In densely settled wet-rice areas much of the loss of population was caused by destruction of food crops-either as a tactic of war or as a result of the passage of thousands of troops. In Sultan Agung's campaigns in 1620-25 against the coastal regions of East Java and Madura, eighty thousand troops besieged Surabaya and its nearby towns off and on for five years, devastating all the rice crops and even poisoning and damming up the river water of the city. The Dagh-Register recorded that after these campaigns "in Surabaya not more than 500 of its 50 to 60,000 people were left, the rest having died or gone away because of misery and famine" . Even on the side of Mataram there must have been enormously heavy losses, not only from the famine and disease that beset the unsuccessful besiegers of Batavia in 1628-29, but also from "the lack of men, so that they had not been able to bring the water to the rice fields" during the wars against Madura in 1624, with the result that the major rice-growing areas of Mataram itself were barren.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "In densely settled wet-rice areas much of the loss of population was caused by destruction of food crops-either as a tactic of war or as a result of the passage of thousands of troops. In Sultan Agung's campaigns in 1620-25 against the coastal regions of East Java and Madura, eighty thousand troops besieged Surabaya and its nearby towns off and on for five years, devastating all the rice crops and even poisoning and damming up the river water of the city. The Dagh-Register recorded that after these campaigns "in Surabaya not more than 500 of its 50 to 60,000 people were left, the rest having died or gone away because of misery and famine" . Even on the side of Mataram there must have been enormously heavy losses, not only from the famine and disease that beset the unsuccessful besiegers of Batavia in 1628-29, but also from "the lack of men, so that they had not been able to bring the water to the rice fields" during the wars against Madura in 1624, with the result that the major rice-growing areas of Mataram itself were barren." in the context of "Reid A (1988) Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450–1680, Yale University Press, New Haven, Vol. I., p. 17,18" to mean that wisdom is timeless.