Sultan Haji of Banten

Abu an-Nasr Abd al-Qahhar, known as Sultan Haji, was sultan of Banten in Java — the English article counts his sultanate from 1682, the Indonesian from 1683, and both end it in 1687, the year of his death.¹² Son of Sultan Ageng Tirtayasa, he overthrew his father in a civil war with Dutch East India Company (VOC) support and accepted terms that subordinated Banten's foreign policy and trade to the Company.¹ The Indonesian article gives his further name as Sayyidi Shaykh Maulana Mansuruddin and records that the people of Banten call him Syeikh Buyut Mansuruddin.² The Ukrainian article, on the authority of the Soviet Historical Encyclopedia, relates that he earned the name Haji by a pilgrimage to Mecca, returning in 1676, undertaken to pursue his father's design of an alliance with the Ottoman Empire.³

From the 1650s the Banten court was divided between the faction of his father Ageng, a firm opponent of closer ties with the VOC in nearby Batavia, and Haji's own faction, which favoured a stronger relationship with the Company; the Dutch themselves called them the old Sultan and the young Sultan.¹ Haji's faction gained the upper hand in May 1680, just as Ageng had Batavia surrounded and was declaring war on the Dutch, and Haji led a coup that confined his father to his residence outside the city.¹ His position was weak because the Muslim elite of Banten remained loyal to his father and resented his overtures to the Dutch, so he turned to the VOC for help.¹

The Company set conditions: escaping slaves and deserters were to be returned to Batavia even if they converted to Islam, pirates punished and the VOC compensated, Cirebon yielded, Mataram left alone, and other Europeans excluded from Banten's trade — nearly the whole of an independent foreign policy.¹ Haji accepted in 1682; a VOC force under François Tack and Isaac de Saint-Martin relieved him as his father's supporters besieged him in his palace, the Company recognised him as sultan, and Ageng was driven into the countryside, where he surrendered in 1683.¹ The Indonesian article records that he had also sent two envoys to King Charles II of England in 1682 seeking support and weapons.² The settlement was sealed in the treaty signed at Keraton Surasowan on 17 April 1684, after which, as the Indonesian article puts it, the Company actively determined the trade monopoly in Banten and the sultanate's independence was effectively at an end.²³