The Sweat of the King

Abstract

Abstract 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.