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25.200 Prophecies and Messianic Expectations.

Javanese political history of the Islamic period, from the sixteenth century onward, was particularly tumultuous. After the collapse of Majapahit several kingdoms suc ceeded one another. The Central Javanese dynasty of Mataram which emerged as winner from the contest went through many wars of succession. In the second half of the eighteenth century there began to' develop some kind of order, entailing a division of the Mataram dominions into* two kingdoms, Surakarta and Yogyakarta. Still unrest and internal wars were never wholly absent in Central Java until finally after the defeat of Dipa Nagara, in 1830, Dutch authority was acknowledged completely and the pax Neerlandica imposed. Almost three centuries of unrest and incidental wars had made life in the Java nese country-side precarious. People in dire distress, despairing of immediate relief and redress of wrongs, put their hope of better days on a righteous King coming to rule over them in am indefinite future, setting right what seemed wrong in the world. Messianic expectations belong to the reli gious tradition of Islam. No doubt in the Pasisir period belief in the advent of the righteous King, in Arabic called the Mahdi, was introduced into Java. Closely connected with eschatology, Messianic expectations were given expression in texts on the Day of Judgment, commonly called Kabar Kiya- rnat. In the First Part, Religion, of the Present Synopsis, Kabar Kiyamat texts have been discussed (see 16.200). There is some reason to believe, however, that even in the pre-Islamic period expec

tations of a Messianic character were enter tained in some religious communities in Java. Indian, especially Buddhist, ideas about the periods of development of the world and the end of history, may have been current in some scholarly circles (see the present au thor’s “Java in the XIVthe Century”, vol. IV, p. 130, on the connection between Eru Cakra, a name for the righteous King, and Wairocana, a Buddhist Jina), It is even possible that ancient indigenous religious speculation on the course of history coales ced with ideas of foreign origin. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a peculiar kind of Messianic texts, in the form of prophecies of coming events and future kingdoms, became popular all over Java. They were called Pralambai}, Jaya Baya, after a King of Kadiri, belonging to the pre-Islamic period. In Old Javanese literature as yet no prototype of eighteenth century Jaya Baya prophecies has been found. So' the connection with the pre- Islamic Kadiri kingdom is not yet accounted for. King Jaya Baya’s appearance in eigh teenth and nineteenth century Javanese prophecies may have been a result of the study of the twelfth century Old Javanese Bharata Yuddha kakawin. The poet, mpu Panuluh, extolled his patron King Jaya Baya as a wise ruler (see 30.100 on the Bharata Yuddha). The Pralambai) Jaya Baya texts refer to the political history of Java. Islamic religious Messianic expectations characteristic for the Kabar Kiyamat texts exercised some in fluence on the authors, however, and in some cases a merging of elements is apparent.