∵ The Sweat of the King

Eighteenth-century Javanese sources indicate that in pre-colonial Javanese kingdoms, a distinction was drawn between the monarch’s personal wealth—called monies that were ‘pure in intent, from the sweat of the king’—and the revenues of the kingdom as an institution. The distinction was probably of Islamic origin. It seems probable that only such personal royal wealth was acceptable for funding acts of personal religious merit.

I have translated the Javanese word muklis here as 'pure in intent' . We might also say, as Gericke and Roorda put it (1901, II:492), referring to the Arabic root, 'pure in heart, not hypocritical' . This is the Qurʾanic term mukhlis, derived from the Arabic ikhlas, 'sincerity' . Zayd (2018) comments that 'mukhlis best approximates the notion of worthy and well-directed "intention". Sincerity is the foundation of all acts of worship […] acceptable to God and of all forms of prayer' . The appearance of this term in the Babad kraton indicates that money that was muklis-that was from the 'sweat of the king' rather than from state revenues-was more appropriate, meritorious, and undefiled when praying for the dead king, more born of pure intent and acceptable to God. Such monies were regarded as undefiled for a pious purpose, unlike money which might have derived from the state treasury.
That a crucial term in the babad account is the Javanese/Arabic muklis/ mukhlis leads to the suspicion that this distinction between private royal wealth and state revenues entered Javanese law and practice with the coming of Islam. Our knowledge of such matters in pre-Islamic times is limited by the nature of the surviving evidence. Neither Old Javanese charters (praśasti) nor works of literature (kakawin) shed light on such an issue, as far as I am aware. That the distinction is so clearly linked in the Babad kraton account with obsequies for the dead king also suggests a specifically religious-that is to say, Islamicsetting for the concept.
A similar distinction between the kingdom's revenues and the monarch's personal estate was applied at the time when Pakubuwana II (r. 1726-1749) was dying in December 1749. This was in the midst of a bitter civil war-already raging for nearly a decade by that stage-and the ailing monarch appears to have trusted no one around him. Instead, he turned to the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, Dutch East India Company) governor of Java's northeast coast, J.A. Baron van Hohendorff (whom Javanese sources commonly name Undur, 'Retreat'). Remarkably, the dying king proposed that, in the transition to the next monarch, it should be Van Hohendorff who took charge of the court and of the king's personal wealth rather than any Javanese lord.
The Dutch and Javanese texts of the treaty which Pakubuwana II and Van Hohendorff signed on 11 December 1749 draw this distinction. The Javanese text distinguishes between the kingdom with all its dependencies (karaton Matawis […] sarta sawĕwĕngkonipun sĕdaya) on the one hand and the king's heirs, including the crown prince, on the other (putra-putra kawula kang kantunkantun punapa dening Pangeran Adipati Anom). The Dutch text makes the same distinction between het Mattaramsche rijk […] met ap-en dependentie on the one hand and mijne na te laten kinderen voornamentlijk den Kroonprins Pangeran Adipati Anom on the other. The former, the kingdom, was surrendered without limitation to the VOC, an arrangement which proved to be a dead letter in the military-political realities of the day. The latter, the monarch's heirs, were entrusted to the care of the VOC. The latter arrangement was common Javanese practice, so that someone trustworthy would ensure that heirs received their proper inheritances.5 Thus, here again we see a distinction drawn between the institutions of the kingdom and the personal property of the monarch and his family.
Prince Mangkunagara I (a.k.a. Mas Said) was then in rebellion and not present at the Surakarta court when Pakubuwana II died. He recorded what he learned at second-hand in his autobiographical chronicle, the Sĕrat babad Pakunĕgaran. He seems to have given no attention to the surrender of the entire kingdom to the VOC-perhaps recognizing that as a concession without significance in the midst of a brutal civil war-but did hear something about the treatment of Pakubuwana II's personal legacy. There we read, titilare Sri Bupati, kang dunya pinaratiga, mring Dĕler ingkang amaris, kang saduman Narpati, ingkang kalih dumanipun, pinĕndhĕt ing Wala[n]da, Dĕler Udur ingkang ambil, nulya Dĕler upamit dhatĕng Sang Nata (the legacy of the king [Pakubuwana II], his worldly goods, were divided into three by the Hon. Gentleman, who transmitted them. One part went to the king [Pakubuwana III], two parts were demanded by the Dutch; it was the Hon. Gentleman Van Hohendorff who took them. Then the Hon. Gentleman took leave of the king.)6 No other sources known to me support this depiction of Van Hohendorff's avarice-which is not to suggest that there was any shortage of avarice in the ranks of the Company's Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde 175 (2019) 59-66 officers. The passage is of interest because again it seems to treat the monarch's personal wealth as something separate from the kingdom itself.
The Babad Giyanti may also shed some light on the issue, but it does not do so as clearly as the previous examples. This is a chronicle conventionally ascribed to Yasadipura I (1729Yasadipura I ( -1803, who-if the ascription is correct-lived through the events it describes over the tumultuous years from the 1740s to 1757. The Babad Giyanti generally views things from the perspective of Prince Mangkubumi (Sultan Hamĕngkubuwana I, r. 1749-1792), who was in rebellion at this time and in alliance with Mangkunagara I.
The Babad Giyanti's account of the succession in Surakarta in 1749 has some similarities with that in the Sĕrat babad Pakunĕgaran. It describes the dying Pakubuwana II-flickering in and out of consciousness-saying to Van Hohendorff: Gupĕrnur iya sukur, dene sira tĕka pribadi, prakara sutanira, Ki Dipati iku, ya mongsa bodhowa sira, sadurunge sauwise pasrah mami, iya marang ing sira, /0/ lajĕng kendĕl tan ngandika malih ('Governor, thank God that you have come in person. The case/affair of my son the crown prince I turn over to your judgement: what comes before and what comes after, I surrender to you.' Then [the king] stopped and said no more.) (Yasadipura I [ascribed to] 1937-1939. Again, the king is depicted as asking Van Hohendorff to handle matters to do with his son, the crown prince. It is not entirely clear what was meant here. Was this about the governor deciding whether the crown prince should succeed, or about the transmission of the dying monarch's personal wealth to the next generation, in accordance with the distinction we have seen in the texts of the treaty itself?
Subsequently, the Babad Giyanti depicts Van Hohendorff as announcing to the assembled court, yen mangke Sang Prabu, seleh karaton maring wang (that the king [Pakubuwana II] has transferred the kraton to me) and then that lamun wong gĕdhe-gĕdhe Bĕtawi, tuwan Jendral ngadĕgakĕn raja, Pangran Dipati Anom (that the Hon. Gentlemen of Batavia and the Governor General install as king the crown prince) (Yasadipura I [ascribed to] 1937-1939. There is room for debate here, but it is possible that the Babad Giyanti also treats the transmission of the dying king's worldly goods to the next generation and the installation of a new king as separate matters.

Further Queries
If we accept that there was a distinction drawn between the monarch's personal private property and the state treasury, questions remain for which the evidence known to me cannot provide entirely satisfactory answers. Readers may find it instructive to turn to Ann Kumar's attempt to make sense of the Mangkunagaran finances in the later eighteenth century (Kumar 1980:26-36), based on the MS Babad tutur. G.P. Rouffaer (1931:299-311) also did his best to untangle such complexities. Neither of these discussions resolves the two following questions: What revenues were regarded as pertaining to the monarch's private income? On this question, we gain most assistance from later eighteenth-century Javanese documents of the court of Yogyakarta, edited by Carey and Hoadley. There we find records of the sultan loaning money and being paid house rents (Carey and Hoadley 2000:314, 349, 350, 364, 367). We might therefore guess that the king had private property in the form of housing and that from his cash balances he earned returns as a moneylender. As the money used when praying for the dead Amangkurat II was undefiled 'reyal pure in intent' , we may assume that the king's earnings from moneylending would have been structured so as to avoid Islamic law's condemnation of usury. The Javanese terms used in Carey and Hoadley's documents are bungah and sĕkar, both of which could simply refer to a lawful 'increase' rather than to usurious interest. What other forms of private royal income might have existed we could only guess.
For what purposes were such private royal resources to be used? On this question, we can only speculate. The most obvious purposes would probably be acts of personal, religious merit and family expenses, such as the costs of weddings, circumcisions, burials, the support of royal family members without adequate income from appanages, and so on. We should expect that acts of religious merit could only convey that merit to a king personally (whether living or dead) if the costs were met from his personal royal wealth. We recall the key comment in the Babad kraton's f. 504v., cited above, that the 1,000 reyal accompanying the dead king's cortege to Imagiri (to reward the religious praying on the deceased's behalf) was reyal muklis saking karingĕt Sang Nata (reyal pure in intent, from the sweat of the king). Thus, rewards to those who took part in group prayer and Qurʾanic recitations in the palaces, performances which conveyed religious merit, presumably should also have come from those pure reyal derived from 'the sweat of the king' .