Sultanate of Cirebon

The saint who founded two states

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

Cirebon was a fishing settlement on the north coast of West Java before it was anything else, standing in the sphere of the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Sunda to its west. What made it a state in its own right was one man's decision to convert it and keep it.

Syarif Hidayatullah — remembered afterwards as Sunan Gunung Jati, after the hill where his tomb stands — was, by the traditions Graaf and Pigeaud treat as broadly reliable, descended from the Sundanese royal house through his mother and connected by marriage to the sultan of Demak, the senior Muslim power on Java's coast at the time. That combination of a local claim and an outside alliance is exactly the one this coast's other Muslim foundations also used, and Gunung Jati used it twice: he took Cirebon for himself around 1479, breaking it from Sunda's still-Hindu court, and some years later sent his son-in-law to found Banten on the same basis further west.

What made Cirebon different

Every other founder on this stretch of coast was, first and foremost, a soldier, a merchant, or both. Gunung Jati's standing was religious before it was political. He is counted among the Wali Songo, the nine saints credited with converting Java to Islam, and his tomb on Gunung Sembung became a pilgrimage site in its own right, drawing visitors from well beyond the territory his political descendants actually governed.

Pigeaud, Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 69 (1974) · G.F.J. Bley / Wereldmuseum Amsterdam · CC BY-SA 3.0

That gave Cirebon a kind of authority Demak and Banten, built by soldiers and traders, did not have in the same degree: a ruling house whose legitimacy rested partly on a claim to sanctity rather than on conquest or commercial success alone. It is a distinction later Cirebonese rulers would keep making long after their political power had shrunk to almost nothing, because it was the one asset the decline described in the chapters that follow never touched.

A port among ports

Materially, Cirebon was what every north-coast Javanese port of the period was: a customs point on the shipping lane linking Java's ports to the Melaka strait and the spice trade beyond it, sitting on a rice-growing plain that fed it and paid its taxes. What set it on its own path rather than Sunda's or Demak's was the specific man who took it, and the specific claim he built into the office from the start.

A century of its own

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

For roughly a century after Gunung Jati's death in 1568, Cirebon governed itself, which is not something every Muslim state on Java's coast in this period managed to do.

Outliving the power that helped found it

Demak, whose sultan had given Gunung Jati his connections and his backing, did not outlast the sixteenth century as a unified state: it broke apart in succession disputes within a generation of its own greatest ruler's death. Cirebon, founded as something close to a junior partner in Demak's own expansion, was not dragged down with it. Its ruling house's separate claim to religious standing, rather than to a share of Demak's own inheritance, meant Cirebon's legitimacy did not depend on Demak's continuing to exist.

Banten, the sister foundation planted by Gunung Jati's own family further west, took the opposite path and grew into the larger and more powerful state of the two — a major pepper entrepot with its own extensive trade network reaching Europe and China both. Cirebon did not compete with Banten on that scale and did not try to. It held its own coastal plain, taxed its own port traffic, and stayed independent by staying, in relative terms, modest.

Pigeaud, Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 69 (1974) · Uncredited · Public domain

What independence looked like

Graaf and Pigeaud's account of this period is thinner than for the generation of the founder, which is itself informative: an independent Cirebon that was not being fought over or absorbed by a stronger neighbour generated less to write about than the wars and successions that mark most of this coast's early Islamic history. Continuity, in the source record, is frequently silence.

What silence in this specific case most likely means is a working settlement: Cirebon's rulers maintained the religious prestige inherited from Gunung Jati, administered a coastal territory that fed and financed them adequately without inviting conquest, and stayed out of the larger contests then developing between Banten in the west and the rising inland power of Mataram to the east. That position could not last once Mataram decided the north coast was worth having outright, and the next chapter is about what happened when it did.

A court that mixed everything

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Pigeaud, Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 69 (1974)

Cirebon sat at a crossing point other Javanese courts did not: between the Sundanese-speaking west and the Javanese-speaking centre and east of the island, between a Hindu-Buddhist past it had only recently left and an Islamic present it was actively building, and on a coast that had traded with China for centuries before Islam ever arrived there. Its court culture kept all of it rather than choosing one strand and discarding the rest.

What the mixing produced

The mask-dance tradition associated with the Cirebon courts, topeng, draws on pre-Islamic Javanese performance forms and continued to be patronised under a Muslim ruling house that in principle might have discouraged figurative performance of this kind and did not. The batik patterns associated with Cirebon incorporate motifs — a cloud pattern known as mega mendung is the best known — that later scholarship traces to Chinese textile and ceramic influence carried by the same trade that had made the port worth having in the first place, worked into a decorative tradition otherwise descended from older Javanese practice.

Singapore · Pigeaud, Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 69 (1974) · National Gallery Singapore · CC0

Pigeaud, Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 69 (1974) · Gunarta · CC BY-SA 4.0

None of this was unique to Cirebon in kind — every port on this coast absorbed Chinese, Indian and older Javanese material into its own culture to some degree — but the degree to which Cirebon's rulers treated the mixture as their court's own particular character, rather than as a set of separate imported curiosities, is what later observers single the city out for.

The tomb

Gunung Jati's own tomb on Gunung Sembung, above the city, became and remained the single most consequential religious site the dynasty produced, outlasting in importance any specific political achievement of his successors. Pilgrims travelled to it from well beyond Cirebon's own shrinking territory throughout the period the following chapters describe, including from parts of the archipelago no Cirebonese ruler had held political authority over for generations.

That is worth setting beside the political decline the chapters after this one trace. A dynasty can lose its independence, then its unity, then its governing authority altogether, and still keep the one thing its founder built into the office from the very first year: a claim to sanctity that outside power could tax, divide or overrule but never actually take away.

Mataram arrives

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

Mataram, the inland Javanese power built from the old kingdom of the Brantas and Solo valleys, spent the early seventeenth century bringing the whole of Java's north coast under its authority, port by port. Cirebon's turn came in 1613.

Why Cirebon did not resist the way Surabaya did

Mataram's conquest of the coast was not uniform. Some ports — Surabaya prominent among them — held out for years against sieges and blockades before submitting. Cirebon's own accession to Mataram's overlordship came without the drawn-out resistance the eastern ports mounted, and the reason is not hard to locate in what the previous chapters describe: a state whose rulers had built their authority on religious prestige rather than on military strength had comparatively little capacity to resist a determined inland power, and comparatively little to lose by accepting a nominal overlordship that left its ruling house and its religious standing intact.

Mataram, for its part, had reasons to prefer a client Cirebon to a destroyed one. The port's trade, though never on Banten's scale, was worth taxing rather than ruining, and a ruling house with genuine religious standing across the coast was more useful left in place, answering to Mataram, than removed and replaced with a governor who carried none of that prestige.

What vassalage actually changed

Cirebon kept its sultans, its territory in day-to-day administration, and its position as a pilgrimage centre. What it lost was independent foreign policy and, increasingly, the ability to settle its own succession disputes without an outside power's involvement — a vulnerability that would matter a great deal within the following two generations, when Mataram's own authority came apart from the inside and Cirebon's ruling house came apart along with it.

One city, two thrones

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

Mataram's own crisis, not Cirebon's, is what split the sultanate in two.

Trunajaya's rebellion and a rescue that was also a takeover

From 1674 the Madurese lord Trunajaya led a rebellion that came close to destroying the Mataram state outright, sacking the Mataram capital itself and throwing the whole of central and eastern Java into war. Cirebon's ruling family, still nominally Mataram's vassals, were caught inside that collapse: two princes of the Cirebon house ended up in Mataram's hands amid the fighting, in circumstances the sources describe as closer to hostage- taking than to ordinary court residence.

Sultan Ageng of Banten, ruling the one major independent Muslim power left on the coast and no friend of either Mataram or the Dutch East India Company then beginning to entangle itself in Mataram's affairs, took the two Cirebonese princes under his own protection during the chaos and had both of them crowned as sultans in 1677.

Two sultans, one city

The result was not a restoration of Cirebon's old unity under new management. It was a formal division: Prince Martawijaya became Sultan Sepuh, ruling from what became the kraton Kasepuhan, and his brother Prince Kartawijaya became Sultan Anom, ruling from the kraton Kanoman, both courts standing in the same city, both claiming descent from Gunung Jati, and neither subordinate to the other. A third, smaller princely line split off from one of the two main houses in the following century, adding a further court to a city that had once had one throne and would from this point permanently have several.

Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008) · Midori · CC BY-SA 3.0

What a divided sultanate could no longer do

Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008) · LintasGiat · CC0

A single ruling house speaking for Cirebon as one polity had been able, within the limits vassalage under Mataram already imposed, to present a united front to whichever outside power it was dealing with. Two, and later three, competing courts in the same city could not. Each line's rulers had an obvious incentive to seek outside backing against the others, and the outside power increasingly available to provide it, as the following chapter describes, was the Dutch East India Company rather than a fading Mataram.

A regulation, not a battle

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

The Cirebon sultanate did not end in a siege, a conquest or a single dramatic act. It ended in a piece of colonial administrative paperwork, which is the appropriate ending for a state whose actual authority had been draining away for more than a century before the paperwork made the fact official.

A century of increasing dependency

From soon after the 1677 division, the competing Cirebon courts found it increasingly necessary to bring disputes — over succession, over territory, over precedence between the rival lines — to the Dutch East India Company for arbitration, because none of the courts individually had the standing to compel the others to accept a settlement. Each appeal to Company mediation strengthened the Company's position in Cirebon's internal affairs a little further and weakened the sultans' own authority to settle their own house's business without outside involvement.

By the eighteenth century's end, the sultans of Cirebon retained their titles, their palaces, their religious prestige and a share of local revenue, but the actual work of governing — justice, administration, the disposition of territory — increasingly ran through Company and then, after the Company's dissolution, through Dutch colonial officials rather than through the courts themselves.

Daendels' regulation

In 1809, Herman Willem Daendels, the Governor-General sent to reorganise Java's administration under direct Netherlands government rule, issued the Reglement van Bestuur voor de Cheribonsche Landen — a regulation for the government of the Cirebon lands. It formalised what had already largely happened: the sultans' remaining administrative authority was removed, and governance of the former sultanate's territory passed fully into the colonial administrative structure.

Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008) · Rijksmuseum · CC0

Nobody was conquered and no palace was stormed. The three Cirebon courts kept their titles, their compounds, and — as the previous chapter's material suggests was never really in doubt — their religious standing. What they stopped being, by regulation rather than by battle, was rulers of anything at all.

The thrones that stayed

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

Most of the states this coast produced disappeared as physical institutions along with their political authority: a palace abandoned, a court dispersed, a title nobody bothered claiming a generation later. Cirebon's three courts did not disappear. They kept existing, without governing anything, through the rest of Dutch colonial rule, the Japanese occupation, and Indonesian independence.

Titles without territory

The Kasepuhan and Kanoman lines, and the smaller Kacirebonan line that had split from one of them, continued to install sultans, maintain their palace complexes, and conduct the ceremonial functions attached to their houses throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, under Dutch rule and then under an independent Indonesian republic that had no more reason than the Dutch colonial government to restore them any political authority. What each court retained was what Gunung Jati had built into the office from the very beginning and what a regulation from a Dutch governor-general had never been able to touch: descent from a recognised Islamic saint, and a claim to religious and cultural standing that outlasted every specific government that ruled the territory around it.

What that made the palaces

The kraton complexes of Kasepuhan, Kanoman and Kacirebonan continued, and continue, to function as centres of exactly the syncretic court culture described earlier — the mask-dance traditions, the batik patterns, the annual ceremonies tied to the Islamic calendar and to older Javanese observance both. Gunung Jati's tomb went on drawing pilgrims through every political change the region underwent, because nothing about a change of government touched what the site had always actually been for.

Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008) · Midori · CC BY-SA 3.0

What ended and what did not

The Sultanate of Cirebon, as a governing state, ended in 1809. The institution Gunung Jati actually founded — a ruling house whose authority rested on a claim to sanctity rather than on force — never depended on holding political power to begin with, and so a regulation that removed the political power left the institution itself, on its own terms, standing.