The Kingdom of Pajang

Eighteen years

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

When Sultan Trenggana of Demak died, the north-coast sultanate that had dominated Java fell into a war over who would follow him. Jaka Tingkir won it. He killed his rival Arya Penangsang in 1554, took the throne as Hadiwijaya, and carried the centre of Javanese power off the coast and inland to Pajang, in the middle Solo valley, where he ruled from 1568.

The double claim

Having destroyed the dynasty he had served under, he argued his right to rule from two directions at once. He claimed descent from Trenggana, whose line he had just finished off. And he claimed descent from Brawijaya, the last king of Majapahit — the kingdom Trenggana's own dynasty had absorbed thirty years earlier.

Demak had made the same manoeuvre in its own founding, tracing Raden Patah to the royal house it displaced. It is worth registering how the claim actually worked in practice: it did not have to be believed so much as it had to be sayable, by a man who already held the field, in terms the court chroniclers could write down.

Inland

Demak had been a port. It lived on land tax and on the tolls of its own harbour, sold rice across the archipelago, and sent fleets against Portuguese Melaka. Pajang sat up the Solo valley with no coast at all and lived on the land alone. Mataram, which took it in 1586, lived the same way.

That is the change worth carrying away from eighteen years. The centre of Javanese power went inland and never came back to the sea. Sultan Agung's armies would later starve outside Batavia because the coast belonged to somebody else, and the Dutch company would buy its way into Javanese successions through the ports. Both of those follow from a short-lived kingdom choosing a river valley.

Jaka Tingkir

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

The Javanese chronicles give Pajang's founder a career before the throne, and it is worth setting out, because it is about as clear a case as survives of what a dynastic chronicle is doing when it tells a founding story.

Jaka Tingkir is a young man from a village, of obscure but ultimately royal descent, who goes to Demak, joins the sultan's guard, is expelled for killing a rival applicant during a selection trial, is taken in by a holy man, and crosses the Kedung Srengenge — where he is attacked by crocodiles and defeats forty of them, who then tow his raft. He returns, marries Trenggana's daughter, is given Pajang, and after the succession war becomes king.

The three things it is doing at once

It establishes descent — the obscure origin is explicitly a disguise, and the genealogy comes out later.

It establishes merit — he is physically formidable, and the killing that gets him expelled is a display of the quality that later makes him fit to rule.

And it establishes sanction — the holy man, the ascetic interval, and the animals that submit are the standard Javanese markers of wahyu, the light of kingship, which is a thing that settles on a person rather than a thing a person inherits.

What the story will not do is separate those three. A Javanese founder is supposed to be all of them at once — born to it, worthy of it, and marked out for it — and the version the chroniclers settled on gives him each in turn, in the order that makes the next one plausible.

Who was writing

The chronicles that carry it were compiled in the seventeenth century and after, by men in the service of Mataram, and Mataram's own claim ran through Pajang. Its kings needed Jaka Tingkir to have been legitimate, because their ancestor had received Mataram from his hand and had then taken his kingdom.

So the legend is not an embellishment attached to a founder by admirers. It is load-bearing, and the dynasty that wrote it down had a stake in every part of it.

Adiwijaya

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

Almost everything known about the interior of Java in the sixteenth century comes from Javanese chronicles written in the seventeenth and eighteenth, by men who served the kings of Mataram and often belonged to their family. That has to be allowed for, and in Pajang's case it has to be allowed for heavily.

The court that Mataram's founder destroyed is described in Mataram's histories as feeble, and its sultan as a weak ruler whose defeat was only natural. It is a tidy account and it is not what the same chronicles show him doing.

What he actually held

As Trenggana's principal heir, Adiwijaya kept Demak's authority together across a much wider area than his own valley: the interior of central Java, and influence reaching west into Sunda country and east into the Brantas basin.

In the southwest he was collecting bulu-bekti, the annual tribute, from the local lords of Kedu and Bagelen, which is the plainest surviving evidence of what he governed — and the plainest evidence of how he lost it, because those are exactly the men Senapati of Mataram talked into keeping their tribute at home. One of them, the lord of Bocor, meant to stay loyal, tried to kill Senapati, failed, and concluded from his failure that Mataram had the right to rule Java after all.

He was also still enforcing. A Javanese chronicle dates the occupation of Wirasaba to 1578, and the Banyumas chronicle records that the sultan of Pajang ordered the killing of its lord. Late in the reign, the court was still settling the interior by force.

Eastward his authority ran to Madiun, on the largest tributary of the Solo, where the ruler was Trenggana's youngest son and his own brother-in-law.

The assembly at Giri, 1581

The high point is a meeting, and it was held in somebody else's palace.

In 1581 Adiwijaya obtained recognition as Muslim king and sultan from the most important rulers of east Java and the eastern coast, at a solemn assembly in the court of the very old Sunan Prapen of Giri — the spiritual authority of the eastern ports. The kings of Japan, Wirasaba, Kediri, Surabaya, Pasuruan, Madiun, Sidayu, Lasem, Tuban and Pati were there.

Look at what that is. Ten courts, most of them on the coast, none of them conquered, acknowledging an inland ruler as paramount at the invitation of a holy man neither side controlled. Relations between Pajang and the eastern princes were generally friendly; Surabaya's Panji Wiryakrama seems to have emerged around then as their spokesman in dealing with him. This is a paramountcy assembled by agreement, in a room, which is a different object from an empire and did not outlive the man who assembled it.

The one outside witness

Francis Drake called at Java in 1580 and got no further than Blambangan, at the extreme eastern tip.

What he was told there was that the island had a very great number of kings, but that there was one whom they acknowledged as supreme. He was not given the name of the city.

Tembayat

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

The eighteen years did one thing that outlasted everything else the kingdom did, and it is not political. Under Adiwijaya, the court literature and court art that had matured at Demak and Jepara moved inland, and southern central Java — which would be the heartland of Javanese culture for the next three centuries — began to be a place where such things were made.

Islam arrived there by the same road. Tradition credits Pengging's knowledge of it to the legendary Syekh Siti Jenar, and further south to Sunan Tembayat, who came from Semarang and was connected to the royal house of Demak.

The buildings that date it

Tembayat is not only a story. The dated inscriptions carved on the buildings at his grave establish that they went up during Adiwijaya's reign, and their style belongs with the early Islamic work of the sixteenth century at Kudus and Kalinyamat, and with the ruins of the same kind in east Java.

The tomb stayed a place of pilgrimage for Muslims of southern central Java for centuries. Javanese tradition adds that near the end of his life the sultan went there himself, to ask for help in his struggle against Mataram, which says something exact about the relationship between his court and the community of scholars that the man from Semarang had formed. It did not work.

Apem thrown over the heads of the crowd

At Jatinom, at the foot of Merapi in what is now Klaten and was then Pajang, there is an annual festival at which apem cakes are thrown over the heads of the people who come for them.

It is called Angka Wiyu, and the name may come from an Arabic invocation — ya Kawiyu, the Strong, the Mighty, the Praised — repeated like a litany by the devout. Whether the rite itself is older than Islam in that place is an open question and a good one.

The poet of Pajang

Javanese tradition also holds that in the second half of the sixteenth century, under Adiwijaya, Pangeran Karang Gayam wrote the moral poem Niti Sruti. He is remembered in the literary tradition as pujangga ing Pajang, the poet of Pajang.

His family came from around Taji, where a toll post stood on the road that had for centuries been the main link between the Pengging-Pajang country and Mataram — the same road Ki Pamanahan's settlers went west along, and the same road the army came back down.

A poem, a road and a customs post. Between them they are most of what the kingdom passed on.

The gardener

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

The vassal who took the kingdom was the son of the man Adiwijaya had sent to settle Mataram. Senapati began withholding what a vassal owed: he stopped coming to court for the annual homage, and when the sultan ordered a punishment carried out against the family of the tumenggung of Mayang — his own brother-in-law — he gave the man asylum instead.

That forced the old sultan to march. The royal army broke up near Prambanan before there was a battle, in large part because Merapi erupted.

On the way home he stopped at Tembayat, and the chronicles say that there he understood his kingdom was finished and that the house of Mataram would rule the whole of Java. He died soon after reaching his own palace — of illness, or of an accident, or, in the version the chroniclers preferred, at the hands of an unidentified gardener who wanted to do Senapati a service. He was buried at Butuh, a little west of the royal garden, at a grave long known as Makam Aji.

The year was 1587.

Four heirs and a holy man

There was no rule for what happened next, and so what happened next was decided by whoever had the most authority in the room.

The sultan left three sons-in-law who were themselves rulers — of Tuban, of Demak and of Aros Baya on Madura — and his own son, Pangeran Benawa, who was young. Sunan Kudus used his standing to see that the court recognised not the son but Arya Pangiri of Demak, who was a grandson of Trenggana and had married a Pajang princess. What the scholar of Kudus seems to have wanted was to put the sultanate of central Java back into the hands of a direct descendant of Trenggana, forty years after Trenggana's death.

It failed within a year, and it failed on something ordinary. The new king lived in the palace surrounded by officials he had brought from Demak, and the grants and lands he handed to those coastal outsiders made the nobility and landholders of Pajang itself resentful and jealous. Benawa, parked at Jipang and unhappy there, made common cause with Senapati of Mataram and with the disaffected at home, and in 1588 a short fight settled it.

Arya Pangiri's life was spared at the request of his wife, the Pajang princess. He was tied with a silk sash and sent back to Demak — the same courtesy, and the same sash, that Senapati would extend to the last claimant of Demak in the same years.

What the losing army was made of

One detail in the chronicles is worth more than the battle.

Arya Pangiri's force included hired soldiers he had brought from the coast: slaves, Balinese, Bugis, Makassarese, and peranakan — Chinese of mixed descent. They proved unreliable, and the men of Pajang went over to the other side.

Mercenaries have to be paid, which means that by the last quarter of the sixteenth century the coastal districts had an economy in which money did that work. The interior — Pajang, and Mataram behind it — did not. The two halves of Java were not only fighting each other, they were paying for it differently, and the side that fought with obligations rather than coin won.

It is the third time in sixty years that a Javanese paramountcy passed from an overlord to his own subordinate. Jaka Tingkir was Demak's man before he was Demak's end; Senapati was Pajang's. It is also the last of them for a long while, because what Senapati founded held Java until 1755.

Kartasura

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

Pajang did not stop existing in 1588. It stopped being the place the paramountcy sat, and then it spent thirty years finding out what that meant.

Benawa made over his father's inheritance to Senapati, whom he treated as an elder brother. Senapati said he preferred to stay in Mataram and asked only for the regalia — the gold and jewels of the Pajang crown — and confirmed Benawa as king of Pajang under his protection. Which is the whole transaction: the ornaments went west, the title stayed, and the title was now something in somebody's gift.

Benawa's reign lasted about a year. He died, or according to another tradition left Pajang to give himself to religion at Parakan in northern Kedu. Senapati then handed the kingdom to a young Mataram prince, Gagak Bening, who ordered a large rebuilding and enlargement of the palace, and who was dead by about 1591. After that Senapati appointed Adiwijaya's grandson, and under him and under Senapati's successor the arrangement held quietly for a quarter of a century.

1617

Then Pajang rose against Sultan Agung, with help from the disaffected inside Mataram itself.

The suppression of a revolt in the older and richer country next door was carried out with massive destruction, and afterwards the villagers were carried off to labour on the building of the new royal city. In 1618 the last king of the Pajang house, beaten in the field, fled east to Giri and to Surabaya. The Pajang family had always been on good terms with the princes of east Java, and in the 1620s the resistance to Sultan Agung's expansion was concentrated in exactly those coastal districts; one of Pajang's last vassal lords went with him and made a place for himself at the Surabaya court.

For most of the seventeenth century the district was of no political or economic consequence at all.

The city that came back

In 1680, Sultan Agung's grandson Amangkurat II was driven out of Mataram, his own inheritance, and had to build somewhere else. He built his new royal city, Kartasura, in Pajang, not far from where the old sultanate had had its seat about a century earlier.

The courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta descend from that one. So the country a kingdom held for eighteen years, and lost, and was flattened for, is where the Javanese court eventually settled for good — twice, and by other people's decisions both times.

There is one more scene worth keeping. In 1628, after his own inheritance had been occupied, the last independent prince of Surabaya had to go to Mataram and submit to Sultan Agung. On the way, it seems, he stopped at Butuh to pay his respects at the grave of the sultan of Pajang.