were equally unpalatable. Safavid Iran was filled to the brim with Shī’ite heretics, the very sort of people that good Muslims ought to always avoid. The Ottomans were too far away. In any case, the sickly sultan of Constantinople, the aptly-nicknamed Ibrahim the Mad, had little interest in Southeast Asia.

Iskandar Thani had no recourse but to look to his neighbors in Southeast Asia. He asked Sultan Agung for a formal alliance, to be sealed by a royal marriage. “All Muslims below the winds,” said the sultan of Aceh, “must unite against the infidel Franks. This is an obligation upon them according to the sharīʿah. Already your name is renowned, even in the Sacred Places; people marvel at how you routed the Dutch. Tales of your fluttering banners are told even in the cities of Rome. I tell you, my brother, Sultan of Mataram: the duty of jihad is incumbent upon the Muslim community. Then why should you not join me in war against the infidel in Malacca, a true war in the path of the Lord?”

There was no reply. Perhaps Sultan Agung never received the letter; perhaps he did not think it was worth a response. In any case, an alliance with Aceh would have been suboptimal for him. Mataram had many Malay vassal states who felt menaced by Aceh’s expansionist ambitions.

Iskandar grieved the perfidious Mataram, but his chances were better in the east. Eastern Indonesia was dominated by the sultanate of Makassar, the vast maritime empire that was the archenemy of the Dutch Company. Its fortunes had only been bolstered by the ambitions of Sultan Agung; Agung had devastated the north coast of Java and thereby diverted its trade to Makassar, and his conquest of Bali allowed Makassar to conquer Balinese tributaries in Lombok and Sumbawa. While the rulers of Makassar had signed a peace treaty with the Company in 1637, the prosperity of the sultanate remained inversely correlated with the success of the Company. The Dutch wanted to monopolize the spice trade and close it to all but themselves, knowing they could never compete with Asian shipping in a fair market. Makassar wanted – needed – to keep the spice routes open, for they were the source of its wealth. War was inevitable. 1637 was but a brief adjourn.

The court of Makassar welcomed Iskandar Thani’s envoys with great fanfare in 1640. The Dutchmen at the factory observed the Acehnese entry with trepidation. The factory’s secretary noted:

When the Acehnese arrived at the covered pavilion [of Makassar’s sultan], they saw before them the entire field covered with troops in battle array, which at a guess consisted of some 10,000 men, arranged in such good order and rows that they could well have been thought a European army formed in battle order. Under a multitude of banners, pennants, and standards attached to poles the length of pikes, it provided a pleasant sight…​

A golden parasol, decked with a stitched cover hung with gold chains, was brought to the army by the cavalry. These horsemen consisted of two standards, each with 126 men, all provided with yellow saddles and new chainmail armor and armed with decorated lances. Then they went and fetched the Somba [the sultan of Makassar] from his palaces and placed him under the parasol. His Majesty the Somba sat on a splendid palanquin accompanied by Chancellor Pattingalloang (his uncle and chief mandarin of the realm) and a large contingent of queens, princesses, and court maidens, all elegantly adorned with gold chains and armlets, and also splendid trousers with gold cloth, with fine white and thin-trailing transparent cloth over it.​

Extraordinarily splendid was the entire spectacle... The large majority wore golden helmets, as well as kris, swords, lances and spears. The Somba's crown had about six to eight pounds of gold set with diamonds and rubies. He wore around his neck outside his splendid chainmail armor bordered with beaten gold.​

Such a brazen display of power and opulence must surely have dazzled the Acehnese – and that, after all, was what it had all been about. Makassar valued Aceh as an ally, but it could hardly stomach the possibility that the Acehnese would see them as weak and impoverished supplicants. For the sake of its pride and legitimacy, it had no choice but to stage this expensive pageant.

This was the nature of politics in seventeenth-century Asia: a game of prestige. The projection of power required any raja or sultan or padishah to acquire guns and elephants, the visible accruements of military force. But just as much, it required his neighbors to respect him as a worthy sovereign of a mighty empire.

The prestige of the Mughals demanded that Aceh pay it homage; the prestige of Aceh demanded that it remain independent; the prestige of Makassar demanded that it stage a costly show for the Acehnese. Prestige alone explains why Makassar became an Acehnese ally while the Mughals did not. The prestige of both Aceh and Makassar was heightened by this alliance of equals. But the Mughals’ reputation could not allow for a bilateral alliance with such a weaker country, while the great prestige of Aceh precluded Iskandar Thani from becoming a vassal.

The demands of realpolitik might have differed from those of prestige. But then, politics have seldom been always pragmatic.

Be that as it may, a formal treaty of alliance was signed in late 1640. The Makassar version of the preamble began:

Aceh and Makassar are brothers, equally great, with none above and none below. We are slaves only to God. We will not force one to submit to the other. We will walk together with arms swinging freely, equal in walking, equal in sitting.​

The equality of the parties having been established, Aceh and Makassar promised to forever defend each other whenever they were attacked. “Though Aceh and Makassar are divided by leagues and leagues of wind and water, whenever Makassar is imperiled on land or on sea, Aceh shall support his brother by the gun and the sword. And though Aceh lies on the very edge of the lands Below the Winds, whenever Aceh is attacked by horse or by ship, Makassar shall send fine cavalry and galleys in his brother’s cause.”

The Company’s two greatest native enemies were now in alliance. Yet more alarming was further news flowing in from Aceh. The Dutch learned that Iskandar Thani had met the ambassadors of the Portuguese State of India and representatives from the English East India Company, perhaps intimating the possibility of an Acehnese-Makassar-Portuguese-English alliance to crush the Dutch for once and for all. It was said that English ships were busy transporting cannon and gunpowder to Acehnese ports and that Iskandar Thani was training his elephants for war.

Imagine the relief of the Dutch when Sultan Iskandar fell ill and died in March 1641. He was only thirty-one.

Iskandar Thani left no children behind. There was a brief period of chaos as each noble wondered whom to support, or whether he should press his claim to the throne. Finally, the nobility decided to give the crown to the Queen Dowager, the primary wife of Iskandar Thani. She accepted their demand and was enthroned as Sultanah Taj al-Alam.

The Company saw Taj al-Alam as the key to Aceh’s downfall. “Women are not much respected in the East,” said one governor from The Hague, “so it is inevitable that Aceh shall decline. In any case, how should a half-naked woman have any success in war?” At first, it seemed they were right. In the summer of 1641, the vassal king of Pahang refused to accept a woman as his overlord and swore fealty to the Dutch ally of Johor instead. The Dutch similarly expected that they could manipulate factions within the Acehnese court - who would have been strengthened by the instability of female rule - to force the sultanah into concessions.

With this in mind, the Dutch tried to coerce Aceh into surrendering the tin trade to the Company. The sultanah stalled and stalled, apologizing to the Dutch embassy for “Her Majesty’s womanly nature, which drives her to always vacillate from one view to another.” As the queen stalled for time, unbeknownst to the Dutch, she convened the leaders of the major factions and slowly forged a consensus among them. When the reply came to the tired Dutch embassy - no, such a concession was unacceptable - the queen had used her wits and her royal prestige to persuade all leading factions to accept this refusal. Taj al-Alam had outwitted the Company, playing on the very stereotypes of her gender. There would be no factional splits for the Dutch to manipulate.

Most negotiations between Aceh and the Company went this way.

By 1650, the Company was confident enough of both its own superiority and Taj al-Alam’s supposed feminine weaknesses, and tired enough of the endless negotiations with the sultanah, that it decided to blockade the city of Aceh itself. An ultimatum was presented, demanding a full Acehnese withdrawal from the Malay Peninsula; the demands were duly rejected. A Dutch fleet immediately set sail to block all ships from entering the port. Eventually, the Dutch must have hoped, the city itself would be captured and razed and Acehnese power in the East would be annihilated.

Makassar, of course, took this as a declaration of war and marshaled its fleet to attack Dutch positions in the East. This had been expected by the Company. Governor-General Carel Reyniersz felt reasonably sure he could at least stalemate Makassar.

Then India threw a wrench in his plans.

Mughal miniature: "Akbar enters the City of Surat"

The Indian metropolis of Surat was the chief port of the Mughal Empire, the richest state in the world, and its population of hundreds of thousands exceeded those of all but three European cities (Istanbul, Paris, and London). No wonder, then, that Europeans called it “a city as large as a kingdom.” Surat was also an important center of Dutch trade from where the Company could access all the opulence of Mughal India.

The events of December 1650 thus came as a shock to the Company. The Dutch blockade of Aceh had destroyed many ships belonging to Virji Vora, a Jain merchant who dominated Indian trade and was rumored to be the richest man in the world. Virji Vora pressed the Company to compensate his lost ships. The Company paid Vora in silver and spices, but the Company was too hard-pressed by Aceh and Makassar to spare much money to compensate Vora. The value of the “compensation” ended up to be barely a third – or even less, since the spices turned out to be spoiled – of what the Jain had lost to Dutch piracy. Vora had already been irritated by Dutch attempts to monopolize the spice trade, and this was enough cause for war. (This was perhaps a little ironic, considering that Vora’s Jain religion abhors violence.)

Vora was already recognized as the honorary Chief Merchant of Surat and was the formal leader of the city’s Hindu-Jain merchant guilds. Religious differences notwithstanding, he was also a commercial ally and personal friend of Mirza Arab, the Mughal governor of Surat. Vora easily convinced Mirza Arab to issue an ultimatum to the Company. The Dutch had two choices. They could either immediately make peace with Aceh, as well as fully compensate every merchant in Surat who had lost money due to the Dutch blockade. Or they could refuse, in which case Mirza Arab would destroy the Dutch properties in his jurisdiction and petition Emperor Shah Jahan to declare war on the Company.

Would the Company surrender before Mughal pressure?

Their shared antagonism towards the Dutch leads to an alliance between Aceh and Makassar, the most powerful Islamic empires in Southeast Asia besides Mataram. Undaunted, the Dutch East India Company blockades Aceh in 1650. Makassar immediately declares war to protect its ally. More ominously, the Mughal governor of the port city of Surat threatens to petition the Mughal emperor to declare war on the Dutch...

* * *

These major divergences all ultimately derive from different timing. Sultan Agung’s victory forced the Dutch to move to Malacca four years earlier than they did IOTL. This means the Acehnese ruler they face is not Taj al-Alam but the more bellicose Iskandar Thani (who IOTL died just thirty-two days after the Dutch took Malacca, not giving him enough time to prepare a response). Iskandar Thani IOTL is sufficiently provoked to seek an alliance with Makassar.

Meanwhile, the weakness of the Company after losing Batavia means that it blockades Aceh in 1650, three years later than IOTL. This means that the governor of Surat is the Persian noble Mirza Arab, who Shah Jahan appointed in 1649. IOTL, the governor of Surat during the Dutch blockade of Aceh was Mir Musa. Mir Musa responded to Dutch attacks on Mughal shipping by attacking and destroying the Dutch factory at Surat in 1647, but this was apparently not approved by the Mughal government. In any case, Shah Jahan did not hold him in high regard and replaced him soon later. His replacement Mirza Arab is more well-regarded by the emperor and his petition could therefore hold much more weight in the Mughal court.

The fact that it's Mirza Arab who is responding to the Dutch blockade of Aceh and not Mir Musa is also significant because the Jain merchant-prince Virji Vora was scared of Mir Musa (to the point that he avoided all markets where Mir Musa had commercial interests) but had good relations with Mirza Arab. This means that Virji Vora is more willing to raise his annoyance at the Dutch with the Mughal authorities (he did not IOTL, though I think it is probable that he lost money due to the 1647 blockade).

It’s just been twenty years, and already the butterflies flutter…

All royal titles were used IOTL by Iskandar Thani and Shah Jahan. The description of Makassar’s military display before the Acehnese envoys are also from OTL (though in reality, they describe a parade held by a different ruler in 1695 before a Dutch embassy; The Heritage of Arung Palakka, p. 290-291), and the preamble to the Aceh-Makassar treaty is a formulaic invocation from the region.

For an overview of Aceh in the seventeenth century, Denys Lombard’s French classic Le Sultanat d'Atjeh au temps d'Iskandar Muda, 1607-1636 is still the canonical work. For the reign of queen Taj al-Alam, who did IOTL stall for time and evoke her femininity to tire the Dutch into compromising, see Barbara Andaya’s “’A Very-Good Natured but Awe-Inspiring Government': The Reign of a Successful Queen in Seventeenth-Century Aceh.” For the Jain merchant Virji Vora and seventeenth-century Surat in general, I used Gokhale’s Surat in the Seventeenth Century: A Study of Urban History of Pre-modern India, quite old now but a still very useful text.

 

[Every Grass in Java]

Mullā Maḥmūd was dead.

His carcass lay rotting by the roadside, already well on the way to decomposition. It was prone on the sand, the ground colored dark from blood long since bled, its arms and legs sprawled about like the shadow of some monstrous ape. The flesh was torn, and here and there one glimpsed the white of the bones. The scavengers must have come and gone. Now only the flies buzzed about the blackening flesh. The flies alone reveled here, feasting on the meat that was now as soft as Chinese tofu. They seemed entirely unaffected by the overwhelming odor of maggoty flesh.

An iron spike protruded from somewhere in the middle of the disintegrating mass. Baureksa supposed the heart had been impaled. No, not supposed – he hoped so. Then, at least, the Mullā would not have lingered in death. The end of the spike was dark and opaquely red. At first it seemed to be rust; but then it could just as well have been dried blood. The general watched a fly land on the very top of the iron. The insect rubbed its front legs together, slowly and meticulously. It was if it was making the sembah – the joining of the hands that signifies reverence to a superior in Javanese culture. Perhaps the fly was apologizing.

Even flies showed remorse and respect before Mullā Maḥmūd.

Was His Majesty worse than a fly?

Sultan Agung had died in the Javanese year 1568 [1646 AD]. The Crown Prince had taken power peacefully, but not without apprehension from most everyone in Java. In the security of the mosques on Friday afternoons, or in the quiet that comes under the palm trees at night, people whispered as they always did. They whispered that the new King really would slaughter his father’s ministers, that His Majesty really would break the clergy. Kangjeng Ratu kaya Jajal Lanat, they said, “His Majesty the King is like the Emperor of the Demons.” Baureksa too had heard those rumors, hoping – but doubting – that the Prince would mellow out as he reigned.

His doubts had been well-grounded. A year had passed since His Majesty’s accession and autocracy had only sharpened his brutality. It was said in the city streets that His Majesty had already beaten a dozen court ladies to death – Baureksa could never know how true that was, but it seemed fully compatible with the new king’s temper.

And now Mullā Maḥmūd. The Kurdish scholar had always been a little too righteous for His Majesty’s taste. Objecting to the king’s amorous liaisons, chastising his petty cruelties – in His Majesty’s view, the Mullā seemed little better than a nagging wife. How dare this doddering old man scold the autocrat of all of Java? One day, the king pressed trumped-up charges of treason on the logician. Everyone knew the Master to be innocent. Nobody dared speak out. At the end of the day, fear always trumps justice.

Master Maḥmūd was tortured, yet refused to confess to his so-called “treason.” He was finally impaled on an iron spike, his body left for the beasts on the outskirts of the capital. And so here lay Mullā Maḥmūd of Damascus, his soul already gone to the Lord of Mercy, his body collapsing into rot and grime.

“Who would ever shed a tear when a logician dies?” His Majesty had said to his court after the execution. “None at all, Your Majesty,” all the ministers – even Baureksa – had fearfully replied. But here, looking at the mangled corpse of the Master, General Baureksa could not help but shed a tear.

His thoughts turned to General Wiraguna. So long ago, or so it seemed, his colleague had sent him a letter. He had suggested that they oust His Majesty if he proved to be a tyrant. The king’s tyranny was already proven far too well by now. Yet there was still no coup. Wiraguna had been appointed Prime Minister in the wake of Sultan Agung’s death, but the new king immediately sent him to suppress a small Balinese rebellion. On the way to Bali, the general fell ill and died. Or so went the official narrative. Wiraguna’s daughter was sure that His Majesty had poisoned his own mentor. After all, who would ever send the highest official in the realm to suppress a few hundred rioting peasants? It had to be a plot to dispose of her father out of the sights of the court. Baureksa agreed. Wiraguna could not have died naturally. He was murdered – and there was only one suspect.

Yet with Wiraguna gone, Baureksa found himself unable to plot against His Majesty, tyrant that he was. He was too loyal for that. Or was it cowardice, not loyalty?

He remembered the mysterious adage he always had memorized, somewhere in his head. “There is nothing that can be compared to the service of the king; this is like being a piece of wood in the ocean, going where the waves bring you.” But what if the waves bring the piece of wood into a huge conflagration? What if the waves engulf the piece of wood and tear it apart with the ocean’s ferocity? Must the piece of wood always obey the waves, even then? Was the analogy valid at all? Was Baureksa simply wood to be simply used by the waves, or was he a man of his own who could forge his own paths?

His head hurt. He needed to leave. Baureksa would go to the southern coastline of Java, the realm of the Goddess of the Southern Ocean, and meditate there. Perhaps he would find an answer there.

* * *

The Chronicle of the Regulator of the Realm, a seventeenth-century Javanese biography of General Baureksa, describes an encounter between him and the Goddess of the Southern Ocean. According to this account, the general was mired in the contradictions between two obligations: his duty to serve the ruler and his mandate to counteract injustice. To find the right thing to do, he retreated into a seaside grotto and meditated. There, the Goddess came to him:

Then the general was sitting at night in his pavilion unattended by anyone, for they were all asleep. He was sunk deep in meditation with his back against a pillar. Heavy was his heart.

Now swiftly someone came.

It was as though a falling star had descended on the pavilion.

Immediately sitting before the sultan was the form of a woman. Two accompanied her, both women with a similar appearance which cannot be described. But, of the three, the one in the center was slightly different from those who escorted her. Different – but how different? This too cannot be described. For long the general did not address her. He gazed, dumbfounded. He closely observed her.

She was sitting but did not touch the ground.

The general said softly: “I ask your name, for I am quite mystified.”

The woman said, “My child Baureksa, you must know who I am.”

The general said, “Your Highness must surely be the Goddess of the Southern Ocean.”

The woman said she was indeed.

The general said in relief, “I beseech your help, Your Highness, for I am quite confused. Is it right to serve a king who is a tyrant? Is it right to oppose injustice though it comes from the rightful king?”

The Goddess said, “Oh, my child Baureksa, it is incumbent upon you to dethrone the king. Take the crown of Majapahit from this King of Devils and give it to a worthier man. It is the wish of God Almighty that the King of Mataram be brought to destruction on account of his tyranny and impiety. It has been revealed to me that you are the instrument of God for this task. It is by you that the state of the Islamic religion shall be restored to its splendor in Java. It is by you that the imperial writ of Java shall once again ring through the foreign lands.”

The general said, “But how shall it be? For the king is strong and I am but a servant.”

“Fear not, my child, for your mother shall stand by you in conquering Mataram. I shall fortify your troops with my spirit armies, I shall make your guns invincible in war – so bring war to the tyrant and give the kingship to a more righteous man.”

Then the general blinked. When he reopened his eyes, the Goddess was nowhere to be seen.

The general was much shaken with wonder.​

* * *

“Sire, you must hear the news.”

“Then tell me,” said Baureksa. He must have missed much during the weeks he had spent on the southern coast.

“While you were away, deep in your meditations, the king’s brother Prince Alit tried to rebel against His Majesty and seize the throne for himself. He was defeated, of course, and publicly garroted. But Sire, as you surely know, Prince Alit had a broad base of support. The Muslim clerics were all unanimously for him. They had grown weary of His Majesty’s impious sins.”

“Yes, yes, I know. So what happened then?”

“Rain fell heavily that day,” muttered the servant in a dreamy voice. “His Majesty had said he was taking a census of the leading imams and other holy men and men of religion. And everyone believed him! So on that day, that rainy day, every imam had gathered before the palace courtyard. And not just the imams. His Majesty had said that all the men of religion should bring their wives and children with them so the census could be improved. So there were five thousand people under the rain that day – thousands of holy men, thousands of women, thousands of children.

“Once every holy men was inside, the king raised his hand. At that sign, soldiers rushed in from the gates of the courtyard. They were armed with swords and daggers, and at once they began hacking into the crowd. Imams young and old, imams from Java and imams from Persia, crones and virgins, little boys and girls – none were spared. Infants were torn from their mother’s breasts and thrown to the ground for the soldiers to tramp on.

“The imams had been disarmed. There was no resistance. Some of the troops grew sick and threw down their swords, crying out that they could not kill so many. Then the king shouted out, “Kill, kill, kill – he who refuses to kill shall himself be killed.” So the troops hacked and slashed again, weeping as they did.

“The massacre took half an hour. In thirty minutes, five thousand people died.

“The bodies were not buried. The stench of their rotting flesh is everywhere now. His Majesty says it is a warning to those who would put religion above their king, and an admonition to those who would abet traitors and pretenders.”

Baureksa nodded slowly. His head felt very clear. If there had been any doubt before, it was gone now.

* * *

Back to narrative. The new king – IOTL we would call him Amangkurat I – did discretely assassinate his teacher and chancellor Wiraguna while dispatching him to lead an expedition to Bali. He also did murder some 2,000 Muslim clerics and their families, amounting to about five thousand people in total, just because some clerics had favored his brother Prince Alit. This massacre is discussed extensively in Dutch sources, where it is remarked that the corpses were still abandoned three years after the slaughter. Only one Javanese source, though, mentions the incident (the others were subject to censure). Here’s all that the chronicle says:

When “disappeared the teachers upon the road, men” [Javanese chronogram for 1570 AJ/1648 AD] departed from the rightful path. As if dimmed was the luster of the kingdom; rain fell heavily; the king constantly cherished a grim hatred and ordered the troops.​

Baureksa’s encounter with the Goddess of the Southern Ocean is also taken directly from a Javanese chronicle, the Babad Dipanagara. English translation from The Power of Prophecy: Prince Dipanagara and the End of an Old Order in Java, p. 145-146.

 

[Every Grass in Java]

In July 1649, General Baureksa went to see Panembahan Agung, the ecclesiastical ruler of the mosque-town of Giri. This port had long been a center of Javanese Islam, with its ruling dynasty of priest-Panembahans (Panembahan means “honored lord” in Javanese) directly descended from the first proselytizers of the island. Indeed, the Panembahans were so religiously significant that the Dutch considered them “the popes of Java.” There could be no better place to legitimate a religiously justified rebellion.

Baureksa knelt before the Panembahan, spoke of his desire to overthrow the king of Mataram, and asked him whether it was licit for him to revolt. The Panembahan replied, “Take care and battle firmly. Let piety serve as your bow, let the Qur’an serve as your arrows, and draw your bow on the field of battle. God willing, your cause will triumph.”

The Panembahan promised that he would support the rebellion with every man he could muster, as would all his neighboring lords. Everyone was tired of Amangkurat.

Baureksa then moved west to the city of Demak. Demak had been the first Islamic capital of Java, and its fifteenth-century Great Mosque with its tiered roofs and timber pillars was said to be the oldest on the island. What better place could there be to pray for success in the upcoming war? Here, Baureksa met his co-conspirator, the pious Prince Pekik. Prince Pekik was the senior prince of the ruling line of Surabaya, conquered by Sultan Agung in 1625. When he came to Mataram in 1633, he was treated with great honor by the sultan. He was appointed a leading general and was allowed to marry Agung’s sister, while his own daughter was wed to the Crown Prince. Under normal circumstances, Pekik would have been the king’s closest ally.

But these were not normal circumstances. Amangkurat had always distrusted his own father-in-law, just as he distrusted every other one of his father’s associates. Pekik’s daughter had died in childbirth a few months before. Kinship ties were now broken between the Prince and the King, while Amangkurat’s suspicions grew only deeper. Was Prince Pekik trying to kill him? Would Pekik find a way to dispose of him so that his own grandson could be crowned? And more and more, the king found himself pondering on the best ways to publicly execute his former father-in-law…

Understandably, Prince Pekik feared for his life. He fled the city discretely and entered into contact with Baureksa, promising him that all the soldiers of Surabaya would rise for the rebellion.

The general and the prince greeted each other warmly in the Grand Mosque. Throughout the night, they must have recited the Qur’an together:

Why should you not fight in God’s cause and for those oppressed men, women, and children who cry out, “Lord, rescue us from this town whose people are oppressors! By Your grace, give us a protector and a helper!”? The believers fight for God’s cause, while those who reject faith fight for an unjust cause. Fight the allies of Satan: Satan’s strategies are truly weak. [Q 4:75-76]​

The next day, Baureksa unfurled the banner of rebellion atop the battlements of Demak.

Lords from across the north coast of Java – Panembahan Ratu of Cirebon, Panembahan Agung of Giri, and Prince Pekik of Surabaya – rallied to the cause and brought their troops to Demak. In a matter of months, some 22,000 soldiers had gathered at the city. Amangkurat raised his own armies from the Mataram area, the densely populated interior of Central Java that was the core of his empire. But many of the Mataram gentry and officials already suspected that the king was doomed and sent only a small portion of their men to the king. Amangkurat still had only 16,000 troops by the end of the year.

The king railed on the treachery of his subjects, but Baureksa was quickly approaching. There was little else to do but to meet the enemy in the battlefield and hope for the best. The treacherous landlords could be purged after Baureksa and Pekik were publicly fed to tigers. So Amangkurat marched north with his small and hesitant army. In April 29, 1650, the two armies met at Salatiga, the main town on the road from Mataram to the north sea. Amangkurat’s armies were outgunned and outmanned. Most of them feared the king and many of them had once served under General Baureksa.

On the day of battle, or so say the chronicles, General Baureksa alone rode out to the battlefield. The scouts aimed at the man on horseback and very nearly shot – then they saw who it was. The king’s troops lowered their barrels and cried out, “Our General, come back to us! Do not stay with the rebels, you will surely die!” Baureksa replied, “If I die today, than that is my fate, and not even Krishna dared defy his fate.” Then he cast aside his helmet. The soldiers saw that their general had a long scar running from the end of his right eye, cutting a ravine across his cheek down to his jaw. They had never known; here was a culture where injuries were frowned upon. ”But look at me.” Baureksa said. “The enemy has scarred my face, just as you, my troops, have scars from the Dutch and the Bantenese and the Balinese and all the other foes you and I have fought.” There was silence. Then the gunners said, “Sire, you are our general. Today you will lead us again.”

The news spread like wildfire as every soldier defected from their hated king. Amangkurat’s army disintegrated. The king himself woke up late and found himself with a rapidly shrinking force. Afraid of being captured, the king ran back to Plered (the new capital, Amangkurat having abandoned Karta early in his reign) on an old horse. The day was won. Baureksa, Pekik, and Agung allowed their troops to plunder the king’s tents and readied their army for the final advance.

Amangkurat returned to his palace in May. The very night of his return, he was assassinated by a guard who had taken bribes from Prince Purbaya, uncle of the king and only surviving brother of Sultan Agung. The king’s body was castrated and beheaded and the rest was cremated. The guard kept the penis as a souvenir.

When the rebels reached Plered a month later, they found that the gates were already open for them. Prince Purbaya personally came out to greet the rebel generals with great honor, displayed the head of Amangkurat as a sign of his loyalty to the cause, and pleaded that he be crowned the new King of Mataram.

General Baureksa spent his own money to afford a royal funeral for the head. It was given the posthumous name Amangkurat (“Cradling the Earth”) and was buried at the dynastic cemetery at Imagiri, near the tomb of Sultan Agung.

While Purbaya begged to be crowned as soon as possible, the rebels stalled for time. Baureksa was temporarily appointed Prime Minister for a day. The next day, he declared that the position was too tiresome for him and resigned in favor of Prince Pekik. It was therefore the Surabaya prince who led the interim government. His administration began with the parceling out of titles and honors. Acknowledging his accomplishments at Salatiga and preeminence in the field of war, Baureksa was given the new title Panatanagara – “Regulator of the Realm.” The Panembahans of Giri and Cirebon were given high religious honors, while various nobles in Plered were mollified with grandiose-sounding titles. But there was little doubt about who had the real power.

There was some discussion about who to crown within the rebel leadership. Baureksa was open to Prince Purbaya’s proposal, but Pekik was dead-set on the idea that his grandson, the one-year-old son of Amangkurat and his dead daughter, should be king. The other rebels were also amenable to the idea of having an infant king and controlling the realm during nearly twenty years of regency. Ultimately, Baureksa yielded. The baby was crowned as Sultan Pakubuwana in September 1650. The rebellion appeared to have been successful. In October, the Panembahan Agung went back to Giri and the Panembahan Ratu returned to Cirebon.

Purbaya also left Plered, outraged at having been cheated out of his throne and set on reclaiming his birthright. Soon there were new rumors in Mataram. “The people of the North Coast have seized Prince Purbaya’s rightful throne by force,” the people said. “Soon, Prince Pekik will make himself Sultan and the Northerners will destroy the dynasty of Sultan Agung. Pekik will move the capital to Surabaya and leave Mataram to fester in desolation. Thankfully, Prince Purbaya has left Plered and is even today planning a just war against the rebels. The prince has consulted a Balinese astrologer, and the omens are clear. Prince Purbaya is destined to restore the House of Agung to the throne, throw the Northerners back into the sea where they belong, and make Mataram preeminent in Java once more.”

Pekik, newly appointed regent as well as Prime Minister, identified Purbaya as the source of all this whispering and sent 5,000 troops to arrest him and bring him back to Plered. Pekik’s men caught Purbaya off guard while the prince was asleep in his countryside mansion. The prince and his family just barely managed to escape. Most of his servants were taken prisoner, the mansion was burned down, and his wealth was appropriated by the state.

Purbaya fled west to the region of Kedhu, where he crowned himself before a crowd of inquisitive bandit chieftains and commanded “all the true Mataram people” to join his rising. In the next few months, some of the leading dignitaries of Plered – such as General Mandudareja, one of the favored commanders of Sultan Agung and a distant scion of the royal house – quietly left to hedge their bets with Purbaya. Most, however, chose to stay neutral and see who won. Pekik had recently announced that the capital would be moved back to Karta once Purbaya was defeated, and this was enough to assure most people that Mataram would remain the center of Java at least in the near future. In any case, even Mataram nobles had grown tired of Sultan Agung's absolutism and thought a baby king might well signal a change.

In this, Sultan Agung’s centralization of the Mataram area proved to be Purbaya’s bane. In most of Java, including most of the north coast save a few key ports, local rulers were granted great autonomy. They usually lived on their lands and had near-absolute authority in their large, contiguous jurisdictions. In the core area of Mataram, by contrast, land tended to be granted to high-ranking princes and ministers. (The notion of paying officials with money was yet an oddity for most Javanese.) These landholders were obliged to permanently reside in the capital, while the land they were granted was widely fragmented into little parcels (for some major landholders, no contiguous plot of land would held more than 2% of their total holdings). It was easier to mobilize the northern lords for a rebel cause.

By March 1651, Purbaya had managed to gather around 10,000 followers, about two-fifths of them bandits and the rest of them noblemen and their retinues. At the same time, the Panembahan Agung advanced from Giri with around the same number of troops to defeat the renegade king. When Purbaya heard the news, says one chronicle, “the prince’s face turned pale; he seemed more like a base Chinese salesman than a scion of Mataram.” Soon after, the prince fled west to the Priangan Highlands with his most trusted retainers.

Purbaya’s cowardice cost him most of his support. Most of the bandits returned to petty banditry, while the nobility largely came back to Plered. (A general pardon had been issued.) Mandudareja feared that Pekik would assassinate him and refused to return, seemingly vanishing into the countryside.

There was little news from the Priangan. It seemed that Purbaya had tried to rally the local mountain lords to accept him as king and, unsurprisingly enough, had had very little success.

By mid-1651, stability seemed to have returned to Java. But it was but a façade, as the events of the next few years would demonstrate only too well.

Amangkurat is defeated and killed in a rebellion led by General Baureksa and Prince Pekik (the latter being a scion of one of the dynasties conquered by Sultan Agung). The rebels install the infant son of Amangkurat as king. Prince Purbaya, only surviving brother of Agung, rejects the new king and leads a rebellion that goes nowhere and soon disintegrates. Peace appears to have returned to Java.

* * *

The new installment.

The Panembahan Giri was indeed widely respected across seventeenth-century Java and Indonesia. For one, his lineage came from Sunan Giri, one of the greatest of the Nine Saints of Java. The dynasty was also responsible for a great deal of Islamic proselytization further east, thanks to which the Panembahan was famed as a religious leader across the archipelago. The first Muslim ruler of the kingdom of Ternate, the world's primary producer of cloves, was educated in the faith in the madrasa of Giri in the late sixteenth century. The main propagator of Islam in Ternate and her neighbors, a missionary known as Tuhubahahul, was a Javanese from Giri. Throughout many of the Spice Islands of Maluku into the seventeenth century, letters from the Panembahan were received with the greatest deference; fezzes from Giri were valued for their religious potency; the sons of chiefs continued to be educated in Giri's madrasa.

Everything there about Prince Pekik and the administration of Mataram vis-a-vis the North Coast (the Pasisir, as the Javanese would call it) is from OTL. Well, not everything. In real history, Pekik was brutally executed in 1659 by the ever-paranoid Amangkurat. He would seem to have a happier fate ITTL.

“Take care and battle firmly. Let piety serve as your bow, let the Qur’an serve as your arrows, and draw your bow on the field of battle." is also a real quote – as are most quotes in this TL so far – but it's actually from a poem by Sultan Agung, Song of the House of Gold. See Ricklefs, Mystic Synthesis in Java, p. 48-49.

I use the Abdel Haleem translation of the Qur'an, considering that it's been published by Oxford and all.

 

[Every Grass in Java]

In the first half-century since its foundation, the Dutch East India Company seemed nigh invincible. The Hollanders had swooped down seemingly out of nowhere, and, in a matter of decades, broken the might of the Portuguese. The Dutch were now seen from the Cape to Nagasaki, their armadas towering over dhows and junks.

By 1650, the Company felt strong enough to gamble. It declared war on two of its most formidable enemies: Aceh in the Malay world and Makassar in eastern Indonesia. The Gentlemen Seventeen (the central board of the Company) knew this would be a long war, costly both in money and manpower. Nevertheless, when push came to shove, the Company would certainly prevail.

The Dutch had attacked Indian shipping in Southeast Asia as part of their blockade on Aceh, provoking the ire of Mirza Arab, Mughal governor of the port of Surat. The governor had offered two choices to the Company: either compensate the affected merchants in full, or refuse to pay and be evicted from Surat and possibly the entire Mughal realm.

The Company could not possibly pay such a ridiculously large sum in the middle of a war. It would have to forsake access to Mughal territory, then. The Company considered retaliation, by attacking and sacking Surat and its riches – but more experienced East India men warned that attacking India’s premier port might doom the Company’s chances of ever regaining access to the empire. So the Company sat and watched as it lost its toeholds in the world’s richest empire. In 1651, Mirza Arab sacked the Dutch factory in Surat. A decree from Delhi soon arrived to forbid all Dutchmen from trading in the empire for an indefinite period of time.

At least for the time being, the Dutch were evicted from North India.

Depredations on Mughal commerce continued. Surat’s greatest merchant magnate, Virji Vora, requested that the state provide a fleet to protect its subjects’ trade, or at least that he and the other great merchants be allowed to build their personal fleets to protect their own ships. The Peacock Throne rebuffed both requests. Vora might be rich and influential, but his official capacity in the Mughal administration was limited. In any case, Delhi’s central government knew and cared little for the Dutch – for all they cared, the Dutch Company was just another group of “nomad tribes patrolling the seas” (khana ba dush muhafazat-i darya) who hailed from their “nests” (nasheman) on the “Islands of the Franks” (jaza’ir-i Firang).

Matters were different further south in the subcontinent. In the famous gem-laden kingdom of Golkonda, whose very name would become an English word meaning “place of fortune,” all matters of state were dominated not by the sultan but by the Persian merchant-official Muhammad Sayyid Ardestani. Like Virji Vora, Ardestani saw losses to the Dutch blockade of Aceh. But unlike his Jain counterpart, Ardestani had the full backing of the Golkonda state on his side. In 1651, he expelled the Dutch from all their factories in the kingdom. Even Fort Geldria, the capital of the Company’s governorate in southern India, was swiftly conquered. The merchant-official then began to buy European warships from the Portuguese to try and reverse-engineer them. The Dutch were far from pleased, but what could they do? There was little to gain and much to lose by making Ardestani an implacable foe.

Meanwhile, war raged on Below – and sometimes Above – the Winds. Considering the complexities of this prolonged war, which would eventually pit the Company against virtually all its enemies, the different theaters and stages of the conflict have been separately treated in the following discussion.

1. The Malay theater, 1650-1651. The Dutch blockaded Aceh throughout these years, though the Company fleet turned out to be much too small for the embargo to be anything more than a nuisance to the Sultana. More dangerous was the Dutch campaign in the Malay Peninsula. When the war had begun, the small city-state of Kedah had abandoned its Acehnese overlord and declared for the Company. Perak now remained the last mainland outpost of Aceh.​

In the dry season of 1651, the Governor-General in Malacca presented the Acehnese vassal sultan of Perak with an ultimatum: surrender peacefully and abandon his loyalties to Aceh, or resist and see the kingdom brought to ruin. Sultan Muhyiddin Mansur Shah replied, “Has God truly decreed that a slave should betray his honest master?” It was war, then. The armies of Kedah, Johor, and Dutch Malacca – around seven thousand Malays and four thousand Company troops – joined to invade Perak. If it fell, Aceh would be reduced to Sumatra alone. Its pretensions to pan-Malay dominion would be proven a sham for once and for all.​

There was no help forthcoming from across the Strait. Sultan Muhyiddin’s army of several thousands, outmanned and outgunned, met the enemy in battle and was annihilated. The civilians of the kingdom fled to the mountains, while Muhyiddin and his court fortified themselves in their capital of Hilir Perak. The VOC and their allies soon arrived and laid siege to the town in late 1651.​

2. The eastern Indonesian theater, 1650-1651. Meanwhile, the Company struggled to hold its ground in eastern Indonesia. Dutch control over the Spice Islands of northern Maluku and their fragrant cloves had long relied on their subsidiary ally, the sultan of Ternate. The sultan nominally ruled the only sources of clove trees in the entire world, after all. Yet, as the 1650s began, Dutch-Ternate relations began to fray.​

Sultan Hamzah, the old and tyrannical king of Ternate, died in 1648. The Dutch quickly crowned Mandar Syah, Hamzah’s meek eldest son. But Mandar was a man considered by all Ternatens to lack even the faintest traces of royal character. In 1650, just as war was beginning with Aceh and Makassar, the leading nobles of Ternate deposed Mandar and crowned his younger brother Prince Manilha as sultan. The old sultan fled to the Dutch fortress in Ternate, begging for protection and pleading that the Company restore him to the throne.​

Makassar could not have been more elated. With Dutch fleets withdrawing to Ternate to depose Manilha, the initiative was theirs. Three thousand troops went east from Sulawesi to support Manilha and the insurgent Ternatens, while Makassar agents fanned the flames of rebellion in areas under direct Dutch control. Their efforts were not in vain. In 1651, Majira – chieftain of the spice-rich Hoamoal Peninsula in southern Maluku and traditionally a vassal of Ternate – proclaimed that his loyalties lay with Sultan Manilha and not the infidel-tainted Mandar, rebelled against his infidel overlords, and sent letters to Makassar asking for help.​

By 1652, the Company was on the defensive in the Spice Islands. The Dutch had chased Manilha and his followers out of Ternate Island, but the insurgents – which included the majority of Ternate’s 8,000 inhabitants – simply fled to the eastern island of Halmahera, where they continued their raids on Dutch positions. The Dutch and their allies regularly ravaged Hoamoal to break Majira’s will to fight, but taking his fortified positions proved to be arduous. Asahudi, Majira’s capital town, was on a steep mountain slope directly overlooking the sea. There were nine small fortresses on this single slope, all stocked with artillery, and then a battery on an island off the coast to prevent Dutch ships from entering nearby waters. Such a fortress could only be taken with great time and money; the Company was starting to run out of both. Clove production was at a standstill and the spice trade was ebbing. Makassar troops were everywhere, whether they were helping Majira’s warriors use their cannons to full effect or providing much-needed manpower for the refugee Sultan Manilha.​

The Gentlemen Seventeen began to worry.​

3. The Europeans join in. Still, as the year 1652 began, the Company was winning. Perak was about to fall. Manilha and Majira were steadily forced back, no matter how many troops Makassar might send.​

But the Dutch were not the only Europeans in the scene.​

Commercial tensions between England and the Netherlands had long been raging, but in the 1650s they reached new heights. The end of the war between Spain and the Netherlands in 1648 gave Dutch merchants free rein over the seas, and by 1650 English merchants everywhere seemed overwhelmed. As one Englishman remarked, “the Dutch have too much trade, and the English are resolved to take it from them.” Meanwhile, proposals of political union between the English Commonwealth (Charles I having recently lost his head) and the Dutch Republic had recently collapsed. So Parliament – confident from its victories in the Civil War – passed the first Navigation Act in 1651, essentially banning the Netherlands from all trade with England.​

This state of affairs could not last, and eventually the first of the Anglo-Dutch Wars broke out. In Europe, this was a war between republics; in Asia, it was a war of Companies. The English East India Company would, under normal circumstances, never have proved a match for its Dutch counterpart. But with the Dutch hard-pressed in Indonesia, these were not normal circumstances.​

Portugal, long chaffing under a personal union with Spain, had recently seen its maritime empire shatter under Dutch offensive. The immensely profitable Spice Islands were among the first to be lost; soon followed the fall of Hormuz, the main Portuguese outpost in Persia, and with it, the demise of Portuguese power in the Arabian seas. The Dutch built forts in Africa and Brazil, and finally even Malacca fell. Even in 1650, when Portugal was finally free of Spain, the Dutch were still laying siege to the vestiges of Portuguese empire. In Sri Lanka, for example, the local Kingdom of Mahanuwara was in an alliance with the Dutch to drive the Portuguese from this island of cinnamons. Mahanuwara was no exception; throughout India the Dutch incited rajas and emirs against the beleaguered Portuguese outposts.​

But now, with England and many Muslims united in war against the enemy, Lisbon saw its chance to strike back. Even better – the Treaty of The Hague of 1641, creating a ten-year truce between Lisbon and Amsterdam, had finally expired.​

* * *

Back after a long, test-induced hiatus. Feels nice to be back writing again. This ties into Post #73, of course.

The Mughal elite’s view of Europeans, which I paraphrase as thinking that Europeans were poor nomad tribes living on desolate island “nests,” might seem surprisingly parochial. But this ignorance is much more understandable from a Mughal perspective. The little Frankish outposts that dotted the coastline posed no serious threat to the Mughal enterprise, that of cavalry-based, tellurocratic (land-centered) dominion over the Indian subcontinent. If anything, the Europeans were reliant on imperial benefaction to access the vast North Indian market (the Mughals assumed, perhaps correctly, that the Franks were so interested in Indian goods because their own homeland was so impoverished). This made Europeans fundamentally similar to Inner Asian nomads like the Afghans or Baloch, also separate from but reliant on the Mughal state. This also meant that the Franks could be mollified and manipulated to serve imperial needs, and so historian Khafi Khan, who wrote his History of Alamgir, notes that the Portuguese are essentially unpaid servants of Emperor Aurangzeb.

For information on Mughal perceptions of Europeans, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s “Taking stock of the Franks: South Asian views of Europeans and Europe, 1500-1800,” Jos Gomman’s Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and High Roads to Empire, 1500-1700, p. 163-164, and S. Digby’s “Beyond the ocean: Perceptions of overseas in Indo-Persian sources of the Mughal period.”

ITTL, this means that the Mughals are unwilling to attack the Dutch in a moment of weakness. Where would the glory be in attacking such a negligible foe? And even if the Dutch are engaging in piracy along Mughal sea routes, there have always been pirates as long as there were ships – so why waste resources building a fleet, or nurture a potential threat by arming merchant-princes?

Thankfully for the Dutch, the Mughals will not enter the war.

The Mughals might be the biggest Indian power, but they are far from the only one. Here we also have the kingdom of Golkonda, the second most powerful Indian state in 1650 (albeit an order of magnitude weaker than the Timurids). And Golkonda, unlike Delhi, has very good reasons to intervene overseas.

1650s Golkonda is ruled by the merchant-prince Muhammad Sayyid Ardestani, who was born in Persia in 1591. Ardestani came from humble origins, arriving in India in his early thirties as a mere horse dealer. But he had a keen business sense and knew just how to use his talents to the full. Just a few years after arriving in the Deccan, he had already made a fortune by running diamond mines. By 1643, not only was he the richest man in Golkonda, he was also Prime Minister of the realm and governor of its southern territories. He dominated both trade and politics in the kingdom throughout the next decade as a close associate of the Portuguese, making ludicrous amounts of money. Ardestani’s commercial enterprise mainly focused on trade between India and the Middle East, but even in Southeast Asia, the fluctuations of the regional textile market were basically identical with the fluctuations of the merchant’s life.

For Ardestani, the current predicament of the Dutch is a most welcome opportunity to remove a serious commercial competitor and help out his Portuguese friends. This is especially given the fact that the Dutch possess a fort in Golkonda territory (Fort Geldria, which was technically built in the territory of the Vijayanagar kingdom, but then Ardestani conquered the area), while the Golkonda court was always opposed to the presence of foreign forts on Indian shores.

For Ardestani’s illustrious career (both as merchant magnate and as Mughal general – but I’ll have more to say on Ardestani’s role as Mughal governor later), see Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India 1500-1650, p. 322-327, or Jagadish Narayan Sarkar’s very old study, The Life of Mir Jumla: The General of Aurangzeb.

So there’s both good news and bad news for the Honorable Company when it comes to India.

As for the discussion of the war in Southeast Asia, I tried to draw on historical analogues as much as possible. When it comes to the war in the Malay Peninsula, Perak’s solitary defiance is based on the fact that Perak almost uniquely remained loyal to Aceh even after the Dutch took Malacca in 1642. IOTL, a 1650 Aceh-Dutch treaty nonetheless coerced the sultana into having to share Perak’s trade with the Company. ITTL, things may well be different.

The contention between Mandar Syah and Prince Manilha for the throne of Ternate are also loosely historical. The Dutch did indeed crown the incapable Mandar Syah when Sultan Hamzah died in 1648. This did indeed lead to a rebellion by the Fala Raha (the four leading noble houses of Ternate), who crowned Prince Manilha as sultan. Mandar won this succession war only in 1653, and only with extensive Company support. The Hoamoal chieftain Majira did indeed refuse to accept the legitimacy of Mandar Syah and declared war on the Company in 1652 with the aid of Makassar. His capital town of Asahudi really was as well-fortified as described. See Leonard Andaya, The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period, p. 163-165.

 

[Every Grass in Java]

Peace had returned to Java by the summer of 1651. The tyrant Amangkurat was ousted from his throne and all contenders to his infant successor neutralized. The southern Mataram nobility had now acquiesced themselves with the new king who could yet barely speak, and with the coterie of northerners who ruled in his name. Or at least, this was what Pangeran Pekik – regent from Surabaya and head of this northerner clique – assumed.

February 2, 1652, was the 1136th birthday of the Prophet Muhammad. Wherever men proclaimed the unity of God and the truth of the Prophet’s revelations, this was cause for celebration. Each little house in Ottoman Constantinople shone bright with lanterns of every hue and color, so that the Bosporus’s waters glimmered at each wave with reflected light. Three thousand kilometers away in the Mughal realm, thousands of Believers and infidels alike thronged around imams and Sufis to hear their special sermons for this auspicious occasion. From the Niger to the Yellow, Muslims united in jubilation.

As in Istanbul, so as in Java. The Prophet’s Birthday, the rite of the Garebeg Mulud, was the height of the Javanese year. Even villagers from miles away flocked to the festivities to hear the orchestral music and their thousand twangling instruments that gave delight, to see the royal banners that fluttered in the breeze like the finest bird-of-paradise tails, and to know what it felt like to be in the company of not your fellow villagers, but tens upon thousands of strangers you would never come to know, all from villages faraway that you would never go and visit.

The Garebeg Mulud was also a political exercise. As one chronicle recounts:

On the morning day then the procession

[Of] Garebegan proceeded in parade

Teeming the subjects great and low

Were arrayed; a crowded sea

Filling the Alun-alun [palatial plaza] brim full

Over they spilled to the by-ways

Thronging in unbroken streams.

Like a leafy young forest lush

The grand parade of subjects from all of Java’s land

Loomed like a long lolling darkening cloud

Pressed in crowded crush

In swarming teeming mass

Like a thunderhead on high

With darkness, covering all the sky.

The Lord Sultan, holding audience

In the Canopied Palace on the Elevated Earth, sat

Upon his sapphire throne.​

No matter the grandeur of a noble’s procession, both practical limits and strict sumptuary laws mandated that they paled before the magnificence of the royal celebrations. The Prophet’s Birthday incarnated in plain sight the vastness of the gap between king and lord. This, and the fact that the Mulud was one of the few occasions when the realm’s leading grandees were gathered together in one city, meant that the government issued its most momentous decrees on the Prophet’s birthday.

On the Garebeg Mulud of February 2, 1652, Pangeran Pekik issued exactly such a decree, perhaps the most important royal edict in Javanese history.

There were two Javas in the age of Sultan Agung. The first Java, the territories centrally administered by the Crown, comprised the region of Mataram in the island’s south-center. Land here was parceled out as appanages to the princes and officials who served the court. (The Javanese had not yet invented the concept of salaries.) Their court duties obliged them to be absentee landlords with no connections to the peasants they ruled over, permanently residing at the capital at the king’s beck and call. Their holdings, too, comprised hundreds of small patches of paddy land scattered all over Mataram. No prince had a contiguous block of territory from which he could challenge the sultan.

The second Java was indirectly ruled. The northern coastline, the Eastern Salient, and the Sundanese and Balinese lands had all been only recently incorporated into the empire through military force. To facilitate conquest, successive lines of susuhunans had left local rulers to remain in control so long as they accepted Mataram supremacy. Even in 1652, the rulers of these areas ruled vast contiguous domains around fortified capitals, stood at the helm of independent armies well-equipped with firearms, and honored dynastic traditions that hearkened to the days before Mataram’s ascendancy. It was this half of Java that Baureksa and Pekik had called upon to overcome Amangkurat and seize the island for their own.

Pekik’s edict had little to say on this second Java, but he had a radical vision for the directly administered territories. All landholders in the central territories were required to surrender their lands to the state before the next Garebeg Mulud. The practice of assigning appanages to nobles was to be terminated; from now on, all land in the Mataram region would be directly taxed by centrally appointed governors with a fixed term of office. All central officials would be paid in cash salaries. No one in Mataram other than the government would be permitted to raise an army.

The southern lords were unanimous in opposition. At best, this edict was little more than a plot to defang the Mataram nobility and make them totally dependent on the mercy of the state. At worst, it was a conspiracy to neutralize the southern elite before eliminating them entirely and replacing them with northerners. Plered’s nobles and princes withdrew to the countryside in protest. “It was around this time,” one chronicle says, “that the pond around Plered turned to red. A few days later, piercing shrieks of the malar munga [an invisible evil bird in Javanese mythology] were heard all around the Regent’s palaces.” These were ill omens, augurs of calamity. Yet Pangeran Pekik would not budge.

On May 18, General Mandudareja, a distant scion of the royal dynasty who had gone into hiding when Pekik consolidated his power, emerged from the countryside. In the town of Sragen, he unfurled the banner of the ancient Pandavas, heroes of Indian mythology who emerged from years of exile to seize the kingdom of Hastinapur. The implication was clear. Mandudareja was to be a new Pandava prince, returned from exile to take the throne of Java.

Nobles and princes from all over Mataram gathered to Sragen with their armies to rebel against the tyranny of Pangeran Pekik. By June, there were two thousand troops in the town. In October, spies from Plered frantically reported that there were fifteen thousand men following the rebel general. Only then did Pekik realize the gravity of the rebellion. The regent sent Baureksa with an army of five thousand to prevent princes in the northwestern province of Kedhu from joining Mandudareja, while he himself requested renewed military support from the northern lords.

Baureksa routed the princes of Kedhu in a campaign of pacification that spanned the next two months. Though the general’s five thousand crack troops never engaged more than three thousand rebels at once, the total number of enemy troops that Baureksa fought in his dozen dry season battles must have neared ten thousand men, virtually the province’s entire military strength. In just two months, Kedhu was broken as a potential threat. The entire campaign was testimony to the general’s strategic talent.

While Baureksa pacified Kedhu, Mandudareja marched on Plered. Pekik waited and waited for the northern lords, but no reinforcement ever came. Two successive campaigns across hundreds of miles had already fatigued the people of the coast, whose lords were unwilling to further sacrifice their subjects even to save the beleaguered regent. By the last weeks of 1652, Pekik seemed resigned to his fate. On December 24, the infant king and his nurses were sent to Baureksa to save them from Mandudareja’s host. Plered was emptied of its civilian population, as to minimize collateral casualties. Three days later, twenty thousand rebel troops attacked the city. Pekik died fighting, his chest skewered by lances, as the city walls fell.

Three months later, on February 10, 1653 – the Prophet’s 1137th birthday – Mandudareja was formally crowned the susuhunan of Java in a splendid ceremony at Plered.

Baureksa retreated to his home in the northern port of Kendal with his infant lord in tow.

The recurrence of civil war in Central Java shook the realm to its very foundations. Tirtayasa, heir to the kingdom of Banten that Sultan Agung had conquered two decades before, seized on the chaos following Mandudareja’s conquest of Plered to escape his house arrest. Returning to his father’s capital in February 1653, the prince instigated the citizens to overthrow the Javanese governor and crowned himself as the independent King of Banten. Pangeran Purbaya, the royal uncle who had been roaming about the highlands of West Java in exile, soon arrived at Banten and begged Tirtayasa to support his claim.

In June, Tirtayasa invaded Cirebon at the head of five thousand Bantenese soldiers, proclaiming his intention to crown Purbaya on the throne of Plered.

Even Bali, deprived of its secular and religious elite following Sultan Agung’s conquest, rose in revolt. We first hear of the rebel king I Nyoman in a government report from the 1640s, where he appears as a petty bandit chief plaguing the roads of Bali. But by the time of Amangkurat’s fall, he had grown powerful enough that the island’s Javanese governor wrote in alarm of “the bandits whose followers, reportedly exceeding ten thousand and well-armed, imperil the roads by day and night. It is said that they seek vengeance for the fall of Gèlgèl, and that their desire is the restoration of the Buddhist capital of Majapahit.” Around the same time that Mandudareja marched on Plered, I Nyoman emerged from the jungle with fifteen thousand rebels. The rebel army advanced to the abandoned palace of Gèlgèl, where they proclaimed I Nyoman as both the secret son of the last Dewa Agung and the second coming of the Pandava prince Yudhishthira, the Hindu hero who returns from exile to take his throne in the Sanskrit epics.

The Javanese governor, panicking at the size of the rebel force, fled to the mainland with his troops. By February 1653, I Nyoman had conquered all Bali without losing even a single man in war.

Sultan Agung’s empire seemed on the verge of collapse.

* * *

We now return to Java with this installment, which of course ties in with Post #103.

The three Garebeg festivals – Garebeg Mulud, Garebeg Puasa, and Garebeg Besar – were the highlight of the Javanese year, as indeed in most of the Islamic world. Garebeg Mulud is the Javanese version of the pan-Islamic festival of Mawlid, the Prophet’s birthday; what is Garebeg Puasa in Java is popularly known as Eid al-Fitr, celebrating the end of the Ramadan feast; Garebeg Besar is Eid al-Adha, the festival that commemorates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son.

The Garebeg Mulud was the most important of the three, requiring the attendance of all officials and nobles from every corner of the Mataram kingdom who would pay homage and taxes and the sovereign would issue the important decrees of the year. The chronicle’s description of the Garebeg Mulud festivities is directly from Babad Jaka Tingkir, a nineteenth-century work of Javanese history (Nancy Florida, Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future, p. 184).

The administrative division of the Mataram kingdom that I refer in the text, featuring the central region (referred to in Javanese as the Nagara agung, “the Great Country”) and the outlying autonomous periphery (in Javanese the Mancanagara, “the Outer Country”), is historical. This division persisted in the Javanese principalities into the nineteenth century, even when the north coast had fallen under Company dominion. See e.g. Carey, Power of Prophecy, p. 1-69, or Moertono, State and Statecraft.

Pekik’s attempts to strip the Nagara agung of their appanage landholders and replace a land grant-based system of governance with a salary-based one parallels similar policies by Amangkurat I, especially with regards to the north coast (which, as you should know by now, ended disastrously). So in the seventeenth-century Javanese court, there was certainly the idea that the state ought to be more centralized (and paralleling developments in the rest of Southeast Asia, such as the pengulus in Aceh); it was only the vagaries of history that made this idea impossible to implement.

So will Mataram survive this all?