After the VOC under their most renowned governor general Jan Pieterszoon Coen had wrested the port of Jacatra (Jayakarta) from Sultanate of Banten in 1619, they established a town that would serve as the Company's headquarter in Asia for the next three centuries.

As part of the Company's security policy the Javanese people were made to feel unwelcome in Batavia, as the Dutch feared an uprising should they formed the majority of the city's population.

Notable among these attempts were Willem Ysbrandtszoon Bontekoe voyage to bring 1,000 Chinese immigrants to Batavia from Macao; however, only a small fraction of the 1,000 survived the trip.

Having been established for almost a decade, Batavia, the first major Dutch settlement and trading post in Java, had naturally begun to draw hostility from the surrounding Javanese kingdoms.

Relationship with the Company became more tense, with Agung early in his reign (1614) specifically warning a Dutch embassy that peace with him would be impossible to maintain if they were to try to conquer any part of Java, over which he was determined to become sole ruler.

As a ruse de guerre they initially asked for permission to land in Batavia to trade, however the size of the Mataram fleet caused the Dutch to be suspicious.

One hundred twenty VOC troops under the command of Jacob van der Plaetten managed to repulse the attack and the Javanese suffered heavy losses.

Even worse, the Mataram commanders had not prepared for a long siege in an area devoid of local logistical support, and by December the army was already running out of supplies.

After the debacle of the first siege, Agung realized that the main hurdle to the conquest of Batavia was logistical, due to the immense distance (some 300 miles) his forces had to cross from their supply bases in Central Java.

[2] He decided to establish numerous rice farming villages ran by Javanese farmers on the northern coast of Western Java, from Cirebon to Karawang.

From the example of Tumenggung Bahureksa and Prince Mandurareja, Dipati Ukur knew that Sultan Agung would not tolerate failure, much less betrayal, and hence he decided to rise in rebellion against Mataram instead.

The Dipati Ukur withdrawal from the campaign and his rebellion weakened the Mataram hold on Priangan that created instability in West Java for several years.

The Batavia campaign failure had led Sultan Agung to shift his conquering ambitions to the east and attack Blitar, Panarukan and the Blambangan in Eastern Java, a vassal of the Balinese kingdom of Gelgel.

This created the rice farming villages on the Pantura (pantai utara: north coast) region of West Java, spanning Bekasi, Karawang, Subang, Indramayu and Cirebon.