The Sultanate of Banten

The port that is Jakarta

Drafted from Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008)formation

In 1527 a Demak expedition took Banten and then took Sunda Kelapa, the port at the mouth of the Ciliwung that the Sundanese kingdom had promised to the Portuguese five years earlier. It was renamed Jayakarta.

The Dutch company took it in 1619 and called it Batavia, and ran everything it did in Asia from there for three hundred and twenty-two years. The name it has now is the one given in 1527 by the force that arrived to stop a Hindu kingdom selling the harbour to Europeans.

Banten is what that expedition turned into. Hasanuddin, whose father had led the campaign, was ruling it as a sultanate of his own by 1552 — while Demak itself was coming apart in the succession war that followed Trenggana's death. The conquest outlived the conqueror by seceding from him.

Pepper

Banten lived on a toll at the port and a crown monopoly on pepper grown in Lampung, across the Sunda strait in southern Sumatra.

That is a workable arrangement for as long as the crown is the only buyer. Everything grown upcountry has to come down to the harbour, and at the harbour sits the sultan's price. It is also the arrangement most exposed to a European company with ships and credit, because such a company can go to the growers directly and buy where the pepper is, and once it can do that the monopoly is a claim rather than a mechanism.

The whole political history that follows — the alliance with the Lampung districts, the openness to Chinese, Indian, English, Danish and Portuguese shipping, the long refusal to sign an exclusive contract with the Dutch, and finally the war between a father and a son — is an argument about who gets to stand between the pepper and the sea.

Hasanuddin

Drafted from Pigeaud, Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 69 (1974)expansion

The man who took Banten was not from Java. Nurullah came from Pasai in northern Sumatra, a port that had been Muslim for more than two centuries; he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca; and when he arrived at the court of Demak he was received as what he was, a devout haji who had seen the world. He was given a sister of the sultan in marriage, and it is reasonable to think that his brother-in-law's adoption of the title of sultan and his conduct as protector of the faith owed something to what the traveller had brought back with him.

In 1524 or 1525 Nurullah sailed from Demak to Banten. He is remembered as Sunan Gunungjati.

Banten was already a town of some standing under the Sundanese kings, and there was an older settlement upstream, Banten Girang, whose name appears in the Old Sundanese Carita Parahyangan. With military help from Demak, Nurullah pushed the Sundanese governor aside and took the port. Two years later came Sunda Kelapa, and after that the other Sundanese harbours, one by one, until the inland capital at Pakuan was cut off from the sea entirely. He never marched on Pakuan. He did not need to.

A cannon with a name

In 1528 or 1529, Sultan Trenggana sent his son-in-law a present: a large cannon cast at Demak with the year on it.

It carried another name first and then was always called Ki Jimat, as though the thing itself were the kingdom's amulet, and it was still standing in the kampung of Karang Antu in the first half of the twentieth century. It was probably cast by a Portuguese renegade from the Algarve, Khoja Zainul-Abidin, which is the whole sixteenth century in one object: an Iberian gunfounder working for a Javanese sultan, casting the weapon that would be pointed at Iberian ships.

Guns kept turning up in the folklore of the western ports the way holy men did in the folklore of the interior. Ki Amuk, mounted on the defence works at the harbour, was expected to put a Portuguese carrack on the bottom with a single well-aimed shot. Behind the stories is a sober calculation. Javanese ships could not match Portuguese ships, as everyone who had watched Melaka knew; heavy guns ashore were the answer to guns afloat.

Lampung

Nurullah's elder son had been left at Cirebon as his deputy and died young, about 1552, and the death took the father to Cirebon for good. The second son, Hasanuddin, was already at Banten. He married a daughter of Trenggana in 1552, and he ruled Banten and Jakarta as his father's authority receded.

Banten's chronicles, from the seventeenth century onward, make Hasanuddin the first king of Banten and the founder of the line. He was not, and the mistake is worth noticing: a dynasty that measures itself from him is a dynasty measuring from the first ruler who was simply a Javanese Muslim sultan rather than a travelling saint from Sumatra.

What he did was pick up the trade. He carried the authority of the Muslim kings of Java across the strait into Lampung and the neighbouring districts of southern Sumatra, where the common speech was Malay. Those districts turned out to be a very large producer of pepper, and the pepper made Banten a port that Chinese, Indian and European ships called at. The period in which Banten and its Javanese officials shaped the government and the culture of Lampung runs from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth.

He also built. The port town was enlarged and given a new name in his time, below the older Banten Girang upriver — probably an ambitious young ruler's way of marking a marriage into the house of Demak.

Hasanuddin is thought to have died in 1570, the same year as his father. He was buried at Saba Kingking, close to Banten, and his descendants came there as pilgrims. But he was never given the religious honour his father had. There is a difference, in Java, between the tomb of a saint and the tomb of a king, and the Banten line began exactly where that difference opens.

1579

Drafted from Pigeaud, Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 69 (1974)expansion

The Hindu kingdom of Pajajaran had been shut off from its own coast for half a century when Banten finally went inland after it.

The reasons are not mysterious and not especially religious. A Muslim ruler at Banten and Jakarta did not like having a Sundanese kingdom at his back; he had to worry about whether the produce of the interior would keep coming down to his harbour; and there was the prospect of plunder. Banten's own chronicle gives the credit for the capture of Pakuan to Hasanuddin, which is almost certainly wrong. The city seems to have fallen in 1579, when his son Yusup had been ruling for nine years.

The Sadjarah Banten tells it without miracles, which is why it is believable. An official of the Pajajaran king betrayed the place: he opened a gate to his own brother, who commanded part of the Banten force. When the palace was taken it was found that the king and his family had gone. The West Javanese chronicles never mention them again.

Two details in that account matter more than the battle. Sundanese Muslims were already fighting on Banten's side. And after the city fell, the Sundanese nobility became Muslim and were confirmed in their ranks and titles — which is how a conquest becomes an administration in one generation.

Yusup died about a year after his victory, still young, after a reign of ten years.

The kadi, 1580

His son was a small child, and the obvious claimant was elsewhere in the family: Yusup's brother, who had succeeded their formidable aunt as ruler of Jepara. He came to Banten by sea with an armed following. In the fighting between the great men of Jepara and those of Banten his admiral was killed, and having lost the servant he could least spare he turned round and sailed home.

What happened next was decided in the town. The kali — the chief Islamic judge — acted, and the great men of the kingdom acknowledged the child Molana Muhammad as king, with the judge and four others governing during the minority.

The refusal of the prince of Jepara, who was treated as an outsider, and the elevation of a minor by his own officials, was read in West Java afterwards as the moment the region stopped being an appendage of the courts of central Java. Many of the local lords of Banten and Jakarta were Sundanese by then, or married into the Sundanese families that had mattered under Pajajaran. Cirebon became the frontier, in culture as much as in politics.

The other consequence lasted longer. Conversion in West Java had been carried out by force at Banten, at Sunda Kelapa and at Pakuan, and the men who carried it kept a corresponding weight in government. The chief Islamic judge at Banten still held a position at court in the nineteenth century that the head penghulu of Yogyakarta or Surakarta never had.

Palembang, 1596

There was a guest at Banten in those years: the last claimant of the house of Demak, driven out of central Java by Mataram, who had tried Portuguese Melaka first and then come to his kinsmen here.

He was a little older than Molana Muhammad, and he had an idea. He still had, he maintained, a claim on the kingdom of Palembang, and an expedition there would also extend the territory of Islam. He talked his devout young cousin into it.

Banten laid siege to Palembang, and Molana Muhammad was killed under its walls. He was about twenty-five. The event is recorded in the account of the first Dutch voyage to the Indies, whose ships were on the coast that year.

His heir, Abdul Kadir, was a few months old. For the rest of the century and the first decade of the next, Banten was governed by older relatives acting as regents for an infant, and the changes of regent and the quarrels between princes did the kingdom no good at all.

1638

Drafted from Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008)peak

In 1638 an embassy came back from the Hijaz with the title of sultan for Abu'l Mafakhir, granted by the Sharif of Mecca.

Mataram, inland and hostile, obtained exactly the same grant three years later. Banten got there first.

Neither court is diminished by the order, and the pair is more interesting than either. What it shows is that a Javanese ruler in the 1630s who wanted a title that was not Javanese knew precisely where to send for one, that the round trip took about three years, and that two rival courts on the same island did it within a decade of each other. That makes it a fashion rather than a stroke of individual genius — and a fashion tells you more, because it means the idea was in the air and both of them breathed it.

It is also worth noticing who was selling. The sharifs of Mecca had almost no army and very little land, and lived largely on what sovereigns paid them for recognition of exactly this kind. A Javanese sultan buying legitimacy from the Hijaz and a sharif living off the proceeds are two halves of one transaction, and the transaction ran the length of the Muslim world.

It is the high point of the sultanate's standing abroad, and it came in the middle of a reign that had begun with an infant on the throne and a decade of regents quarrelling over him. Abu'l Mafakhir had lost Jayakarta to the Dutch in 1619 and would not get it back. What he could still do, in 1638, was be recognised in Mecca before the greatest kingdom on his own island was.

Ageng

Drafted from Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008)peak

Sultan Ageng Tirtayasa took the throne in 1651 and ran Banten for thirty years as the western counterpart of what Makassar was in the east: a port open to everybody, deliberately, against a Dutch company trying to close the archipelago.

English, Danish, French, Portuguese, Chinese, Gujarati and Persian traders were at Banten because they could not be at Batavia, which is forty miles down the coast. He sent embassies to England, to the Ottoman court and to Mecca. He refused the exclusive treaties the company wanted, for three decades, and made the refusal the basis of his revenue.

The canal

The other thing he is remembered for is infrastructure. Ageng had a canal cut inland from Banten toward Pontang, some thirty kilometres, with Chinese engineers and Chinese labour, to open new rice land and move produce.

It is a striking thing for him to have spent on. A ruler whose income was pepper and customs put money into growing rice, and the reason is the one Makassar demonstrates at the other end of Java: a free port needs to feed the people who come to it, and a polity that has to import its food cannot afford to annoy the power that controls the sea.

Ageng had watched what happened to Makassar in 1669 — destroyed for exactly the policy he was running — and the canal is what a man draws from that.

Two open ports, fifteen years apart

Makassar fell in 1669. Banten fell in 1684.

The two records are the same argument and the same defeat, and between them they close the archipelago. After 1684 there was nowhere in the islands to buy pepper or spices outside the Dutch company's system, which had been the company's object since it arrived.

What is worth holding onto is that neither was defeated on the merits of the policy. Makassar was destroyed by a company fighting alongside a Bugis prince whose people Makassar had conquered — the chapter argues it was a South Sulawesi war the company joined. Banten was ended by the sultan's own son.

Two open ports, two closures, and in both cases the company's decisive asset was a local quarrel it did not create.

The Chinese of Banten

Drafted from Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008)aside?What aside means

The Chinese community at Banten was large, old, and the reason the pepper trade worked.

They were the buyers, financing growers on advance and consolidating small lots for export. They were the engineers and the labour for Ageng's canal. They farmed revenues, ran the mint at various points, and provided the shipping that took Banten's pepper north to China — which is where most of it went, not to Europe.

The same is true of every major port in these seas. There were Chinese communities at Melaka before 1511, at Makassar, at Ayutthaya, at Brunei since before the sultanate, and at Batavia in very large numbers. Melaka ran four syahbandars — harbourmasters, one for each of the main merchant communities — and one of the four was for the Chinese.

Neither subjects nor foreigners

What makes them hard to describe is that they fit none of the ordinary categories.

They were not an arm of the state, like the Mongol ortogh merchant partnerships financed by princes to farm taxes and run the long-distance trade. They were not subjects in the way the Javanese cultivators of Lampung were subjects. And they were not visitors: many were resident for generations, married locally, and in several ports made up a quarter or more of the town.

A resident foreign merchant community that financed the crop, moved the export, lent to the crown and had its own law in practice and its own market connections abroad is a constitutional fact about a place. It is also invisible in almost every summary of what a polity was, because summaries are built around rulers, revenue and territory, and this is none of those.

And what happened to them

Nothing good, mostly.

In 1740 the Dutch company killed something like ten thousand Chinese residents of Batavia — its own capital, sixty miles east along the same coast, fifty-six years after Banten's sultanate ended. The survivors fled inland and east, and their arrival set off a war that pulled the company deeper into Javanese politics than it had ever been.

So the community that had financed the pepper, moved the exports and lent to the sultans enters the standard narrative of Java at the point where it is massacred, and is remembered there for the consequences the massacre had for somebody else.

Father and son

Drafted from Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008)end

Sultan Haji was Ageng Tirtayasa's son and designated heir. In 1682 he took the capital with Dutch company troops, besieged his father in the interior, and captured him. In 1684 he signed the treaty that gave the company the pepper monopoly and excluded every other European from Banten.

Sultan Haji is the sultanate's last ruler. The man who ended the polity is also the last name on its own list of kings, which is a rarer thing than it sounds.

It is tempting to file this as a Dutch conquest, and the company certainly supplied the troops and collected the monopoly. But no company took Banten. A son took it from his father, with borrowed soldiers, and then paid for them with the thing the sultanate had lived on.

Ended from inside

Johor went the same way fifteen years later, when the sultan's own nobles killed him on the road to the mosque and the chief minister took the throne.

Both polities were ended by the people closest to the ruler rather than by anyone outside. Both were followed by a long stretch in which the name continued and the thing did not: a sultan at Banten under company terms, a bendahara dynasty at Johor with no fleet. Being destroyed by a stranger at least leaves a date. Being handed away by your heir leaves an office that goes on being occupied.

The difference is what the two endings cost. At Johor what went was the orang laut, who had served the dynasty rather than the office and would not serve the usurpers — an institution that had survived Srivijaya and Melaka and did not survive a killing.

Here what went was the position. Ageng's Banten was the last open port in the western archipelago; Makassar, its eastern counterpart, had been destroyed for the same policy fifteen years earlier. After 1684 there was nowhere in the islands to buy pepper or spices outside the company's system, which had been the company's object since it arrived and which it finally achieved by helping a son against his father.

The sultanate continued as an office until Raffles abolished it in 1813. But a polity is a thing that disposes of its own external relations, and after 1684 Banten did not: the treaty settled who it could trade with, and with whom it could not. What survived for another hundred and twenty-nine years was a title.

The pension

Drafted from Raffles, The History of Java (1817)afterlife

Raffles has to be read as what he was — the Lieutenant-Governor who had just taken Java, writing an account of the disorder his own government had come in to settle. The judgements are his case. The detail is worth having, because it is the fullest description of what happened to Banten in the century and a quarter between the treaty and the abolition, and because at the end of it he quotes his own terms.

By the time the British arrived, he writes, Banten — "once rich in its pepper plantations and the emporium of the Archipelago" — had lost all its trade and all its importance, from the restrictions of the Dutch company and the nearness of Batavia. The succession to the throne was generally disposed of by the Dutch government. The administration of the country and the collection of the port duties were still left to the sultan, and European interference, resisted hard at first, had long been acquiesced in.

1808

Then the Dutch government tried to get more out of the province.

Coffee was to be planted. New roads were to be opened. A new harbour was to be built, first at Mew Bay and then at Merak Bay. All of it fell on the people as forced labour, and so many deserted from the works that the Resident was ordered to tell the sultan his first minister would be held answerable for the task being done. The desertions continued. A more peremptory order followed: the sultan was to hand the minister over. Going to enforce it, the Resident exposed himself and was murdered.

A large military force was sent. The reigning sultan was deposed and banished to Ambon, and a relative was put in his place under regulations dictated by the Dutch — for whom, Raffles notes, "so fallen had the sovereigns of this once flourishing and powerful kingdom now become" that no treaty was thought necessary. The new sultan ceded the territory nearest Batavia and administered the rest under Dutch superior authority.

The works went on and so did the risings. A lieutenant and eighteen dragoons were surprised and killed. Princes and chiefs were murdered by their own people. A second sultan was got rid of by being lured aboard a ship and carried to Batavia, and a chief was installed as sultan of the highlands while the Dutch took the lowlands into their own hands.

Pangeran Ahmad

At that point the country produced a leader of the ordinary kind, and the European authorities could not catch him.

Pangeran Ahmad gathered the discontented of every description. A permanent garrison was kept in Banten and every attempt on him failed. He was offered part of the country and would not take it. In the end the Dutch decided to abandon the interior to him and wait for the inhabitants to grow tired enough of him to come in for protection.

They had not grown tired when the British blockade arrived in 1811. Ahmad supplied the cruisers offshore with provisions plundered from the people of the country, and the officers took him for an unfortunate prince maintaining his independence against the Dutch. When British troops landed, the sultan of Banten was Ahmad's prisoner and the province was in Ahmad's hands.

Ten thousand Spanish dollars

Raffles' summary of what the British inherited is that the fertile districts were held by a lawless rebel, the inhabitants were in revolt, and for several years there had been universal anarchy and distrust; that no revenue for government could be raised at all; and that a general settlement under European control was the most that could be hoped for.

His sentence about the end is this: "In the year 1813 the sultan voluntarily resigned the administration of the country into the hands of the British government, in consideration of an annual pension of ten thousand Spanish dollars."

The adverb is doing a great deal of work. The sultan who resigned had recently been a rebel's prisoner in a province where two of his predecessors had been deposed and deported by a European government, and where the throne's occupant had been chosen abroad for a generation. A land survey followed, cultivator by cultivator, in the northern divisions.

The pepper port that refused the company's exclusive contracts for thirty years under Ageng ended as a line in a revenue settlement, and its last sultan ended as a pensioner priced in the currency of yet another empire.