They say history is written by the winners, but
sometimes—just sometimes, friends—it’s written by the dead. And the dead have
one hell of a story to tell about Sunda and Galuh.
These weren’t just any old kingdoms, you understand. These
were the heavy hitters, the long-haul truckers of Southeast Asian politics.
While empires rose and fell like cheap carnival rides around them, Sunda-Galuh
kept on keeping on. From the twilight days of Srivijaya right up until those
first Portuguese sailors showed their pale faces in the archipelago—what the
locals called Nusantara. And if you think that’s just ancient history, well…
stick around. The past isn’t ever really past, not in places where power has
seeped into the very soil.
You could say the golden age hit its stride in the 14th
century, when a man named Niskala Wastu Kancana grabbed the reins. He wasn’t
supposed to be king—that’s the funny thing about fate, it doesn’t give two
shits about “supposed to.” The throne sat empty after that bloodbath they still
whisper about—the Bubat Incident of 1357. I won’t go into details, but it was
the kind of thing that makes grown men wake up sweating at three in the
morning, sheets twisted around their legs like pythons.
Niskala knew what people need after their world gets turned
inside out. Stability. Security. A sense that tomorrow won’t be worse than
today. So he built himself a palace in Kawali—Galuh Pakwan, they called the
city—and carved his name into stone at Astana Gede. People still find those
inscriptions, worn smooth like old teeth. They tell a story: I’m here. I
fixed this. Remember me.
The old chronicles—the Carita Parahyangan—claim he
ruled for a hundred and four years. Bullshit, of course, but the kind of
bullshit people tell when a ruler’s done something right. Time stretches when
you’re happy, contracts when you’re scared. Ask any kid on Christmas morning…
or any woman alone in a parking garage at midnight.
Then there was Sri Baduga Maharaja, Niskala’s grandson. The
golden boy. The unifier.
See, Sunda and Galuh had been separate pieces on the board
since the 8th century, since some king named Sanjaya decided dividing was
better than sharing. But Sri Baduga—who started as just another Galuh prince
with ambitious eyes—he changed the game. Married himself a Sundanese princess
and moved the whole operation to Pakwan Pajajaran, where Bogor stands today.
He left his mark too. Three stone testaments survive: the
Batu Tulis stele in Bogor, standing silent as a gravestone; the Huludayeuh
inscription, hiding in Cirebon; and the Kebantenan tablet, half-forgotten in
Bekasi. Words in stone outlast us all.
When his boy Surawisesa took the throne, those first
Portuguese ships appeared on the horizon like something out of a fever dream.
Men with strange eyes and stranger customs, scratching in their journals about
the splendor they saw. Tomé Pires—poor bastard died in a Chinese prison years
later—he wrote about six thriving ports under Sunda’s control: Banten, Pontang,
Cigede, Tangerang, Sunda Kelapa, and Cimanuk.
You know what they say about being at the top, though. There’s
nowhere to go but down.
And boy, did they go down.
That’s when Islam started spreading along Java’s northern
coast like a dark tide. New powers, new gods, new money. The Hindu-Buddhist
kingdoms of the interior—old money, old gods—didn’t stand a chance. Not really.
Their authority was tangled up with rituals older than their grandfathers’
grandfathers. But ritual doesn’t stop a knife. Faith doesn’t fill an empty
belly.
The Muslim rulers took over those northern ports—key spots
where goods flowed in and out, where taxes got collected, where news traveled
first. When they wanted to squeeze the inland kings, they didn’t need armies.
They just… stopped. Stopped sending tribute. Stopped trading. Stopped supplying
necessities.
Uka Tjandrasasmita tells this story about Sunan Gunung Jati,
one of those coastal Muslim leaders. They say he cut off shipments of salt and
shrimp paste to the Pajajaran king. Small things, maybe, but imagine life
without salt in that climate, in that era.
(That’s the thing about power—it’s not always the big
gestures that kill you. Sometimes it’s the small denials, accumulating like
snow on a rooftop until the whole thing collapses.)
First Banten fell into Muslim hands. Maulana
Hasanuddin—Sunan’s own son—transformed it into an Islamic power center with
connections to Demak and Cirebon. Then, like dominoes set up in a long, patient
line, the other ports toppled one by one until Sunda Kelapa itself—the jewel,
the linchpin—was gone.
And Sunda? Poor old Sunda sat landlocked, choking, dying by
inches.
Was it the economy that killed them? The embargo? The
military pressure?
Husein Djajadiningrat claimed it was a straight-up
attack—Banten’s Sultanate marching on Pakwan Pajajaran in 1579, banners high,
swords drawn. Clean and simple, the way modern scholars like their causality.
But the Carita Parahyangan—that’s the older
chronicle, the one written closer to the bone—it tells a different, darker
tale. A tale of rot from within. Of weakness and decay in the final years,
after Surawisesa’s strong hand was gone.
First came Prabu Ratu Dewata, buried eventually at Sawah
Tampian Dalem. A pious man, they say. Religious. The kind who spends hours on
his knees while the world burns around him. During his eight-year reign,
enemies killed two of his officials in battles he probably never knew about.
Worse, his religious fervor led him to execute innocent priests—men of his own
faith—on false charges.
(The true horror isn’t always the monster under the bed.
Sometimes it’s the blindness that keeps us staring at the ceiling while the
monster does its work.)
After him came Sang Ratu Saksi Mangabatan ring Tasik. Where
the first king drowned in prayer, this one drowned in lust. The chronicle
whispers that he married his own stepmother—the kind of sin that makes even
sinners cross themselves. Another eight wasted years.
Then Nilakendra took the throne, a man of appetites and
waste, who ruled just long enough to hand a weakened kingdom to Nusiya Mulya.
Poor Nusiya—the last man standing when the music stopped—died in battle against
the Demak-Cirebon alliance, fighting for a kingdom already half-ghost.
Three bad kings. That’s all it took. Three men who couldn’t
see the darkness gathering, couldn’t feel the foundations crumbling beneath
their feet. Three men who thought crowns made them untouchable while their
enemies planned and waited and watched.
History’s like that. You think the story’s about trade
routes and military campaigns and religious movements. But in the end, it’s
about people. People making choices. People failing to see what’s coming.
And sometimes, what’s coming has been there all along,
patient as the grave, just waiting for its moment to rise.
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