by Tim Hannigan
The ports on the north coast of Java were true melting pots, however, full of Javanese becoming Muslim, and Muslims becoming Javanese. There were, Tomé Pires wrote, merchants of all nations settled in these ports: ‘Parsees, Arabs, Gujeratis, Bengalese, Malays and other nationalities, there being many Moors among them’. But when it came to the interior, it was still the realm of a ‘great heathen king’ who went about his countryside with ‘two or three thousand men with lances in sockets of gold and silver’. This, of course, was Majapahit, still lingering eight generations after the glory days of Hayam Wuruk and Gajah Mada.
The Hindu-Buddhist kingdom’s power was much diminished; indeed, Pires noted that the Muslim rulers of the coast, even if they were of foreign origin, had ‘made themselves more important in Javanese nobility and state than those of the hinterland’. But Majapahit could still lay a greater claim to represent the majority culture of Java. The island was still studded with active temples, and was still crawling with Hindu-Buddhist holy men: ‘There are about fifty thousand of these in Java’, Tomé Pires wrote; ‘Some of them do not eat rice nor drink wine; they are all virgins, they do not know women’. Such was the hold of these wandering mystics, Pires declared, that even the coastal Muslims were inclined to pay them passing obeisance: ‘These men are also worshipped by the Moors and they believe in them greatly; they give them alms; they rejoice when such men come to their houses’.
And yet within a century, Majapahit would have vanished altogether, and by far the greater part of Java would be Muslim. Just how this came to pass is unclear, but the local legends give all the credit to a clutch of shadowy figures who seem to have been following in the footsteps of Tomé Pires’ army of ascetics. There were just nine of these new men, however, rather than fifty thousand; and they professed Islam rather than Hindu-Buddhism.
Javanese tradition today ascribes the Islamisation of the island to the exploits of the mythical Wali Songo, the ‘Nine Saints’. Most do seem to have been real people: they have tombs that remain major pilgrimage centres in Java today. However, the presence of saintly bones in modern mosque courtyards is just about the only certainty in the tale of the Wali Songo; even pinning them down to a definitive list of nine is impossible. Some are clearly historical figures, even if they are thickly swaddled with later folklore. Amongst these is Malik Ibrahim, a foreign Muslim with purported origins oscillating from Persia to China, who settled at Gresik on the northeast coast of Java a full century before Tomé Pires’ time and who found fame under the saintly name of Sunan Gresik. Others could be dismissed as a confection of ancient myths salted with a small pinch of Islamic lore—were it not for the fact that they have verified tombs of their own.
Perhaps the best way to look at the Wali Songo is as a metaphor for the early Islamisation of Java: a diverse array of men, some the temporal chiefs of little harbour kingdoms, some authentic ascetics wandering the byways touting Koranic quotations; some of Indian, Chinese or Arabic origin, some true sons of the Javanese soil; each doing his own little bit for the new faith.
The Wali Songo, and the wider movement they presumably represent, are often regarded as ‘Sufi’. Sufism is the diverse mystic tradition within Islam, and the earliest Islamic manuscripts from Java are certainly of a mystical bent. But the popular modern perception of Sufism—all whirling dervishes and qawwali singers—mistakenly makes the term a synonym for earthy heterodoxy, a colourful counterpoint to the dour business of mosques and scriptures. Given the eclectic, heterodox and at times downright heretical complexion of later Javanese Islam, the idea of wild-eyed holy men spreading a left-field version of the faith between the palm groves and volcanoes is hard to resist. But just as in Christianity and Judaism, Islam’s meditative and ascetic traditions are often rooted in the most strictly orthodox readings. It has always been perfectly possible to be both ‘Sufi’ and ‘Fundamentalist’, and though Java’s earliest Islamic texts may well be mystical in approach they are generally orthodox in attitude. A colourful heterodoxy would typify traditional Javanese Muslim culture in the coming centuries—with old Indian epics still forming the literary lodestone; with modes of dress and carriage infinitely distant from those of Arabia; and with Muslim sultans reputedly consorting with mythical mermaid queens. But this probably represents the culmination of a long process of later synthesis rather than the original style of Islam espoused by lamplight in the velvety Javanese darkness by the wandering Wali Songo.
The first major Muslim state to rise out of the Javanese crucible was Demak. For most of its length the north coast of Java—a region known as the Pasisir, ‘the Littoral’—is a slab of level land giving way gently to the muddy shallows of the Java Sea. But just over halfway along this strip of shoreline, Java bulges suddenly around the flanks of a single isolated volcano, Gunung Muria, rising 5,250 feet (1,600 metres) to a ragged crater. Today, the towns that stand around the base of the peak—Kudus, Jepara, Demak and Pati—are moderately prosperous backwaters. Old rivers have silted up, shunting the foreshore outwards and leaving places that once were ports marooned several miles inland. In the sixteenth century, however, this quiet quarter was the anteroom of Muslim Java.
In his account Tomé Pires vividly describes how small Muslim-ruled maritime states had grown up along the Pasisir:
[Foreign Muslims] began to trade in the country and to grow rich. They succeeded in way of making mosques, and mollahs [sic] came from outside, so that they came in such growing numbers that the sons of these said Moors were already Javanese and rich … In some places the heathen Javanese lords themselves turned Mohammedan, and these mollahs and the merchant Moors took possession of these places … These lord pates [patis] are not Javanese of long standing in the country, but they are descended from Chinese, from Parsees [in this instance simply ‘Persians’ rather than people of the Zoroastrian religion] and Kling [Indians]…
Something like this seems to have happened in the little port of Demak sometime late in the fifteenth century. A foreign Muslim, most probably Chinese, gained control of the port, and this man’s son, remembered by the name of Raden Patah, was one of those who was ‘already Javanese and rich’. But it was the subsequent king of Demak, Trenggana, who brought the state to its brief bout of glory. He came to the throne in the early 1520s and swiftly pushed the influence of his maritime kingdom east and west along the coast. He annexed other ports along the central stretch of the Pasisir, and then, sometime around 1527, he overran Majapahit, the decayed and increasingly irrelevant relic of Hindu-Buddhist Java. Sixteen years after that, Demak troops swarmed up sweeping mountainsides, chased the shaven-headed priests away from the bathing temples, and took possession of the sacred mountain, Gunung Penanggungan.
And that, to all intents and purposes, was the end of Hindu-Buddhist Java. It would be a few years before the Sundanese country in the west of the island made the change (Tomé Pires had noted that foreign Muslims were generally unwelcome in Sundaland ‘because it is feared that with their cunning they may do there what has been done in [Central and East] Java’), and the strange ghost-state of Blambangan in the far east of Java would stay Hindu-Buddhist until the eighteenth century. But the baton had clearly been passed.
Trenggana of Demak died in 1546 while trying to extend his rule still further east along the Pasisir beyond the Brantas delta, and once he was gone his kingdom swiftly fragmented. For the rest of the sixteenth century, various Muslim-ruled micro-states flared up along the coast, and then in the interior too—each smoking and crackling for a generation, but ultimately failing to catch fire. It was not until the dawn of the seventeenth century that the true inheritor of the Majapahit mantle emerged—a state that successfully completed the synthesis of old tradition and new Islam, and that came to control more of Java than any realm that had gone before. Its name was a storied one that had first been used almost a millennium earlier—and its location, too, was steeped in old glory. The religion might have changed, but in Java the past would not be forgotten, least of all in th
e new incarnation of the ancient state of Mataram…
In the mid-sixteenth century, somewhere in the vicinity of the weather-worn temple complex at Prambanan, a minor Muslim-ruled state emerged. It was known as Mataram after the ancient realm that had existed in the same region; its ruler was called Ki Gede Pamanahan, and he had a son called Senopati.
According to later myth, sometime in the 1570s Senopati retreated to the wilder parts of Central Java, out amongst the sacred bathing places and bamboo groves, and started to practice mystic asceticism. There is a clear echo here of the older tale of Airlangga’s mystical apprenticeship with the ascetics. This—and indeed another thread of the tale claiming a Majapahit ancestry for Senopati—shows that the shift to Islam had required no wiping clean of the slate of stories. Java was no palimpsest.
Senopati’s meditative efforts were effective, it is said, and he ultimately attracted the attention of a figure from Javanese mythology who had successfully survived the Islamic conversion— Kanjeng Ratu Kidul, the so-called Queen of the Southern Ocean, an aquatic deity of particular potency. She took the young noble deep beneath the waves of the Indian Ocean, taught him how to make both love and war, and then returned him to dry land, where he promptly bumped into the meandering Muslim missionary, Sunan Kalijaga (presumably this one-time member of the Wali Songo—who would have been well over 100 years old by this stage—felt that he ought to provide a counterbalance to the Goddess and all her fishy heresy). He told Senopati that his coming conquests were nothing short of the Will of Allah. Success was assured. Senopati went home and swiftly turned his father’s modest estate into the greatest kingdom that Java had ever known.
Senopati certainly seems to have existed—he has a tomb, dated to 1601 and sited in the graveyard of his capital at Kota Gede, on the edge of Yogyakarta, a city founded by his descendants. But the man who really brought Mataram to greatness was his grandson, who came to the throne in 1613. His name at that stage was Raden Mas Rangsang, but today he is remembered by the title he took towards the end of his reign: Sultan Agung.
Sultan Agung appeared on the stage at a time when true Javanese dominance of the Archipelago sea lanes was no longer a possibility. There were other powerful players by this time, and unlike the rulers of Majapahit or Srivijaya he would not attain uncontested maritime mastery. But he ruled from the stupendously fertile country between Gunung Merapi and the Southern Ocean, and the new Mataram quickly came to exercise a more extensive and organised degree of power over Java itself than any kingdom that had gone before.
In an inordinately short space of time, Sultan Agung forced his frontiers east and west from his new palace at Karta, up to the north coast, out into the rebel badlands of East Java, and westwards to the fringes of Sundanese country, crushing any number of smaller polities in the process, including the feisty city-state of Surabaya near the original site of Majapahit.
Sultan Agung must have considered himself to be enjoying all the divine beneficence of both Allah and the Queen of the Southern Ocean at this point, so when he embarked on a project to crush another trading city at the other end of Java, he surely felt that success was equally certain. But by the third decade of the seventeenth century a radical new element had entered the Archipelago, and the feverish outpost in question—a port on the Ciliwung River formerly known as Sunda Kelapa—was the kernel of a brand new sort of colonialism…
CHAPTER 4
SPICE INVADERS:
THE EUROPEANS
ARRIVE
The four ships limped into Banten Bay looking more pitiable than threatening. Their sails were ragged, stained with welts of mould and mildew. If anyone amongst the crowd of buyers and sellers at the riverside market outside the walls of the port city at the head of the bay looked up and saw the pathetic little fleet advancing they might have wondered at its provenance before pressing on with their errands. Ships from foreign parts had been dropping anchor off Banten for millennia; a new arrival was nothing to get excited about. It was June 1596.
Banten lay on the most westerly indentation in Java’s north coast. This had once been the heartland of Holotan and Tarumanagara, and three generations earlier the locals had been Hindu-Buddhists. But in the 1520s, a Muslim army from Demak had conquered Banten. Now it was an independent polity under a ruler by the name of Maulana Muhammad who was enjoying the considerable trade revenues of this crucial staging post—for Banten was above all else a pepper port.
Pepper was the most versatile and high-volume of Archipelago spices. It had been brought to Southeast Asia from southern India two millennia earlier, and along with the more elusive nutmeg and cloves it soon became the mainstay of the spice trade. The other spices grew only in the remote groves of Maluku, but pepper spilled in green strings from the plantations of Lampung in southern Sumatra, and from the hills of Banten itself. The harbour there was full of trading ships from Arabia, China and India—and a good few Portuguese carracks and caravels, too.
In the century since Tomé Pires had made his notes, the Portuguese had settled into the Archipelago scene. In some ways they were the founding fathers of European colonialism in Southeast Asia. They had cast a brittle arc of Catholicism through the easternmost islands, taken chilli, potatoes and papaya to local kitchens, and added their own dash of Latin spice to the semantic stew of the Malay lingua franca. The modern Indonesian words for butter and cheese (mentega and keju), flags, tables and windows (bendera, meja and jendela), shoes and shirts (sepatu and kemeja), churches (gereja), and even Sunday (Minggu), were all Portuguese borrowings. Indeed, Portuguese itself remained an important common language in the Archipelago until the nineteenth century.
But the Portuguese had been more thoroughly assimilated into the Archipelago trading communities than the other Europeans who would follow. Living at impossible distances from Lisbon, they had settled into Southeast Asia with little prospect of ever going home. They had taken local wives and concubines, and within a few generations to be ‘Portuguese’ in the Archipelago often meant little more than to be a Catholic and to speak a pidgin version of the language.
In 1596, however, the Portuguese were still the foremost Europeans east of Africa, and they were well established in the foreigners’ quarter of Banten, a jumble of lodgings and warehouses outside the city walls. But the four ramshackle ships that had swung to their anchors in the milky waters off the mouth of the Cibanten River that bright June day were not Portuguese. A voyage from their bases in Melaka or Goa was a relatively short affair; these boats looked like they had been floating around the least salubrious of the seven seas for months. As a gaggle of emaciated men with bleeding gums and broken noses stumbled ashore from the ships’ launches, the locals must have gawped. They had never seen such a pathetically decrepit party of sailors. Appearances, however, can be deceptive: these men were the forerunners of an empire. The Dutch had arrived in the Archipelago, and they were about to set the tone for the coming centuries.
This first Dutch expedition to Indonesia had sailed from Amsterdam the previous year. The canny businessmen of northern Europe had long cast a jealous eye on the spice incomes of the Portuguese. Stories of the Spice Islands of Maluku and of astronomical incomes accrued from small shipments of nutmeg were rife amongst Dutch seafarers, and as their own naval technology caught up they started to plot their own adventures. A group of Dutch investors trading as the Compagnie van Verre, or ‘Long Distance Company’, spared no expense in setting up their fleet. They were hoping for a spice fortune in return and they did not baulk at fitting out their ships with the latest maritime technology. They spent months discussing routes and compiling pre-emptive reports, even engaging in industrial espionage, sending men to sniff around the Lisbon docksides in search of navigational secrets. And then, having done all this, they decided to send their four ships to sea under the command of incompetent reprobates…
With a hothead by the name of Cornelis de Houtman at the helm of the flagship, the fleet and its accompaniment of 249 sailors headed out f
rom the Netherlands towards the Atlantic in April 1595—and immediately got lost. They drifted in the wrong direction as far as Brazil before doubling back east and finally wallowing around the southern tip of Africa. By the time they entered the Indian Ocean the ships were already in a sorry state, and men were succumbing to scurvy and dysentery on a daily basis. And as if disease and decay weren’t enough to contend with, all sense of order had collapsed as men and officers turned violently against one another. By the time they arrived at Banten the crews had been decimated by sickness and their own bad behaviour, and the ships were floating carcasses.