Sultan Agung
Figure Jawa Tengah
Ruler of Mataram 1613–1645, who joined the Javanese calendar to the Islamic one in 1633, twice besieged Batavia without success, and whose reign became the measure by which later courts judged themselves.
One calendar made from two
In 1633 Sultan Agung established a calendar joining the solar Saka reckoning to the lunar Hijri one: the year number continued from the running Saka count — so that the year became 1555 and not 1 — while the lengths of months and years followed lunar reckoning.
The result is a calendar whose year number is older than the Hijri and whose rhythm is identical to it, so that Islamic festivals fall on the same dates and the Javanese count is unbroken. The decision was administrative and not merely religious: it states that what arrived does not erase what was there.
The calendar is still in use. Its month names — Sura, Sapar, Mulud and so on — are adapted Arabic names, and the court ceremonial cycle and many village selamatan are reckoned by it. It also runs alongside the five-day pasaran week, and the combination of the two produces the thirty-five-day selapan cycle on which the reckoning of auspicious days rests.
Two failed sieges, and a grave
Sultan Agung besieged Batavia in 1628 and 1629 and failed both times. The second failure was due in part to the destruction of Mataram's rice stores at Tegal and Cirebon by Dutch ships, so that the besieging force ran out of supply; that account comes from the VOC archive and not from the babad, which assembles the failure differently.
The difference in assembly deserves attention. Javanese babad tend to explain defeat through betrayal, neglect of a condition, or a higher will, and not through logistics. The two kinds of source are not answering the same question, and reading one to correct the other yields a picture skewed in one direction or the other.
Sultan Agung is buried at Imogiri, the burial ground he built on the hills south of Yogyakarta, still the burial place of the two courts descended from Mataram. The order of entry to it — dress, sequence and prohibitions — remains in force, and this continued use makes Imogiri one of the places where the order of the court can be observed working rather than being displayed.
Full entry 3 / 3
2 sections, 4 sources, one of them primary.
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