Jakarta spent more than three centuries named after an ancient Germanic tribe
In 1619 a Dutch governor burned the Javanese port of Jayakarta to the ground and built a fortress on its ruins. He wanted to call it after his hometown; the company board chose Batavia instead, after a Roman-era tribe the Dutch believed were their ancestors. The name lasted until Indonesian independence.
Batavia sat in a sheltered bay on Java's north coast, on marshy ground laced with canals, and grew two centres: the old walled town and Weltevreden, a newer district on higher land to the south. It became the hub of the Dutch East India Company's Asian trading network and, eventually, capital of the Dutch East Indies. Its hinterland, the Ommelanden, stretched across parts of today's Jakarta, Banten and West Java.
The Dutch arrived in stages. Amsterdam merchants sailed to the archipelago under Cornelis de Houtman in 1595, and in 1602 the Dutch state gave the company a monopoly on Asian trade. In 1610 Prince Jayawikarta let Dutch traders build a wooden warehouse across the Ciliwung river from Jayakarta, then allowed the English onto the opposite bank to keep the balance. By 1618 relations had soured into a siege of the Dutch post, an English fleet under Thomas Dale arrived, and governor Jan Pieterszoon Coen fled to the Moluccas for help.
The Dutch were close to surrendering when the Sultanate of Banten, which had never approved Jayawikarta's pact with the English, called him away. Coen returned with reinforcements on 28 May 1619 and razed Jayakarta two days later, driving out its people; only an old Portuguese stone marker survived. Jayawikarta withdrew inland and died there. Coen enlarged the fort into Batavia Castle, and though he wanted the name Nieuw-Hoorn, the company's directors overruled him, holding a naming ceremony on 18 January 1621.
The company paired monopolies on local produce with imported cash crops and absorbed surrounding land to protect its trade. The city stayed under European rule for about 320 years, until Japan occupied the colony in 1942. After nationalists proclaimed independence on 17 August 1945 it was called Jakarta locally, though the Dutch name persisted abroad until full independence in 1949, when it became Djakarta and later Jakarta.
Source: Batavia, Dutch East Indies
