The sieges of Batavia (1628 and 1629)
Event DKI Jakarta
Other and rejected name forms
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Two assaults by Sultan Agung of Mataram on the VOC position at Batavia, both failing chiefly on supply: the rice stores laid along the route were destroyed by VOC shipping, and the Mataram army starved before the walls.
Two assaults, and a question of supply
Sultan Agung attacked the VOC position at Batavia in 1628 and returned in 1629. The first assault failed because the Mataram force came without adequate siege equipment and ran out of supply once the siege dragged. The second was prepared with rice stores laid along the route — at Tegal, Cirebon and elsewhere — and failed because those stores were found and burned by Dutch ships before the army arrived.
The account of the burned stores comes from the VOC archive, not from Javanese sources. It is checkable and not disputed. What makes it important is not the detail but what it explains: the distance from Mataram to Batavia, some four hundred kilometres, was one a large army of that period could not cross without depots on the way, and whoever held the sea held the depots.
How a defeat is explained
The Javanese babad explain the failure differently: through the treachery of commanders, through a condition unmet, and through a higher will. Some babad record the punishment of commanders who returned.
The two kinds of explanation are not competing to answer the same question. The VOC archive answers why an army could not sustain itself before a fort; the babad answer why a rightful king could be defeated. This encyclopedia sets both side by side and declines to arrange one as a correction of the other, since such an arrangement would discard the evidence only one of them holds.
Full entry 3 / 3
2 sections, 4 sources, one of them primary.
Full does not mean finished. It means this record clears the bar this encyclopedia sets before it will speak at length.