Majapahit

Foundation

In 1292 Kertanagara, king of Singhasari in East Java, was killed in a revolt by Jayakatwang, a vassal prince of Kediri. Kertanagara had defied the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan and, according to Chinese sources, mistreated his envoy, and a Yuan fleet was sent to punish him. When it arrived in 1293, Kertanagara was already dead. His son-in-law, Raden Wijaya, who had been pardoned by Jayakatwang and allowed to clear land at a place called Majapahit, allied with the Mongols, and together they defeated Jayakatwang. Wijaya then turned on his allies and drove them out, and the Mongol force withdrew. He was crowned as Kertarajasa Jayawardhana. The new kingdom took its name from the place, after the bitter maja fruit that grew there.

Hayam Wuruk and Gajah Mada

The early reigns were troubled by revolts. Gajah Mada, an officer of the palace guard, rose to become chief minister under Queen Tribhuwana and then her son Hayam Wuruk. Javanese tradition says he swore an oath, the Sumpah Palapa, not to rest until the islands of the archipelago were united under Majapahit. Under Hayam Wuruk the kingdom reached its height. The Nagarakretagama, written in 1365, lists dozens of places across Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi, the Malay peninsula and the eastern islands as tributaries. Historians read this list as a claim of prestige and trade rather than a description of administered territory, though Majapahit's naval expeditions are recorded.

In 1357 the Sundanese king came to Majapahit with his daughter for her marriage to Hayam Wuruk. A dispute over whether she was a bride or tribute led to the killing of the Sundanese royal party at Bubat, an episode later blamed on Gajah Mada and remembered bitterly in West Java.

Religion and culture

Majapahit's court practised a fusion of Shaivism and Mahayana Buddhism, in which Shiva and the Buddha were treated as ultimately one; a well-known line of the poet Tantular says that they are different yet one, a phrase that modern Indonesia took as its national motto. Old Javanese literature flourished, temples such as Panataran were enlarged, and the kingdom's art and ritual passed to Bali, where they survive.

Decline

After Hayam Wuruk's death the kingdom was weakened by a civil war, the Paregreg, in 1404–06, and by the growth of Muslim trading ports on the north coast of Java. Muslims lived at the court itself, as the graves at Trowulan show. By the early sixteenth century the port of Demak had become the dominant power, and Majapahit's last capital fell around 1527. Javanese tradition remembers the transition through the stories of the nine saints, the wali songo. Majapahit became, in modern Indonesia, the model of a great precolonial state of the archipelago.