The Sultanate of Mataram

The forest

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

In the third quarter of the sixteenth century the sultan of Pajang sent one of his commanders, the lord of Pamanahan, west into the neighbouring country of Mataram, to bring it into the world of Islam and settle it.

The Javanese chronicles are detailed about Pengging and Pajang, where they can name Muslim kings ruling in the first half of the century. About Mataram they have nothing comparable, and the silence is the point: no local ruler is defeated in these stories, and none is driven out. What the stories describe is men clearing forest.

The best reading of that is the plain one. The core of Mataram in the 1560s was largely unpeopled and largely uncultivated, and the sultan of Pajang was doing what Javanese kings had done before and would do again — planting a settlement in empty ground next door, because settled ground pays tribute.

What was under the trees

Nothing in the tradition suggests that either the sultan who ordered the clearing or the man who did it knew that the same valleys had been the seat of kings five centuries earlier.

They were. The Opak and Progo country is where the great temple complexes stand, and Kota Gede, the capital Pamanahan's son built, is about thirty kilometres from Prambanan. But tropical growth had covered the ruins of the old palaces completely, and the kingdom that took the name of Mataram in 1588 took it as the name of a district, not as an inheritance. The colonists were opening a forest. That the forest had a floor made of somebody's capital is a fact about the place that had to be dug up again before anyone could use it.

A coconut, and a woman in the sea

The chronicle tradition preserves two stories that seem to be about older rights.

The first is the palm-tapper of Giring, in the limestone hills of Gunung Kidul, who possessed a coconut whose water, drunk at a single draught, would make the drinker the ancestor of the family that would rule all Java. Ki Gede Giring let it stand. Ki Pamanahan drank it by accident, and the prophecy came true.

As a story it is slight. As evidence it is not, because it concedes that the authority of Giring in that country was older than the authority of the newcomers from the east, and the tradition took the trouble to reconcile the two by making them friends.

The second is Nyai Loro Kidul, the goddess of the Southern Ocean, who becomes the king's wife. Along the whole south coast there are remains of pre-Islamic religious observance in the stories and in the customs, and the myth attaches to the dynasty probably in the seventeenth century, once there was a dynasty for it to attach to.

A newly cleared district, a settler family with no ancestral claim to it, and two sets of powers already in residence — one holding a coconut, one living in the sea. The house of Mataram made terms with both, and went on making them: the labuh offerings its kings ordered at four places in southern central Java — Merapi, Lawu, the south coast, and Dlepih — were still being made in the twentieth century.

Senapati

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

Ki Pamanahan never called himself anything grander than Ki Gede Mataram, the lord of Mataram. His son was given a name and a title together when he was installed at the court of Pajang: Senapati-ing-Alaga, commander in war. It stuck to the dynasty, and the kings of Mataram carried it afterwards as a matter of course.

He had it from the sultan he would depose.

A wall

The first thing Senapati did with Mataram, from about 1584, was build a wall around his palace.

That sounds unremarkable and was not. Walls were a new thing in Mataram. The older courts of east Java and the north coast had had them for a long time, and the work at Kota Gede was done on the advice of one of the wali — Sunan Kalijaga, or whoever had succeeded him as the religious authority at Kadilangu — and the stone fort of white and red brick was finished in 1592 or 1593 by a refugee from the ruler of Surabaya. A frontier settlement's ruler was importing fortification from the older centres, at the same time as he was importing their religious sanction, and both of them arrived from the coast he would spend his life fighting.

Everything else he did before the war

He also stopped going to court.

The annual sowan, the appearance before the sultan to render homage, was the act by which a vassal was a vassal. Senapati stopped performing it. When Pajang ordered a punishment carried out on his brother-in-law's family, he gave the man asylum instead. And he worked on the tribute-paying lords of Kedu and Bagelen, who were persuaded to acknowledge him rather than carry their annual dues east to Pajang. One of them, the lord of Bocor, tried to kill him, failed, and became a supporter.

Beside those, the chronicles set the other kind of preparation. At the flat stone of Lipura, southwest of what is now Yogyakarta and the sacred centre of the Mataram country, he slept and received a prophecy of his descendants' greatness. From there he went down the Opak to the dwelling of the goddess of the Southern Ocean, while his uncle and adviser Juru Martani went north, up Merapi, to make contact with the powers there.

The chroniclers were writing for his descendants, and they arranged the insubordination and the visions into a single sequence in which each authorises the other. It is worth reading them the other way round as well: a man in a newly walled town on the edge of the settled country needed every kind of standing he could get, and took it from a saint at Kadilangu, a goddess in the sea, and the tribute of Bagelen, in whatever order they became available.

1588

The old sultan marched, his army broke up near Prambanan when Merapi erupted, and he died the same year. His successor from Demak lasted a year in Pajang before Senapati and the dead sultan's son threw him out.

Only when the son formally handed Pajang over could Senapati regard himself as an independent king in southern central Java. From that point the chronicles give him the title panembahan. The date is 1588, and what he assumed with it was not just a kingdom but a claim: as the lawful successor of the sultan, he considered that every ruler who had been subordinate to Pajang was now subordinate to him.

He spent the rest of his life on the difference between considering that and achieving it.

Batavia

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

Sultan Agung had taken every city in Java that mattered. In 1628 and again in 1629 he besieged the Dutch company's capital at Batavia, and failed both times.

He did not fail to Dutch arms. He failed to rice.

The armies he sent were large enough; the problem was feeding them four hundred kilometres from the granary, and his solution was to position depots along the north coast in advance. Company ships found them and burned them. The army outside Batavia's walls starved in front of them, and what was left of it walked home.

It is about as clean a demonstration as the century offers of what sea power was actually for. Mataram could put more men in front of Batavia than the company could put behind its walls, and could not keep them there, because everything on that coast moved by water and the water was not his.

What the sea was for

Mataram was the largest agrarian state in the archipelago and drew nothing from the sea at all. Its whole revenue was the rice country. Melaka, three hundred miles away, had no farmland whatever and lived on the traffic through the strait — and bought much of its food from Java.

Those are the two ways a polity in these islands could be rich, and Java's politics ran through the second one even though its greatest kingdom was built entirely on the first. Every decisive thing that happened to Mataram happened because of a coast it held as a dependency and could not use.

And the title from Mecca

In 1641 an embassy came back from the Hijaz with the title of sultan, granted by the Sharif of Mecca, and Agung used it for the rest of his reign.

The sharifs had little land and no army, and lived substantially on granting recognition of exactly this kind; Banten had sent for the same title and got it three years earlier. What a Javanese king wanted from the Hijaz was a standing that no rival on Java could confer and none could deny, and it was for sale.

1677

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

Trunajaya was a Madurese prince. His allies were Makasar exiles — men who had left South Sulawesi after the fall of Makassar in 1669, and who had spent the intervening years as fighting men for hire in the Java Sea.

In 1677 they took the Mataram capital and drove Amangkurat I out; he died on the road. His son appealed to the Dutch company for help, and got it, and was restored.

That is the hinge. Before 1677 the company is a coastal power that Mataram alternately fought and traded with. After it, the company is a participant in Javanese succession, is paid for participating in territory and in trade rights, and is in the field for every subsequent dispute over the throne — three of them, in 1704, 1719 and 1746, each of which cost the winner more than it gained.

Nothing in the sources describes a rule that was supposed to settle a Javanese succession, and three wars over the throne in forty-two years is what the absence cost.

What a diaspora did

The Makasar who came with Trunajaya, and the Bugis who took power at Riau after 1699, both came out of the settlement imposed on South Sulawesi in 1667 and 1669, when the Dutch company and Arung Palakka's Bone destroyed the archipelago's last open port.

Makassar's most consequential export turned out to be its own defeated. One half of them landed here, and what they did was pull the company into the centre of Javanese politics eight years after it had finished with Sulawesi.

Giyanti

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

In 1755, after nine years of war, the kingdom was divided in two. Pakubuwana III kept Surakarta. Mangkubumi took Yogyakarta and the title Hamengkubuwana I. The Dutch company brokered the treaty and guaranteed both halves.

No foreign power conquered it. The division was made between two Javanese princes, in a war fought by Javanese armies, and the company's part was to underwrite the outcome and take payment for doing so.

The ending that is still there

Most endings end something. Both halves of this one are still running.

Two courts, two dynasties in unbroken descent, two palaces, and two divergent traditions of Javanese court music, dance, dress and language, two hundred and seventy years later. The sultan of Yogyakarta is the governor of a province of Indonesia by hereditary right, which is the only such arrangement in the republic.

The two courts are in competition, and always have been. Each presents itself as the continuation of Mataram, and the divergence between their court traditions is partly the product of two centuries of each declining to do things the way the other does them. A gamelan tuning, a way of folding a headcloth and a dance posture are all, in this context, arguments about succession.

What Surakarta and Yogyakarta were after 1755

What the two courts kept was ritual authority, revenue and an enormous cultural production. What neither had again was the disposal of its own external relations: they were courts inside somebody else's empire — the company's, then the Dutch state's, then the republic's.

That is the sense in which 1755 is an ending. The line did not stop, and has not stopped. What stopped was Java being governed from a Javanese court's own decisions, and the seven hundred years of kingdoms in the interior that ran from Kediri through Singhasari, Majapahit, Demak and Pajang stop being that kind of sequence here.

A false translation

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

The division of 1755 did not stop the war. A third prince, Mas Said, was still in the field, and kept fighting for more than two years after Mangkubumi had been proclaimed sultan by the Dutch governor.

He was hunted, his camp burned, a price put on his head, and his force finally broken; and he still would not submit, because his name alone was enough to bring men back to him. In the end he asked for districts to live on, and was told the partition of the lands had already happened but that something might be found for him if he came to court. He came, on the stipulation that the Susuhunan would meet him half an hour's walk outside Surakarta, threw himself at his feet, was raised up, and was given a bench to sit on.

The settlement made him Pangeran Adipati Mangkunagara with four thousand cacah in Kaduwang, Malesa and the southern mountains. The kingdom that had been divided in two was now divided in three.

Raffles, who governed Java sixty years later and had the company's papers, summarises it like this: the war lasted twelve years, the finest provinces of the island were laid waste, thousands were killed on both sides, and "the independence of the empire" was finally annihilated. He gives the Dutch bill for it too — 4,286,006 florins, 12 stuivers, 8 pennies, from 1746 to the peace — and the return on that outlay, which was, if not the acknowledged sovereignty of Java, at least effectual control over how it would be administered in future.

The shape the island was left in

The 1758 settlement drew a line the rest of the colonial period kept.

The Dutch took the direct administration of every province on the north coast, from Cirebon to the eastern end of Madura. The inland and southern provinces were restored to the Javanese princes and divided between them in nearly equal shares, counted in cacah — households — rather than in territory, which is how a Javanese kingdom had always measured what it had.

So the coast that Mataram's kings had spent a century and a half failing to hold was formally taken away from them, and the interior they had always actually lived on was handed back, subdivided, to be held on terms.

1808, and the argument about the words

Those terms lasted fifty years and were then declared void by the man who governed for Napoleon's Netherlands.

Marshal Daendels announced in 1808 that the clauses under which the princes held their lands in fee from the Dutch no longer applied, and that he would henceforth treat them as independent princes, standing in no relation to the European government except the one that necessarily exists between a weaker and a stronger state next door to each other.

Yogyakarta took him at his word. Its court, Raffles writes, was conscious of owing its existence chiefly to the military success of its founder and to the weakness of the Dutch and of Surakarta, and had never fully accepted the terms of 1755 — which, it was said there, had been imposed on the sovereign by a false translation into Javanese.

That claim deserves to be recorded exactly as it stands: a court arguing, half a century on, that the treaty which created it had been mistranslated to the man who signed it. Whether or not it was true, it is what a dynasty says when the document that made it is also the document that bound it.

Daendels marched on Yogyakarta with a considerable force. The treaty that followed had the reigning sultan resign the administration to his son as regent and cede certain provinces.

What the British found, and did

None of it had been carried out when the British landed in August 1811. The sultan had ostensibly resigned, but he still took his usual place on the throne, and not one of the ceded districts had actually changed hands.

In 1812 the British government deposed him and put his son on the throne. That son died, and in 1815 was succeeded by a boy of nine.

Two hundred and twenty-four years after a settler's son in a newly walled town stopped going to court to render homage, the court he founded had its occupant chosen by a European government that had been on the island for four years.