Bima Sultanate

The Sultanate of Bima, officially the Settlements and Lands of Mbojo, was a Muslim state on the eastern side of Sumbawa in present-day Indonesia. Its predecessor, a Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Bima, was traditionally founded around 709, and the sultanate itself emerged in the early seventeenth century, with 1621 conventionally taken as its beginning. Bima was a regionally important polity and marked the eastern limit of Islam in this part of the archipelago. Its court culture drew on Makassarese and Malay models, while local Nggahi Mbojo institutions remained central. The sultanate controlled the eastern coast of Sumbawa and its trade in rice, horses and forest products. From 1908 it was subjected to indirect Dutch colonial rule, and after 1949 it joined the federal Indonesian republic. The sultanate was formally abolished in 1958, when the Sumbawan principalities were replaced by a modern administrative structure. Its legacy survives in the palace, manuscripts and rituals of Bima.