The Mataram Sultanate was the dominant Islamic kingdom of central Java, conventionally dated from 1587 to 1755. Chronicles place its emergence across the 1580s; the entry follows the usual marker of 1587, when the warlord Senapati broke from his overlord at Pajang and made Kotagede his capital. A rice-based inland power, it briefly unified almost the whole island under Sultan Agung, then slowly lost its independence to the Dutch East India Company. It ended not in conquest but in the 1755 Treaty of Giyanti, which partitioned the unified sultanate into the royal courts of Yogyakarta and Surakarta, whose dynastic lines continue today.
Twice, in 1628 and 1629, the greatest king in Java threw his armies against a single Dutch fort on his own coastline, and twice they died beneath its walls. Sultan Agung had beaten nearly every rival on the island, yet the sea, and the trading company that ruled it, defeated him where the land could not. A century later that same company would not need to conquer Mataram at all. It would simply be invited into the kingdom's own quarrels, again and again, until there was a treaty to sign and two smaller thrones to hand out.