The Sultanate of Demak

The strait

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Demak stood on a strait. The Muria highlands, which are now a massif rising out of the north Java plain, were then separated from Java by a channel that could be sailed, and a trader coming from Semarang could cut through it to Rembang instead of going round. The district lay on the southern shore of that shortcut, on quiet water, with rice land on both banks.

That is the whole explanation of the place. Two things a sixteenth-century Javanese state needed were a harvest it could tax and a passage it could control, and Demak had them in the same few miles of coast.

Juwana

The collecting point for the rice of those shores, around 1500, was not Demak but Juwana, further east.

Tome Pires reports that by about 1513 Juwana had been destroyed and emptied by the Gusti Patih, the great commander of the still-Hindu Majapahit. It was one of the last exertions of the old kingdom, and its effect was the opposite of what was intended: with Juwana gone, Demak held the strait south of the Muria outright.

Jepara lay on the other side of the highlands, with a sheltered harbour originally screened by three small islands, and it suited the larger ships running along the north coast to Maluku and back. The two towns worked as a pair, and the pairing outlasted the channel that made it: by the seventeenth century the shortcut had silted to the point where big boats could no longer use it at all, and Jepara simply became Demak's port.

The road inland

The link to the interior was the Serang, which now reaches the Java Sea between Demak and Jepara and which small trading boats could still ascend to Godong in the eighteenth century. Its tributaries rise in the central limestone hills. Beyond those hills lie the old inland districts of central Java — Pengging and Pajang — and from there cart roads crossed the low watershed between the Serang and Lusi valleys to the Bengawan Solo, which is the road between southern central Java and the east.

The rice of the Demak plain was already good and the ground took irrigation well, but the surplus a ruler could actually raise, for his own table and for sale, went up sharply if he held that road into Pengging and Pajang.

So the interior was not a later ambition. It was in the arithmetic of the place from the beginning, and Demak's kings spent their reigns acting on it. The kingdom that eventually took the paramountcy from them sat at the far end of the same road.

The coast takes the interior

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

Nothing much happened in 1527. No siege, no treaty, no last king killed.

What had been happening for a century and a half before it was a slow inversion: a north coast that became Muslim through trade, in a state whose economy depended on the Hindu-Buddhist interior's rice reaching that coast's ships. Demak is the polity that finished the inversion.

Raden Patah was installed at Demak around 1475 as a vassal of Majapahit and had declared himself independent by about 1478. The Javanese chronicles trace his descent to Majapahit's own royal house, and that genealogy is not decoration: it is the entire basis on which a port town claimed the right to rule Java rather than merely to trade from it.

It is also worth noticing what kind of claim it is. Demak did not conquer Majapahit and never said it had. It said it was Majapahit — the same line, the same right, a different religion and a different coast — and that argument was still being made a century later, when Pajang's founder claimed descent from Majapahit's last king and from the Demak sultan he had just overthrown, at the same time.

1513

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

In 1512 and again in 1513 Demak sent a fleet against the Portuguese at Melaka, under Pati Unus, and both attempts failed.

Ports in these islands mostly experienced European power the other way round — a fleet arrives, and you deal with the consequences. Melaka itself had fallen to one two years earlier. Demak did the unusual thing and crossed eight hundred miles of sea to attack a fortified city held by the power that had just taken it. That the attempt failed is less surprising than that it was made.

The rice again

Demak sat on the north coast with the Javanese granary behind it, and what made it rich was not growing rice but exporting it — to the ports of the archipelago that could not feed themselves, including, until 1511, Melaka.

Melaka had no farmland at all and bought most of its food from Java. The two cities were the two halves of one arrangement. When Melaka fell to the Portuguese, the polity that had been selling it rice sent ships to try to take it back — which is a commercial motive as much as a religious one, and the sources give both.

The mosque

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

The great mosque at Demak is a Javanese building. It has a stacked pyramidal roof of the kind that stood over Javanese shrines before Islam, no dome, no minaret, and four main pillars — the soko guru — one of which tradition says was assembled from wood chips by one of the wali songo, the nine saints.

It is the oldest substantially surviving mosque on Java, and it makes the argument in one building.

What Islamisation looked like here

The wali songo are the nine figures Javanese tradition credits with converting the island: Sunan Kalijaga, Sunan Bonang, Sunan Giri, Sunan Gunungjati and the rest, each with a tomb that is a pilgrimage site and a body of story attached.

What the stories consistently describe is accommodation. Sunan Kalijaga is supposed to have used wayang — the shadow theatre, whose repertoire is the Ramayana and the Mahabharata — to teach, and to have introduced gamelan performance at the mosque as a way of drawing a crowd. The Javanese Islamic tradition that came out of it kept the shadow plays, the gamelan, the calendar partly recalculated rather than replaced, and a great deal of the older vocabulary.

The Hindu-Buddhist tradition of the Javanese courts is usually said to have moved east to Bali when Majapahit ended, and it did. But that is only half of where it went. Some of it crossed the strait intact, and some of it stayed exactly where it was, inside the religion that replaced it.

Two mechanisms at once

It would be easy to read the mosque and the wali songo as the whole story of how Java became Muslim. It is about half of it.

The other half was campaigns. Demak carried Islam inland to the rice country and the interior courts by force through the 1520s and 1540s, and one of those campaigns killed Trenggana, the sultan who had ordered it.

Both were running at the same time, and the division of labour is fairly clean: an army took the courts, and a shadow-puppet repertoire took the villages. The first is why there was a sultanate at all. The second is why Javanese Islam looks the way it does.

Pati Unus

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

Raden Patah's successor reigned three years, between a founder and a conqueror, and he is the reason Demak is remembered for something other than taking Java.

He commanded the fleets that attacked Portuguese Melaka in 1512 and 1513 and failed. Javanese tradition calls him Pangeran Sabrang Lor — the prince who crossed to the north.

The ship

Portuguese accounts of the 1513 attack describe the Javanese flagship as a jong of extraordinary size — bigger than anything they had, with multiple layers of hull planking that their guns could not penetrate, carrying a very large crew.

The numbers in those accounts are the numbers of frightened men and should not be taken literally. What they establish, without any figure being trustworthy, is that in 1513 a Javanese sultanate could build ships a European fleet found alarming — and that the reason the attack failed was not the ships.

It was that Melaka is eight hundred miles away, the fleet had to be supplied across that distance, and an assault on a fortified position from the sea is the hardest operation there is.

Why it failed

Demak fought with Javanese levies from the rice country and with the fleets of coastal chiefs who served rather than obeyed, and both were adequate to the thing it had done everywhere else, which was to take a port on its own island chain.

Melaka was a different problem. An assault on a fortified position from the sea is the hardest operation there is, and this one had to be mounted and then fed across eight hundred miles of open water, twice, against a garrison that could be resupplied from Goa. The prince who crossed to the north is named for the crossing, not for what happened at the far end of it.

The Salokantara

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Almost nothing survives about how Demak was actually governed. Neither the Javanese chronicles nor the Portuguese reports describe the officials or the palace with any care, and what can be said comes from scattered notices about individuals and from what later Javanese courts inherited.

What they inherited turns out to be the answer.

The furniture of a Hindu kingdom

Javanese writers of the seventeenth century and after took it for granted that the Muslim kingdom of Demak was the continuation of Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit, and pushed the point as far as making the legendary Raden Patah a son of the last Majapahit emperor. The writers who said this were Muslims, and many of them were religious scholars. The difference of religion mattered less to them than the continuity of the machinery of state.

They had a case. The Muslim lords of the small north-coast ports had spent years as vassals of a Hindu overlord before Demak felt able to call itself an independent Muslim kingdom, and the annual journey to court at which a vassal renewed his loyalty kept them in working contact with Majapahit's officers, above all with the patih. When the ruler of Demak became a sultan in his own right, the arrangements he knew how to run were those.

The evidence is in the paperwork. A collection of laws and rules of procedure is ascribed to the Demak king Senapati Jimbun, and it carries an Old Javanese title, Salokantara. The old manuals on government and royal officials, the Wadu Aji, went on being copied in central Javanese versions. Majapahit's supreme court had been staffed by consecrated Hindu and Buddhist judges called dharmadhyaksa; the judges of Demak are jeksa, which is the same word with the consecration removed, and the pradata court they sat in was still the high court of the central Javanese principalities at the end of the nineteenth century.

Where the new religion actually sat

Islamic law had to be given a place, and the place it was given was a narrow one: marriage and what attaches to marriage, and questions of worship in the strict sense. Beside it stood customary law and a court law of Hindu descent, and neither gave way. This is not a Javanese peculiarity — the theoretical supremacy of fiqh has been rare everywhere — but it is worth being exact about in a kingdom whose whole claim was to be Islam's protector on Java.

The man who administered that law was a scholar from among the ulama, and at Demak the office of jurist and the office of leading prayer in the mosque were already close together. The title the Demak imams used was pangulu, head, and they held authority in law as well as in the mosque.

The armed mosque

The soldiery looks equally familiar. As at Majapahit, the king's strength rested largely on volunteers from the landholding families and the free peasantry, and the corps a young man joined to make a career — the Tamtama — had existed at Majapahit and was still a named regiment in the palaces of Surakarta and Yogyakarta in the twentieth century. The legend of Jaka Tingkir, who enlisted in the Tamtama at the capital and ended as sultan of Pajang, is a story about that ladder.

What was genuinely new was the mosque quarter. The zeal of recent converts and the martial tradition of Islam pushed the artisans and traders around the capital's mosque and the village mosques into armed bands, formed to defend the faith and extend its territory — the "armed penghulu" of the Serat Kandha and the babad, who are remembered as having joined the holy war that finished the Hindu capital for good under the lord of Kudus, himself descended from a line of penghulu.

Those half-military, half-religious men are probably the ancestors of the Suranata, the corps that stood closest to the king in the central Javanese palaces from the seventeenth century onward. A century after Demak's greatness the district was being governed by a tumenggung of the Suranata, and the Dutch who met him in 1678 took him for a crown prince.

1546

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

Trenggana took the throne in 1521 and held it for twenty-five years. Under him Demak took the north coast in both directions, took Banten and the Sunda ports in the west, absorbed what was left of Majapahit, and campaigned east into the last Hindu-Buddhist holdouts of Java's eastern salient.

He was killed on one of those campaigns, at Panarukan, in 1546.

His son Sunan Prawata was murdered in 1549. The kinsman who arranged it, Arya Penangsang, held the throne until 1554 and was killed in turn, and the man who won the war that followed was Jaka Tingkir, who moved the court inland to Pajang.

Eight years, three rulers, two murders. That is a short distance between a kingdom's greatest ruler and its last one.

No rule for what came next

Eight years, three rulers, two murders, and nothing in the sources describes a rule that was supposed to prevent it. There is no designated heir installed in a father's lifetime, no council with a recognised right to choose, no practice of any kind standing between the death of a sultan and the ambitions of his relatives. A sultanate that had taken Java in fifty years did not survive its own founder's grandson, and what it lacked was not soldiers.

What replaced it

Jaka Tingkir moved the court inland to Pajang, and argued his right to it from two directions at once: descent from Trenggana, whose dynasty he had just finished off, and descent from Brawijaya, the last king of Majapahit, whose kingdom Trenggana's dynasty had absorbed thirty years earlier.

Which is exactly the pair of claims Demak itself had made — Raden Patah's line traced to Majapahit's royal house, and the right to rule Java that came with it. Two consecutive Javanese sultanates justified themselves by descent from the thing their predecessor had destroyed, and each was destroyed in turn by somebody making the same argument about it.

The centre of Javanese power went inland with him in 1568 and never came back to the sea.

A second Turk

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The Javanese chronicles say nothing at all about the reign of Sunan Prawata, who took the throne when his father was killed in 1546. What survives instead is one Portuguese letter.

Manuel Pinto wrote it from Melaka on 7 December 1548, to the archbishop at Goa. He had stopped in Java on his way back west from South Sulawesi and had talked with the king, who by that date is very probably Prawata.

The king told him he was working to bring the whole island of Java to Islam, and that if he succeeded he would be segundo turco — a second Turk, the equal of Süleyman, who in 1547 had just settled his position in Hungary by treaty with Charles V and was the great champion of Islam of the age. He said he thought he could bring Melaka down without fighting for it, by cutting off the rice that Java sent there. And he said he was considering an expedition to South Sulawesi, to conquer it and convert it.

Pinto argued him out of the last one, on the ground that a Javanese army would be inconvenient for a priest who was trying to introduce Christianity there at the same moment.

Where a Javanese king learned about Süleyman

Someone at Demak was following European politics closely enough to know who Süleyman was and what he had just achieved.

The likeliest channel is a man in the palace: a Portuguese renegade from the Algarve, known as Coje Geinal, who cast cannon for the king in the middle of the century and is probably the same gunfounder who made the piece Trenggana sent to Banten. A deserter with a trade brought both the artillery and the news.

The scale of the claim, and the size of the reality

Set the letter beside what was actually happening and it is a remarkable document. Prawata seems to have understood himself as the rightful lord of the Muslim kingdom and the protector of the faith on Java — while the real power was already draining to rulers who were nominally under him.

That is the middle of the sixteenth century in one sentence. Cirebon and Banten in the west, Surabaya and Gresik-Giri in the east, all becoming half-independent Muslim states in exactly these years; Prawata could not stop any of it. He was murdered with his wife in 1549, on the orders of a nephew, in a feud over an earlier killing of his own.

Java would not be brought to Islam by a sultan of Demak. It would be brought there anyway, over the next two centuries, largely by the men whose ports were slipping out of his hands while he was explaining to a passing Portuguese what he intended to become.

Pangeran Mas

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The babad tell the end simply. Jaka Tingkir of Pajang beat Arya Panangsang of Jipang, who had murdered the last king of Demak; the coastal lords and the princes of central and eastern Java acknowledged the victor as paramount; the old capital became a district town under a lord who answered to Pajang.

It is too simple, and the chroniclers who wrote it had reasons. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers in the inland courts consistently magnified Pajang and Mataram at the expense of the coast they had displaced. In fact the Ratu of Kalinyamat at Jepara was the real power along the western north coast, as far as Banten, well into the second half of the sixteenth century.

An emperor at Demak in 1564

There is also a Portuguese notice that will not fit the tidy version.

De Couto reports that in 1564 the sultan of Aceh, preparing one of his expeditions against Portuguese Melaka, sent envoys to the Rey de Dama, Imperador do Java to ask for help. The ruler of Demak refused, on the ground that an Aceh victorious over the Portuguese would become too strong and would draw Java into its orbit. The envoys were killed at Demak, which ended the question. De Couto tells the story at length because to the Portuguese it looked like divine intervention.

Fifteen years after the last king's death, then, somebody at Demak was still worth an embassy from the most formidable ruler in the western archipelago. He is not identifiable in the Javanese chronicles. The likeliest reconstruction is that he was a religious figure of the old royal house, whose weight came from being protector of the faith and panatagama, orderer of religion, rather than from soldiers — probably the prince known as Pangeran Kediri or Pangiri, a nephew of the murdered king and of the Ratu of Jepara.

Carried home with his hands tied in silk

When the sultan of Pajang died in 1587 the succession was open, and the ruler of Demak came to Pajang with troops of his own — among them slaves who were Balinese, Bugis and Makassarese — to press his claim to the paramountcy.

Senapati of Mataram, backing another candidate, scattered them at once. Then he treated the old man with extravagant courtesy: an escorted litter home to Demak, and his hands bound with nothing but a silk sash. If the story is true, the courtesy is the measure of how little was left. A rival who has to be killed is a rival; a rival who can be sent home in a litter is a relic.

What the episode also shows is that in the interior, among people whose fathers or grandfathers had become Muslims only fifty or seventy-five years earlier, the Demak line still carried religious authority when it had no political power at all.

Melaka, Banten, and a son with a knife

Pangeran Kediri's son was called Pangeran Mas, or Pangeran Juru. A Javanese chronology used by Raffles has it that in 1588, after the collapse, the great men of Demak and their people took ship. In 1587 Paulo de Lima had stormed Johor for the Portuguese, a victory that rang through the western archipelago, and a Javanese embassy appeared at Melaka that same year; a landless claimant looking for help against Mataram had reason to look there. No Portuguese document records a meeting.

By 1596 he was at Banten, where the Dutch of the first voyage met him. They were told his father had once ruled all Java and had been deposed by his own vassals, and that the son, impoverished by war, had gone to Melaka and then here, where the king of Banten — his kinsman — received him with the honours of his birth and lodged him outside the town. The same voyage brings back a phrase about his homeland: Dauma, waer den Keyser noch voor Coning ghekent wordt, Demak, where the Emperor is still acknowledged as king.

Between 1602 and 1604 Demak rose against Mataram. It is very likely that Pangeran Mas meant to sail from Banten and put himself at the head of it. The English factor Scott heard in 1604 that on a voyage from Banten to somewhere else on the north coast he had been killed by one of his own sons. He was buried in the Banten cemetery at Pangkalan Tangka, and it is by that place-name that the last claimant of Demak is remembered — Sultan Pangkalan Tangka, named for where a man ends rather than for anything he held.

Why the son did it is not recorded.

Holy ground

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Once Senapati held southern central Java, around 1588, the lords of Pati, Demak and Grobogan counted in the Mataram chronicles as sampun kareh — already subdued. In 1589 they were ordered out on his campaign against the princes of east Java, which failed; in 1591 they were ordered out again, to Kediri, under one of his sons who needed a reputation. That is what Demak had become: a contingent.

After that the office changed hands the way offices do. Ki Mas Sari of Wirasari was made adipati in 1595, apparently because his predecessor could not be trusted. In 1601 the new king of Mataram appointed his own elder half-brother, Pangeran Puger, who unsurprisingly took up arms from Demak against him, was beaten at Tambak Uwos, and was sent to live at Kudus with his family and without his followers. His replacement was a spearman promoted for good service, who took the name Tumenggung Endranata; in 1627 he was found to be entangled in the war between Pati and Sultan Agung and was stabbed with a kris as a traitor on the sultan's orders.

What was left to be

As a seaport, Demak meant nothing by the end of the sixteenth century. The channel that made it was closing, and the ships had moved to Jepara.

As farmland it went on mattering for a long time. Rice and the other produce of the Demak plain kept a real place in the economy of the Mataram kings, which is the same fact the first Demak lords built on, now owned by somebody else.

And then there is the third thing, which is why the name is still in use. Into the nineteenth century, believers all over Java kept up their reverence for the Great Mosque and for the graves at Kadilangu, where Sunan Kalijaga lies. The town counted as holy ground.

A polity that lasted about seventy-five years as an independent kingdom, and whose royal line died out in exile at Banten, is remembered in Javanese history beside Majapahit itself. It is not the strait or the fleet or the law book that did that. It is a mosque people kept walking to.