Decline
By 1625, Mataram was the undisputed ruler of Java. However, its military strength did not deter Mataram’s former overlords from rebellion. Pajang rebelled in 1617, and Pati rebelled in 1627. Following the capture of Surabaya in 1625, expansion halted as the empire was beset by rebellions. In 1630, Mataram crushed a rebellion in Tembayat (southeast of Klaten) and in 1631-36, Mataram had to suppress the rebellion of Sumedang and Ukur in West Java. M. C. Ricklefs and H. J. De Graaf argued that these rebellions in the later part of Sultan Agung’s reign were mainly due to his inability to capture Batavia in 1628-29, which shattered his reputation of invincibility and inspired Mataram’s vassals to rebel. This argument seems untenable for two reasons. Rebellions against Sultan Agung began as far back as 1617 and occurred in Pati even during his peak of perceived invincibility, after his conquest of Surabaya in 1625. Secondly, his military failure to capture Batavia was not seen as political failure from the Javanese point of view.
Read more about this topic: Sultan Agung Of Mataram
Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall—which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall,
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)