Demak’s attack on Pasoeroewan in 1546 was the Sultanate of Demak’s final military blow against the Hindu-Javanese kingdom of Pasoeroewan in East Java — the campaign that, in De Roo de la Faille’s reading, is the historical kernel of the Babad Tanah Djawi’s account of the death of the king of Demak and the building of the Demak mosque, and that fixed the year of the mosque’s completion (traditionally 1468 Saka, but which De Roo de la Faille reads as 1546 A.D.). The campaign is a key Javanese event in the Pasej–Atjeh–Java triangle of the early sixteenth century, and the one by which the Sunan Gunung Jati line and the Raden Sahid line converged on the final Islamic conquest of Hindu Java.
The campaign
In 1545 Pinto arrived at Bantam on a junk from Goa, bound for trade with China. There an old woman, Njahi Pombaja, came aboard as envoy of the king of Demak to summon the king of Soenda Tagaril (i.e. Sunan Gunung Jati) to provide troops for the campaign against Hindu Pasoeroewan. Pinto and a number of other Portuguese were persuaded to join. The expedition left Bantam on 5 January 1540 (Pinto’s date), assembled at Japara under the admiralschap of the “regent of Panaroekan”, and on 11 February 1546 arrived before Pasoeroewan — which Pinto calls Hikan dureh, a bedekte taal form for hin-doe rèh, “the land under Hindu rule”.
The city was invested but defended itself stoutly, and many fell on both sides. The king of Demak, in a war-council, asked his panakawan (squire) for a sirih-prize; the squire — the son of the regent of Soerabaja, deep in deliberation — did not hear; one of the chiefs pulled him by his state-dodot and reminded him; the squire, kneeling, offered the king his golden sirih-box; the king took a sirih-leaf and, mildly, tapped the squire on the head, asking: “are you deaf, that you do not hear me?”. That tap — for a Balinese of high house, an untheiling of the godhead whose seat is the head — drove the squire to madness; he sprang up and stabbed the king to death with a beladau (dagger). The king’s last words, Pinto records, were “I am dead”.
The empaling and the aftermath
The squire’s family — the substantial house of Soerabaja — was held collectively responsible: sixty-two persons, old and young, of either sex, were empaled (soela). “This was the cause, later, of certain troubles, which took place in the land of Java and in the isles of Bali, Timor, Madura”. The king’s corpse, on the advice of the Portuguese, was placed in a chest filled with lime and camphor, and sent by a junk laden with earth to Demak. The army withdrew in full retreat. An heir was lacking; an eight-man council of electors was appointed; disturbances broke out; Djaka Tingkir (i.e. the later Sultan of Padjang) — “Le Roy de Panaruca, Prince de Balambuan et Amiral de la flotte” — had some eighty rioters hanged, and the city-governor Kéjan-sedahan (“Kéjan-sedahan, doek dja-di tjara ke-prabon”) had forty mutinous sailors killed, but died himself in the tumult. An agreement was finally reached to fetch the successor from Sidajoe.
Decoding the bedekte taal
De Roo de la Faille reads the entire campaign as a bedekte taal record of the final Islamic conquest of Hindu Java. The squire’s tap on the head is the untheiling of the divine head — the godhead that the Balinese high house carries in the head; the empaling of the sixty-two is the extirpation of the wong agung (great men) of the old order; and the king’s burial in lime and camphor — the same materials as the kapoer of the Bantam mosques — is the allegorical sign of the Islamic order’s closing of the Hindu age. The successor from Sidajoe De Roo de la Faille identifies with the later Sultan of Padjang, i.e. with the Soenan Kalidjaga line that the Babad Tanah Djawi records as the builder of the Demak mosque.
Significance
For AcehWiki, Demak’s attack on Pasoeroewan in 1546 is the Javanese counterpart of the Atjehnese war on Aroe of 1539 — the closing event of the Hindu-Javanese age in Java, as the Atjeh-Aru war was the closing event of the Hindu-Javanese age on the Sumatran east coast. The convergence of the Sunan Gunung Jati and Raden Sahid lines on the campaign — both figures identified by De Roo de la Faille with the Pasej-Atjeh religious tradition — also marks the campaign as the moment at which the Pasej Islamic tradition completed its migration into the Javanese wali world.
See Also
- Pati Oenoes
- Soenan Kalidjaga
- Faletahan
- Demak
- Pasuruan
- Japara
- Banten
- Mendez Pinto
- Sultanate of Atjeh
- Atjeh-Aroe War (1539)
- Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java
Source
Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java, by P. de Roo de la Faille (Den Haag: Maart 1954), chapter “Over Soenan Kalidjaga”, pp. 53-58, citing Pinto’s Peregrinacam.