Fall of Civilizations Podcast - 21. Majapahit - Empire of the Islands

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

Beneath the shade of an Indonesian teak forest, a great brick gateway stands in ruins...In this episode, I want to tell the story of the Majapahit Empire of medieval Indonesia. I want to show how this empire of the islands grew up on the volcanic island of Java, and how it beat the odds to survive in a world of medieval superpowers. I want to show how Majapahit expanded its influence and dominion to other lands, and undertook voyages that have few precedents in history. And I want to show what happened to bring this empire of the islands finally crashing down...SOURCES: https://www.patreon.com/fallofcivilizations_podcast/posts/sources-for-21-165265269Voice Actors--------------Henry StenhouseMichael Hajiantonis Alexandra Boulton Simon Jackson Catherine James Tom Marshall-Lee Chris Harvey Jack Jacobs Nick Denton Amrit Sandhu Paul Casselle Tim Stephenson Ameen TaherReadings in Old and Middle Javanese were performed by Ferry Sanjaya and Kadha Aditya.Historical advisor: Dr Alex West

In the year 1815, the English colonial official Thomas Stamford Raffles would travel across the island of Java, in what is today Indonesia. At this time, the world was torn by war. In Europe, the Napoleonic wars were raging, and the Earth's oceans had become just another battlefront. The lush tropical island of Java had been until recently a Dutch colony, but the Netherlands had been conquered by Napoleon in his advance across Europe, and so the Dutch colonies had fallen under the control of the French. Now the British desired to take Java for themselves

and strike a blow at Napoleon's overseas empire. In 1811, British Marines launched an invasion of Java, landing among its coral reefs and sky-blue oceans, clambering through its shady mangrove forests and up its beaches of black volcanic sand, climbing the steep cliffs in the shadow of its towering volcanoes. From there they overwhelmed the inexperienced Dutch defenders and took the island for the British Empire. With them came the Englishman Thomas Stamford Raffles, who later wrote about these events. Holland had ceased to be an independent nation, and in the year 1811, the French flag was hoisted over Java. But on the 17th of September of the same year, a capitulation was entered into, by which all the dependencies fell into the hands of Great Britain.

Raffles was a lifelong sailor and had actually been born at sea on a ship commanded by his father off the coast of Jamaica. He became a clerk in the British East India Company at the age of 14 and from there became a true company man. He had spent the best part of the last decade furthering the interests of British colonialism in East Asia and had even become fluent in the language of Malay. When Java was captured by the British, partly as a result of his skill at languages, Raffles was granted the position of Lieutenant Governor. At the age of just 30, Raffles found himself in charge of an island

a thousand kilometers across, home to more than six million people. Raffles was fascinated by Java. He remarked on its dramatic landscape of soaring volcanoes and steamy rainforests, its fertile rice terraces and remarkable culture, as he wrote home to King George III. The gracious permission which I have received affords me an opportunity of interesting your royal highness in favour of the amiable and beautiful, ingenious people whose country they describe. A chain of very high mountains runs along the whole

length of Java. Even in July and August, the atmosphere is refreshed by occasional showers, and the landscape is at all times of the year covered with the brightest green. But most of all, he was fascinated by Java's antiquities. Everywhere among its forests and shaded rice terraces could be seen the remains of the countless temples, palaces, and even whole ancient cities left in ruins. A few years later, around 1815, he embarked on a journey around the island with the aim of surveying these ruins and writing a book. Although by then Java was an overwhelmingly Muslim land, Raffles found everywhere the remains

of an older culture hiding just beneath the surface, as he writes in his work, the history of Java. The Mohammedan religion, as it present exists on Java, seems only to have penetrated the surface and to have taken but little root in the heart of Javans. But the antiquities of Java consist of ruins of edifices, and in particular of temples sacred to the former worship. Images of deities found within them,

and scattered throughout the country, either sculpted in stone or cast in metal, inscriptions on stone and copper in ancient characters and ancient coins. Raffles was fascinated by these remains, which seemed to confirm stories he had heard, stories of a great empire that had risen up on that island. A thriving combination of Hinduism and Buddhism that had flourished for centuries, spread its influence across the sea to counterfeit its influence across the sea to countless other islands in the Indonesian archipelago, and built what may have been one of the largest empires in Southeast Asia. This was the empire of Majapahit. The numerous and interesting remains of former art and grandeur, which exist in the ruins of temples

and other edifices, the abundant treasures of sculpture and statuary, either lay entirely buried under rubbish or were but partially examined. Nothing, therefore, of the ancient history of the people, of their institutions prior to the introduction of Mohammedanism, of their magnificence and power could be accurately known or fully relied on. The grandeur of their ancestors sounds like a fable, and it is only when it can be traced in monuments which cannot be falsified that we are led to give credit to their traditions concerning it. Raffles became convinced that he could find the remnants of the civilization of Majapahit, and so he traveled the length and breadth of the island and visited every ruined site he could along the way. He stopped at the ancient cities of

Kediri and Singasari and found there the crumbling remains of city walls, palaces, and carved statues of the Buddha alongside Hindu gods. But when he got to the valley of the Brantam, River in East Java, the locals advised him not to go near the ruins. They told him that a terrible curse still lingered over those crumbling stones. The natives have a superstition that the site of this ancient capital cannot be visited without some misfortune attaching to the party who undertake the visit. Those whom I had, with some difficulty, induced to accompany me to the spot, did not fail to assure me that I should lose my government within the year. Finally, Raffles visited the great capital of Majapahit, which his guides told him lay buried near

the town of Traulan. At Trawlan, Raffles hoped to find a magnificent ruined city, testifying to the former greatness of this power. But when he arrived, he would be disappointed. He would find little more than a scatter of broken brickwork and assorted sculpture littering the landscape, buried in volcanic ash and shaded beneath the towering teak trees. A village adjacent is called Traulan or the light of the moon. The ruins of the palace and several gateways of burnt brick are to be seen.

But the whole country, for many miles, is thickly covered with a stately teak forest, which appears to have been the growth of ages, so that it is difficult to trace the outline of this former capital. Ruins of temples, mostly executed in brick, are scattered about the country for many miles and attest to the extent and grandeur of this pride of Java. The temples are beautifully decorated with representations of flowers and other peculiar ornaments, which it would be difficult to describe. In fact, the local people turned out to be right. And, Perhaps Raffles should have listened to their warnings.

Raffles would only govern the island of Java for another year. The Napoleonic Wars soon came to an end, and the British returned the colony to the now independent Dutch, relieving raffles of his post. And he would go on to suffer more misfortune in the years that followed. Just ten years later, he would. would have a stroke, likely caused by an underlying condition in the blood vessels of his brain. This stroke would kill him the day before his 45th birthday. As Raffles wandered about those

ruins of crumbling red brick at the site of the ancient city of Majapahit, he had no idea that his fate was already sealed by the birth defect lurking in his head. But perhaps that day he thought about life and death as he walked beneath the shade of that teak forest and listened to the calling of coales and minor birds high in the trees. Perhaps he thought about the rise and fall of empires and the changing fortunes of the world. Perhaps he wondered how such a power had risen up on the island of Java and left such a mark on the memories and imaginations of that land's people. Perhaps he asked himself how its people had constructed these temples and palaces,

these walls and reservoirs, carved such beautiful and haunting monuments, and then fallen all at once into ruin. My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to the fall of Civilization's podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask what did they have in common, what led to their fall, and what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time, who witnessed the end of their world. In this episode, I want to tell the story of the Majapahit Empire of medieval Indonesia. I want to show how this empire of the islands grew up on the volcanic land of Java, and how it beat the odds to survive in a world of medieval superpowers.

I want to show how Majapahit expanded its influence and dominion to other lands over the seas, and undertook voyages that have few precedents in history. And I want to show what happened to bring bring this empire of the islands, finally crashing down. The surface of planet Earth is a thin crust of solid rock, which sits over the softer and much hotter mantle beneath it. This crust can be as much as 80 kilometers thick in places, and as thin as 10 kilometers in others, and it is divided into seven major tectonic plates. The largest of these is the Pacific Plate. It is a vast sheet of solid rock more than 100 million square kilometers in size that makes up much of the floor of the

Pacific Ocean, and which alone accounts for about a fifth of Earth's total surface. The Pacific Plate is made up almost entirely of ocean, oceanic crust, which is different to the continental crust that we all live on. Oceanic crust is typically much thinner, but made of denser basalt rock. For this reason, whenever it impacts with other tectonic plates, the Pacific plate is pushed downwards into the Earth's upper mantle, creating a zone of subduction, and these subduction zones are renowned for their violent volcanic activity. Due to its immense size and density,

the Pacific Plate has the most subduction zones of any tectonic plate, and as a result, its borders are the most volcanically active areas on Earth. This ring of raging volcanoes stretches in a vast horseshoe shape for more than 40,000 kilometers, or about the sea. or about the circumference of the earth. From the southern tip of South America, all around the western shore of the Americas, and then through the sea down the eastern coast of Asia. To geologists, it is called the Circumpacific Belt,

but in popular usage, it has come to be known by another name, the Pacific Ring of Fire. The 19th century English geologist George P. Scrope was one of the first to describe this far-ranging phenomenon. A striking and constant allineation of volcanic spiracles is displayed in the numerous archipelagos which border the eastern coast of Asia. Beginning from the peninsula of Kamchatka, Japan, the Luchu, Philippines and Molokas form a scarcely interrupted, linearerial. series of volcanic islands, amongst which many contain vents in habitual activity and bearing marks of recent and extremely violent eruptions. The Pacific Ring of Fire is home to three-quarters of all the world's volcanoes, and 90% of the earthquakes on Earth take place along this line. The Ring of Fire

has given us some of the world's most iconic peaks. including the elegant cone of Mount Fuji in Japan, and the violently explosive Mount St. Helens in the United States, as well as the volcanoes of Mount Tambora and Krakatoa, whose 1815 and 1883 eruptions were among the largest in recorded history. As it is dragged down into the depths of the planet, the subducting Pacific Plate has also created some of the lowest places on the earth's surface, giving rise to a series of dramatic oceanic trenches. The deepest of these, known as the Mariana Trench, reaches a sea depth of 11 kilometers, deeper than Mount Everest is tall. And in the areas where the ring of fire passes through

open ocean, it has also created a huge number of volcanic islands. As volcanoes erupt under the sea, magma spews out of the planet's mantle and cools on contact with cold seawater into solid rock. Over time, whole islands form around these volcanoes, and on these islands, the lives and deaths and dramas and dramas and tragedies of millions of human lives have played out throughout history. Perhaps the region where the Pacific Ring of Fire has had the most effect in sculpting the landscape is in the area of what is today Malaysia and Indonesia. Here the Ring of Fire has lifted thousands of islands large and small from the sea. And this archipelago has come to be known by a name that in old,

Javanese meant simply the outer lands. This name is Nusantara. The archipelago today called Nusantara lies across an area of ocean wider than the continental United States and laid over a map of Europe would stretch from France as far east as northern India. The archipelago is today home to more than 700 languages, six major religions, and more than 300 ethnicities. And since modern humans first arrived on these islands, they have given rise to a huge variety of different peoples. One Chinese Buddhist monk named Farsian, who sailed to India in the fourth century in search of rare religious manuscripts, describes the perils. and beauties of this ocean.

In this sea there are many pirates. The sea is boundless and extent. It is impossible to know east or west, and one can only advance by observing the sun, moon or stars. If it is dark, rainy weather, you have to follow the wind in perfect uncertainty. During the darkness of night, one only sees the great waves striking each other

and shining like fire. whilst shoals of sea monsters of every description surround the ship. Today, the complex geography of this region can prove confusing to many. As you listen, if you find yourself getting lost in the different names of islands and seas referenced in this episode, it's worth remembering that you're not alone. This is by far the densest region for islands anywhere in the world, and in fact the government of Indonesia itself has struggled to come up with a definitive answer

to exactly how many islands there are within its borders. One 2002 study using the satellite images LandSat identified more than 18,000 islands, while another 2010 study gave a lower figure, noting that only around 9,000 even have names. Nearly 90% of Indonesia's islands are tiny, coming in at less than a kilometre squared. Other islands are massive. The archipelago contains the world's second largest island of Papua or New Guinea,

the third largest of Borneo, and the sixth largest of Sumatra. In land area, each of these is large. than Japan, or the size of the United Kingdom and France combined. But while this archipelago is home to some enormous islands, these tend to be rocky and mountainous, their interiors covered in impenetrable rainforest and generally sparsely populated. It is the fifth largest island in the archipelago that has had perhaps the greatest impact of all, and this is the place where our story begins, the long, narrow island of Java. Java is a volcanic island, shaped like a cigar, running just south of and roughly parallel to the equator.

It's little over 100 kilometers wide, north to south, but stretches for more than 1,000 kilometers east to west, And the center of the island is dominated by a rocky spine of conical volcanoes. A medieval Javanese creation myth called the Tantu Pangalaran, describes how the island was once floating free in the ocean, before the gods decided to nail it down. The island of Java was unsteady, constantly moving up and down, as it had no great mountains, not to mention human beings.

For this reason, Lord Jagat Pramana arose and promptly performed yoga on the island of Java. The deity stood facing east. He churned the water and it turned into foam and turned into mountains. For this reason, we have what is called the land above the clouds now. Now the gods Brahma and Vishnu agreed and made human beings. They needed lumps of clay and formed them into humans of perfect beauty. Today, partly as a result of its rich volcanic soil and its heavy rainfall and strong sun,

Java is the world's most populous island. It is home to more than 150 million people, despite its land area being only about the size of England, making it one of the most densely populated places on Earth. More people live on Java than in the whole of Russia, despite it being about 130 times smaller, and its capital of Jakarta recently took the top spot as the world's most populated city. This reputation for abundance goes back to ancient times. The Hindu epic poem, the Ramayana, written around 2,000 years ago, Reddy mentions Java as a place of wealth.

The island of Java is decorated with seven kingdoms, gold and silver islands, rich in gold mines, and a cold mountain that touches the sky with its peak. Even in ancient times, the island had a global reputation. It was prominent enough in the second century that the Greek writer and geographer Claudius Ptolemy included it in his work Geographia, right at the farthest edge of the known world. He describes an island named Yawadiyu, a name which he says means the island of barley, possibly referring to the hardy grain millet, which has been an important food stuff there for centuries before the introduction of rice. As a

result of its inclusion in Ptolemy's work, the island would also appear in a number of medieval and early modern Mapomundi, or maps of the world, although few Europeans could agree on where exactly the island was. In these maps, it usually appears somewhere wedged between Africa and Asia, and always as far away as it was possible to get. But for the people who lived on the island of Java, it was the very centre of the world. According to Javanese legend, it was where the gods had first created humanity and taught them the secrets of civilization, as the Tantu Pangalaran recounts. Such were the instructions of Lord Guru to all the gods.

They descended to Java, the god Rama. became a blacksmith. The earth served as his anvil, water as his tongs, light as his fire, and wind as his bellows, and the sky as his hammer. Lord Wisquakarma descended as a carpenter and made a house, and people followed him and made houses. The Lord Ishwara descended and taught beneficial words, in particular about the ten kinds of good conduct and the five fields of learning. Since it sits virtually on the equator, Java experiences very little variation in sunlight throughout the year. In fact, its shortest day is only 48 minutes shorter than its longest.

The western side of the island also enjoys very dependable monsoon rains from the Indian Ocean, which combine with the extremely fertile volcanic soil so that farmers could grow all year round and could often harvest three whole crops of rice each year. The 14th century Chinese source, the Songxi, or history of the Sung Dynasty, describes the great abundance of this island. The country is flat and fit for agriculture.

Its products are rice, hemp and peas, there being no wheat. Salt is obtained by boiling seawater, and there is an abundance of fish, turtles, poultry, ducks, goats and cattle, which they kill for the purpose of eating. Their fruit are papaya, coconuts, plantains, sugar cane, and tarot. From about the 5th century on, this vast agricultural potential would give birth to thriving societies. these would go on to construct elaborate monumental architecture. For nearly the next thousand years, most of these societies would arise in the west of Java. One king of this time named Purnavaman left one of the earliest stone inscriptions, carved into a large boulder in the

Chiarutin River. The powerful illustrious and braille, king, the famous Purnavarman of the Taruma Nagara kingdom, whose print of the foot souls are the same as those of God Vishnu. The inscription is accompanied by a carved imprint of both of the king's feet, symbolically stamping his ownership on the territory. By the 6th or 7th century, a power known as Kaling seems to have risen up in central Java, and a description of it was included in the Chinese source, known as the Xin Tang Shu, or the new history of the Tang Dynasty. Carling is also called Java. It is situated in the southern ocean. The people make fortifications of wood, and even the largest houses are covered with palm leaves. They have couches of ivory,

and mats of the outer skin of bamboo. The land produces tortoiseshell, gold and silver, rhinoceros horns and ivory. The country is very rich. They have letters and are acquainted with astronomy. These early kingdoms seem to have met with great success on the island of Java, but little has survived of their records, their literature or their architecture. But all that would change with the founding of a kingdom known as Mataram. The name Mataram comes from the Sanskrit word Martyr, meaning mother, and likely meant something

like motherland. This kingdom grew up not in the west, but in the highlands of central Java, right in the shadow of the great volcanoes Merbabu and Merrar. The people of Mataram were the first to truly take advantage of this mountainous landscape and cultivated the steep slopes of this area using concentric terraces of rice fields, fed and drained by intricate systems of canals and stone-lined channels. This kingdom of the mountains was originally Hindu and worshipped primarily the god Shiva, the god of creation and destruction.

Living as they did on a land constantly torn apart and remade by the destructive power of the volcanoes, it's no mystery why this god would have held sway in the kingdom of Mataram. But with the rise of a dynasty known as the Shilendra's in the 8th century, Martharam began to drift further towards a new religion, Buddhism. In this period, Martyram would become what's known to historians as an Indianized Hindu-Buddhist kingdom, with elements of both religions combined into a syncretic whole. These religions became so intertwined over the centuries that followed that the epic Tantu Pangalaran even recounts the story,

of one God who came down to earth and divided himself into two holy sages, one Buddhist and one Hindu, so that he could spread both religions at the same time. Let us tell about Ma'amu Paliat. He returned to the island of Java. He divided his body into two, and it became a Shaivite and a Buddhist. Off they went and arrived in Java. They headed for Gira and set up a monastery together. The kings of Java would even come to be known by the title,

Bartera Siwa Buddha, meaning the divine lord Shiva Buddha, a royal figure in whom the two sacred beings were fused. This was in general a period of coexistence and unity, and it's in this era that some of Java's most remarkable monuments, would be built. The kings of the mountain kingdom of Martyram were ambitious builders. Around the year 850, they completed construction of a great temple to Shiva, the towering Prambanan temple, which still sends its eight sturdy spires up into the skies of southern Java. It is the second largest Hindu structure in Southeast Asia, behind only Angkor Wat in Cambodia,

and it left its mark not just on the landscape, but in the name of the year in which its construction was completed. By this time, the Javanese had adopted a unique system of naming each year, giving them what are known as moon chronograms, or in Javanese, Chandra Sengala. This system used the Indian Shaka calendar, which assigned numbers to the years the way we do today, like 1066, 1939 or 2026. But the Javanese developed this Indian calendar with their own poetic flourish. They gave each number from 0 to 10 an array of possible symbols, like the sun, moon, fire, and other elements, which they could choose from to give the year a name that seemed the most fitting. For example, the 18th century Balinese Chronicle, named the Babad Gumi, gives one year the name

Gaja Api Aninwatu, or Elephant Fire, Wind, Stone, due to a particularly violent eruption of the volcano Mount Agum that took place in East Bali. Another year in which a fierce battle took place was named Paksha Shikara Babumi, or the force of violence moving upon the earth. Due to this system, we can sometimes get a sense, from the names that years were given of the overriding mood in the kingdom.

Sometimes a mood of joy and celebration, at others of despair and sorrow. On the year that the kings of Martyram completed the Prambanan temple, they were clearly proud of their achievement, and because of its eight towering main shrines, they named the year in honor of it. In our calendar it was 856, but in the Shaka calendar it was called Eight Mountains of the Holy Monks, as recorded in a text known as the Shavgra inscription. In the time of the Shaka year, Eight Mountains of the Holy Monks,

the statue of the god was finished and inaugurated. After the Shiva Sanctuary had been completed in its divine splendor, the course of the river was changed so that it rippled along the grounds. Then the grounds were inaugurated as temple grounds with the gods. Other temples built by the kings of Mataram, such as the sprawling temple at Seoul, are thought to have been Buddhist, since they were built in the form of a mandala, an important geometrical concept in Buddhism that is used to conceptualize the shape of the universe. But chief among their works is the structure that would become what is still the largest

Buddhist temple in the world. It's thought that the Javanese of the time called it Bumi Shambara Budara, or the mountain of combined virtues of the ten stages of buddahhood. But today it is known by a name, meaning only the great Buddha, or Borobudur. Borobudur rises like a mountain from the river plains, right in the shadow of the great volcano Mount Marapi. This vast complex consists of nine stacked platforms, rising like a wedding cake up to a height of 35 meters and topped by a central dome. One heritage worker Gerard Boller, describes the appearance of this incredible temple. Orobo Dore, the Mountain of the Virtues, is first of all a landscape,

the landscape which, over a thousand years ago, met the eyes of those who came on pilgrimage here to seek inner peace. It has hardly changed. In the distance, two volcanoes, one ever menacing, glows red in the night. All around in the middle distance, a ring of mountains. Built on this same volcanic stone, Borobudor emerges from a delicate green background of tropical vegetation. The design of Borobudur, like the temple at Sewu, is an enormous mandala, visible from above. But this mandala covers the area of two football pitches and guides its pilgrims up through a series of concentric walkways and stairways, carved out of black volcanic stone.

These are all lined with nearly 3,000 carved freezes and 500 Buddha statues created by the finest craftsman the kingdom could find. The archaeologist Professor Radin Sokmono, who was in charge of the project to restore the great temple in modern times, describes its spiritual function. For the ardent Buddhist, it is the highest wisdom that leads to the ultimate salvation, and for the technician, the highest degree of expertise that leads to the appropriate fulfillment of his duty.

In both cases, Borobudor is the embodiment of such a deeply felt wish. It is a prayer in stone. The symbolism of this structure, shaped like a mountain, would, likely have been obvious to the early medieval Javanese. The gods had once placed the mountains of Java to secure the island in place and brings stability to the land. Now their king did the same thing, placing his own mountain on the landscape to act as a testament to the lasting stability of his rain. And Borobudur was built to last. It was constructed entirely without mortar or cement, carving its two million blocks of volcanic stone into intricate interlocking shapes to hold them together.

This design has meant that it has largely survived the countless earthquakes that have taken place over the last millennium in one of the world's most seismically active zones. As well as the shifting ground beneath their feet, the builders also had the heavy rainfall of the Javanese monsoon to contend with. For this reason, they equipped the site of Borobudur with more than a hundred spouts for drainage, each carved in the shape of a giant or sea dragon. so that when it rained, water would have poured from their mouths. But the most remarkable and haunting feature of this monument is the thousands of reliefs carved all around its galleries.

Many of these carvings show stories from the lives of the Buddha, ascending through kilometers of galleries, and in this way the monument is a story brought to life in stone. But alongside this religious narrative, others show scenes of simple daily life for all the different levels of Javanese society. In these carvings, we see people carrying woven baskets for winnowing and steaming rice and stirring milk rice in pots. We see people working in the fields and shopping in a bustling urban market. marketplace, people carrying baskets of tropical fruit and nets full of fish, all of their faces looking out from the stone, frozen in a moment that passed by more than a thousand

years ago. The Chinese history of Liang describes the dress and appearance of the people of Java, which can be seen in the reliefs of Boro Boudur. Men and women have the upper part of the body naked. Their hair hangs loosely down, and around their lower limbs they only use a sarong of cotton. The king and the nobles have a thin flowered cloth for covering the upper part of their body. They wear a girdle of gold and golden rings in their ears. Young girls cover themselves with a cloth of cotton and wear an embroidered girdle. In these carvings we also get a sense for courtly life. We see the king coming and going on his elephant. his courtiers and the palace women.

In some carvings we see the king and his nobles enjoying a splendid feast known as a Mahamansa. One 12th century Javanese epic poem known as the Bormantaka or death of Boma describes the sumptuous sight of one of these feasts. The dishes were salted eggs, vegetables in hot sauce, Likin and ceca, red mints of tripe with its various red salads, and sizzling dripping of turtle. And the boiled vegetables, Langeuban with marrow and tongue in rolls,

Mushrooms steamed in leaves, crisp flakes of jellyfish, liver with rump accompanied by roasted lungs, breastbone, intestines on skewers, with fat and hot kebabs. The banana heart was sweet, and there was no lack of prawns, crabs, salted fish and muscles. Pickled meats, grilled meats, wuku and various skewered meats, doves, pupook birds and wild pigeon made them clutch in all directions. Some of these 9th century carvings even depict recipes that are still enjoyed in Indonesia today. Among them a dish called Tumpeng, a tall cone of rice surrounded by side dishes, which is still prepared for special occasions. But one particular feature, of these carvings has always captured the imagination of those who visit the ruins.

These are the so-called Boro-Budur ships. In among the scenes of daily life are carved the shapes of five large seagoing vessels, graceful and high-sided, which show just how accomplished the Javanese had become as shipbuilders and sailors. And so it's a no surprise that it was around this time that the people of Java began to gain a reputation around the world as traders and pirates. The Javanese of the Mataram period sailed in large ships that were often built from teak. This kind of wood was prized for its strength and its high oil content, which gives it a natural water resistance, even even without varnishing, and gives it a distinct rich aroma like fine leather.

These ships were built without nails, using only interlocking joints and wooden dowels, and with ingenious arrangements of sails. The third-century Chinese writer Wan Chen, in his work Nanju Yiwu Jiu Jor, or strange things of the southern lands describes the sight of these majestic vessels. The people sometimes rig as many as four sails, which they carry in a row from bow to stern. The four sails do not face directly forward, but are set obliquely, and so arranged that they can all be fixed in the same direction to receive the wind and to spill it. If it is violent, the sailors diminish or augment the surface of the sails according to the conditions.

Thus, these ships sail without avoiding strong winds and dashing waves, by the aid of which they can make great speed. To Wan Chen and other Chinese writers, these Javanese ships were so remarkable because China itself would not develop large ocean-going vessels until around the 9th century, or 600 years later. In fact, the Chinese held the ships of these islanders in such reverence that no foreign craft were permitted to sail within range of the main port of Guangdong or Canton,

as the 16th century Portuguese diplomat Tomé Perez recounts. They say that the Chinese made this law about not being gay or, to go to Canton for fear of the Japanese and Malays, for it is certain that one of these people's ships would route 20 Chinese ships. Such is their fear of Malays and Japanese. This fear appears to have been warranted. The inscriptions of the Cham people of Vietnam and the Khmer in Cambodia frequently reference the arrival of fearsome sea-going raiders, who are thought to have sailed from islands like Sumatra and Java. One inscription in the Po Nagar Temple in Vietnam

describes one such raid in the year 774. Ferocious, pitiless, dark-skinned men born in other countries, whose food was more horrible than corpses, and who were vicious and furious, came in ships, took away the temple statue and set fire to the temple. The Javanese were in part able to become such successful sailors due to the extremely predictable wind patterns that take place in this part of the world. During the rainy season from December to March,

the winds blow in over Java from the Asian mainland in the northwest, picking up moisture over the South China Sea and Pacific Ocean and bringing the monsoon. But during the dry season from April to September, the winds reversed direction and blow from the southeast and the deserts of Australia, bringing dry air and a lower probability of rain. This meant you could travel whichever direction you wanted so long as you wisely chose your season to sail. As their confidence grew on the waves, we have evidence that the Javanese also undertook some even more ambitious voyages. One Italian explorer who arrived in Java around 1505,

named Ludovico D'Varthema of Bologna, sailed to the island of Java, and was amazed to see the captain of the ship navigate even when the north started. was no longer visible. When the chartered vessel was supplied with provisions, we took our way towards the beautiful island called Java, at which we arrived in five days, sailing towards the south. My companion asked the Christians, now that we have lost the North Star,

how does he steer us? Is there any other North Star than this by which we steer? The Christians asked the captain of the ship this same thing, and he showed us four or five stars, among which there was one which he said was the, opposite to our north star. This was the so-called Southern Cross, the distinctive pattern of stars that could be seen in the southern hemisphere in the direction of the South Pole. The Europeans were amazed at this discovery, but the captain then told him that the Javanese had sailed into the South

following these stars and had there come upon an icy and frozen land. He also told us that on the other side of the said island towards the south, there are some other races who navigate by the said four or five stars opposite to ours. And moreover, they gave us to understand that beyond the said island, the day does not last more than four hours, and that there it was colder than in any other part of the world. If this is true, it means that the Javanese had already sailed to and around Australia, and set out into the Antarctic Ocean.

But tantalizingly, we have only this second-hand story to go by, and the rest will have to be left to our imaginations. But as the centuries of the first millennium went on, there is a great deal more evidence that the people of Java were making their mark in even further lands. 7,000 kilometres away on the shores of East Africa, the 10th century Persian writer Busurk Ibn Shariah gives an account of a series of raids undertaken by a people from a faraway land that he calls the Wackwak.

The Wackwak set out with a thousand ships to launch a determined attack upon the town of Kambala. But they were unable to capture it, for the town was strongly fortified and was surrounded by an arm of the sea in the midst of which Kanbalo rose like a fortress. When the people of the African coast eventually came to terms with the attackers, they learned more about why they had come and how far they had traveled. The people of that country demanded why they had come to Gumbalo rather than to any other place. They replied that it was because the country possessed merchandise of value in the whack-wack country and in China, such as ivory, tortoise shell, panther skins and ambergris, and also because they wanted to obtain some of the Zeng people, who, being strong men, are able to stand heavy labour.

Their voyage, they said, had lasted a year. If the story told by these people be true, this proves that the Wackwack Islands are situated opposite to China. The location of these Wackwakw Islands has long been debated. One clue can be found in the Persian chronicler Ibn Khodad Bey, whose description has made many historians believe that they may have been the islands of Indonesia. East of China are the lands of Wack Wack,

which are so rich in gold that the inhabitants make the chains for their dogs and the collars for their monkeys of this metal. They manufacture tunics woven with gold. Excellent ebony wood is found there. Gold and ebony are exported from Wack Wack Wack. This detail of dogs wearing collars made of gold was also mentioned by early European explorers.

who visited Java, leading many to conclude that the Wackwack really were Javanese. If this story does relate an attack on Eastern Africa by the people of Java, then it shows the extent of their shipbuilding and seafaring prowess, and that they had become a formidable threat for all the peoples who lived around the Indian Ocean. From these raids they would have brought back gold, ivory and slaves to Java. But in other places they didn't simply raid and sail away. In the large island of Madagascar, just off the coast of eastern Africa, the people's language has always puzzled linguists. The Madagascan language of Malagasy shares little in common

with those of the African mainland, and it was only when the grammar and syntax were compared with Indonesian languages that a remarkable similarity was noticed. Although separated by the entire Indian Ocean, the language of Malagasy shares a grammatical structure with several Indonesian languages like Javanese, and they even have a number of different words in common. Just one example is the word for island, Nosi in Malagasy and Nusa in Javanese. In fact, the closest living relative of Malagasy is thought to be a language called Manian, which originated on the south coast of Borneo. The most modern analysis of mitochondrial DNA in Madagascar has confirmed this connection

and shows that the people there can trace their lineage back to about 30 mothers who arrived on the island from what is now Indonesia. This suggests a single boatload of settlers who had travelled across one of the world's widest oceans to find a new home. They also brought plants and crops with them. Botanists estimate that a full 7% of the plant life on Madagascar today originated in Indonesia. These include bananas, plantains, taro and yams, and all of the plant life. All of these were already well established there by the medieval period. In 1602, another Portuguese explorer Diogo do Kuto described these far-reaching journeys of the Javanese.

The Javanese are all men very experienced in the art of navigation, to the point that they claim to be the most ancient of all. It is certain that they formally navigated to Africa's Cape of Good Hope, and were in communication with the east coast of the island of Madagascar, where there are many brown and Javanese-like natives who say they are descended from them. The Javanese of this period navigated using the stars, but also magnetic compasses and maps written on the bark of the papal mulberry tree.

In 1512, only 20 years after Columbus had first reached the Americas, and 12 years after the first Europeans set foot in Brazil, a Portuguese conquistador fighting on the Malay Peninsula captured a sea chart from a Javanese sailor. He was amazed to find that it had already been updated with all the new discoveries that had been made on the other side of the world, as he wrote in one letter to King Manuel I of Portugal. We found a large map of a Javanese pilot containing the Cape of Good Hope, Portugal, and the land of Brazil,

the Red Sea and the Sea of Persia, the Clove Islands, the navigation of the Chinese and Japanese, and how the kingdoms border on each other. It seems to me, sir, that this was the best thing I have ever seen, and Your Highness will be very pleased to see it. In 2003, a modern team was able to be able to be. to pilot a replica of an old Javanese sailing ship from Indonesia to Madagascar, and around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, thus proving that this journey was possible with the technology available at the time. But despite its remarkable achievements in architecture and its voyages of discovery, the Shilendra dynasty of Mataram would eventually decline,

and all of its grand monuments would decline with it. The reasons for the fall of Mataram are unclear, since no true chronicles have survived from this time. But the kingdom's decline may have been related to a series of dramatic volcanic eruptions that occurred sometime in the 10th and early 11th centuries. The people of Java have always lived with a particular paradox, that the immense productivity of their land also comes from its most destructive force. Many landscapes that experience a monsoon season as heavy as Java can suffer from poor soil quality as the seasonal rains wash away topsoil and leach nutrients away. But in much of Java the hundreds of active

volcanoes counteract this effect. Due to the island's particular geology, its volcanoes are especially beneficial for the soil, filling it with minerals like magnesium, potassium and phosphorus that plants thrive on, all blasted out of the depths of the earth itself. Volcanic soil is also uniquely porous, and retains moisture exceptionally well, while allowing air circulation for plant roots. But of course, a volcano is a violent phenomenon. When they erupt, they scorch the earth with pyroclastic flows,

spew lava, and rain huge boulders down from the sky across a large area. This poses an obvious problem, that the areas of the greatest agricultural productivity on the island were also the most dangerous. This meant that while the volcano's overall effect on the island was positive, a year in which a great eruption took place could wipe out a good proportion of any kingdom's food supplies. And of all these volcanoes, by far the most active, was the one that the Javanese call by a name which means the mountain of fire, or Merapi. Rising to nearly 3,000 metres or 10,000 feet,

Mount Marapi is the most active volcano in the whole of Indonesia and is considered one of the most active and dangerous in the world. It has erupted regularly for at least the last 500 years, with small eruptions occurring every two to three years, and larger ones every 10 to 15. Then every few hundred years, the mountain explodes in a truly catastrophic fashion. The Javanese Chronicle, the Babad Tanajawi, records the devastation caused by one eruption of the great Mount Merapi that took place in the 16th century. Then Mount Merapi erupted with fire.

It made a terrifying, thundering noise. A rain of ash fell. A volcanic mud flow ran down the Ompak River. Big rocks rose from the flow and landed on the land. When the piles of wood on the Ganang Giddle mountains were set on fire, the mountains became a blaze of fire. The gong, kiai, bichak was beaten ceaselessly. All tried to save their...

lives and ran in all directions. Added to this obvious physical destruction, the Javanese also held the volcanoes in great spiritual reverence and viewed eruptions as signs and portents from the gods. After the deaths of great kings, Javanese chronicles often describe the mountains, rumbling in mourning. At the death of His Majesty, the world Whaling in the palace was as loud as thunder. Mount Marrappi rumbled, joining in with the sound of a rainstorm. It was believed that the eruptions, earthquakes,

and various rumblings of the land were not just seismic events, but actually one of the primary ways that the gods weighed in on the affairs of humanity. For this reason, their timing could have real life or death consequences. One chronicle recounts the story of a lucky prisoner held by a 17th century Javanese king. The king wanted to kill the prisoner Raden Masuya Kasuma, but this did not happen, because every time they wanted to kill him, Mount Merapi flared up with a terrifying noise.

In the end, the man was set free and promoted and given the lordship of one thousand. rice fields. A particularly devastating eruption would not only cause immense economic damage to the kingdom, it could also be considered a clear sign that the gods were angry with the current ruler. For any king who didn't have a firm grasp on power, this could be a devastating blow. From some inscriptions left in Java, we know that as the 9th century came to an end, the kingdom of Mataram descended into civil war, with three kings ruling in only two years. When the dust of this civil war settled in the year 929,

a king named Rakehino Pusindok took to the throne. But, curiously, it seems the kingdom of Maturam had by this point moved. All of the inscriptions issued by this king would be written in East Java, far away from its original heartlands around the volcano Mount Merapi. It seems that around the beginning of the 10th century, the entire Mataram Kingdom simply upped sticks and fled its original wealthy province, leaving its towering temples and cities abandoned. And what's perhaps most significant is that no other power seems to have seen. swept in to the empty lands.

This suggests that some kind of cataclysm took place there. Archaeological evidence shows that the early 10th century layer of human occupation at the great temple of Borobudur, for instance, is sealed by up to half a metre of volcanic ash, suggesting a major eruption. The peoples of this land were no strangers to erupting volcanoes, So we can imagine that it must have taken one of particular violence, or a series of eruptions taking place in frighteningly quick succession

to cause the wholesale abandonment of this kingdom and its re-establishment hundreds of kilometres to the east. One inscription, known as the Buchangan stone, describes a kind of disaster sweeping the land. In the time of the great catastrophe that overwhelmed the island of Java in the Saka year 928, when King Waruari came forth from Waram, the whole of Java seemed transformed into a single raging sea. Many of the foremost men of the realm perished. Chief among the dead was the divine king.

Unfortunately, the exact dating of volcanic eruptions is difficult, and it's hard to say whether this was true. truly the cause of Mataram's downfall. But whether from volcanic causes or not, it's clear that for one reason or another, life had become unlivable for the people of Mataram in central Java. The kingdom eventually reached a level of stability in its new home in East Java, away from the destruction it had faced. But its confidence in itself and in the gods. approval of its rulers had been fatally reduced. Within a century, the remains of Martyram was facing destruction, now at the hands of human enemies. An invasion by a

neighboring king wiped out what was left of it, and the kingdom of Mataram disappeared, living on only in the stone carvings left lining the walls of its great temples. thousands of moments of everyday life, now sealed beneath a thick layer of volcanic ash. After the fall of Mataram, a number of successor kingdoms would rise up. In the 11th century, much of Java was reunited again under the rule of a king named Airlanga, whose name meant he who leapt over the water. He was born on the small island of Bali and crossed the sea to Java as a young man.

The Puchangan stone describes how this king was spared from the destruction that swept the land during the fall of Mataram. At that time his majesty was only 16 years old, still too young to have mastered the art of war, yet because he was the very manifestation of Vishnu, All the gods protected him from being swept away by the great destruction. Arlanga would rule successfully for several decades, but when he died, the land divided again.

The kingdom that would truly give birth to Java's golden era was named Singasari. Singasari derived its name from the Sanskrit word Simha, meaning lion, and this lion kingdom was founded by a king named Ken Angrock. Ken Angrock's name means the man who overturned everything, and he was a revolutionary force on Java. In the centuries since he lived, the legend of Ken Angroch has grown to mythic proportions, and he has inspired theatre, song, and plays.

poetry in Indonesia. The story of his life is largely told in a fragmentary chronicle known as the Pararaton, or the Book of Kings, written sometime later in the 16th century. According to this chronicle, Ken Angrock was actually the son of the Hindu god Brahma, who appeared to his mother, a poor woman named. named Ken Endoc and informed her of her immaculate conception. The god, Brahma, Asangama, the god, Brahma, descended there and lay with Ken Endok.

This meeting took place in the fields of Lalaten. The god made a vow with the woman. You must not go to your husband again. If you lie with him, he will die, and my child will be corrupted. That child is named Ken Ankrok, and he will one day rule the land of Java. With that, Brahma vanished. The woman held true to her word, and soon Ken Angrock was born. But the family was extremely poor and couldn't provide for the little boy.

His parents abandoned him in a grave, but he was found by a common thief named Lembong, who was perhaps plundering the graveyard for valuables. When her time was full, she gave them. birth to a boy. Ken Endok abandoned him in a burial ground for children. Not long after, a thief named Lenbong wandered into the same place. There he saw something glowing. Drawn to it, he heard the sound of a child crying. When he came closer, he saw that the light was coming from the child himself. Lembong picked him up, carried him home, and raised him. as his own son.

Brought up by this thief, Ken Angrock would learn all the tricks of his trade until he was the most accomplished thief in Java. But one day he met an Indian holy man who identified him as the son of Brahma and an embodiment of the god of Vishnu. This holy man convinced Ken Angroc to give up his sinful life. As a reward, Ken Angrock gained a magical weapon, a kind of Javanese knife known as a kerris.

These are long daggers, often created with a distinctive rippled blade, and they were worn by Javanese men as a sign of status. as a talisman against various evils, and of course as a practical sidearm for self-defence. One Chinese visitor to Java at the start of the 15th century named Marwan writes about the importance of these blades. From little boys of three years to old men of a hundred years, they all have these knives,

which are all made of steel with most intricate patterns, drawn in very delicate lines. For the handles, they use gold or rhinoceros horn or elephant's teeth, engraved with representations of human forms or devil's faces, the craftsmanship being very fine and skillful. With this magical sword by his side, Ken Angrock rose to prominence in Java, and eventually, through the overwhelming force of his various virtues, became its king. as the Pareratan describes. Not long afterwards, Ken Angrok was acclaimed as king of Tamapel.

His realm was called Singasari. His enthronement was witnessed by learned men of both the Shaivite and Buddhist traditions of Kediri. Those who had once shown Kenyanangani, who had once shown Ken Hanzari. shown Ken Angkorok kindness in his days of hardship were summoned, granted protection, and generously rewarded for their loyalty. Not everyone easily accepted the rule of this commoner. In the nearby rival kingdom of Kediri, the king was named Dandang Gendis, and he refused to accept Ken Angrook as.

his king. Dantang Gendez gathered his armies and marched to fight Ken Anorok, but he was no match for the divine power of the God made man. He fell because he was attacked on all sides by the forces of Singaseri, who came on like a flood pouring down from the mountains. The army of Kediri scattered like a swarm of bees, fleeing in panic, abandoning the field like startled goats, casting aside their parasols. King Dandang Gendis withdrew from the battle

and fled into the realm of the gods, rising up into the air with his horse, his grooves, his parasol-bearers, and those who carried his drinking vessels and his drinking vessels sinking vessels and his mats, all of them ascending into the sky. Thus, Ken Diri was utterly defeated by Ken Hangbro. Nanty, the Mewu Angawangawang.

Tashidot kālake and rock. Needless to say, this section of the Pararaton Chronicle is considered to be largely mythical and reflects the propaganda of this king's new regime, regime. But this story would be repeated across the towns and villages of Java by trained storytellers, who together wove a new national myth around the figure of Ken Angrock. One of the most important mediums in which this story was told was that of the Javanese shadow puppets.

The exact origin of Javanese shadow puppetry is a mystery, but it's clear from a number of oblique references in Javanese literature that it was already a well-established practice by at least the 10th century. This form of shadow theatre is known as Waiyang. Waiang in Javanese means shadow or ghost, but it can also mean imagination. And these plays would retell stories from the Hindu epics like the Mahabharat, local Javanese stories such as how rice came to the earth, and the stories of their kings and ancestors.

The Chinese visitor to Java at the beginning of the 15th century, Marwan, describes witnessing these performances. Each time the performer unrolls and exposes a section of the, picture, he thrusts it forward toward the audience, and speaking with a loud voice in the foreign language, he explains the derivation of this section. The crowd sits around and listens to him, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, exactly as if the narrator were reciting one of our popular romances. These shadow plays would typically start at nightfall and go on until dawn, and would be conducted behind a screen of white cotton fabric

using a lamp burning with coconut oil, usually cast in metal in the form of the sacred bird, Garuda. The puppets were typically made of goat hide or buffalo skin, mounted on bamboo canes, and placed in a trunk of banana palm lying behind the screen. The puppets had jointed limb, and were punctured all over with intricate patterns of holes that allowed the light through,

so that their shadows could then be cast onto a screen. These puppet shows were often accompanied by music. In small village performances, this could simply be the drumming of the puppeteer on the box where the puppets were kept. But in the royal court, a puppeteer would perform alongside a... a full orchestra of musicians, known as a gamelan, with a whole host of 15 instruments. These night-long plays would unfold according to strict traditions.

In the hours between sunset and midnight, the puppeteer introduced the characters and set up the conflict. And then at the stroke of midnight, the drama burst out into a frenzied clash of between good and evil. The Portuguese traveller and apothecary Tomei Perez, who visited Java around 1513, wrote about seeing these forms of theatre and shadow puppetry. The land of Java is the land of performers and masks of various Japanese kinds, and both men and women do thus.

They have entertainments of dancing and stories. They mime, they wear actors' dresses and all their clothes. They are certainly graceful. They have music of bells. The sound of all of them playing together is like an organ. These actors show a thousand graces like these by day and night. At night they make shadows of various shapes. Over time the performance of these shadow plays took on a spiritual meaning.

The puppeteer, or Dalang, was thought to become possessed by the power of the gods as he worked, and in the performance all the holy elements were represented. The banana palm representing the earth, the cloth screen, the sky, the fire in the coconut oil lamp, and of course the interplay of light and darkness, good and evil, as the stories of gods and demons played out across the screen. These performances were considered to have real power. Some, such as the Bratayyuta, or a Javanese version of the Indian epic, the Mahabharat, were considered too potent to ever perform in their entirety, as Thomas Stamford Raffles records. Although the Waiyang may represent any portion of the Bratahuda, there is a prevalent

superstition that a great war will be the inevitable consequence of performing at one sitting the whole of this poem. It is gravely asserted that a chief of Kendall tried this experiment about 50 years ago, but that the performance was no sooner completed than his country was laid to waste and destroyed. Other of these shadow plays were performed at auspicious times in order to bring about certain effects, with stories of the goddess of rice told during the harvests, and the great myths told during times of trouble and strife. One particular shadow play was reserved solely for times when a plague of mice or rats had descended on a village, and its goal was to convince the rodents to depart and

dwell in the kingdom of vermin instead. Over the next centuries, the story of Ken Angroc, the first king of Singasari, would be told again and again in these kinds of performances, and would take on more and more fantastical elements. And for that reason, it's impossible to say definitively which parts may have a grain of truth to them. But it's likely that some elements are true, that Ken Angroch was a problem. common man of uncertain birth and lineage, that he had been a thief or brigand of some kind, that he rose to power in the kingdom in a violent upheaval and crushed the nearby kingdom of Kediri in open battle. But after he comes to the throne, the tone of the chronicle shifts and becomes more grounded in historical reality. Many events recorded

during his reign are dated, and so this second half of the Chronicle is considered to contain more historically verifiable information. What we know for sure is that over the course of the 13th century, Ken Anroch's new kingdom of Singasari would gradually expand its power, wealth, and prestige. But it was under the reign of his great-grandson, the fifth king of Singasari, that it would grow into a true empire. His name was King Kerta Nagara, and during his time on the throne, he would order expeditions to extend the kingdom's influence

not just over most of Java, but across the sea to the large island of Borneo to the north, the small island of Bali to the east, and even conduct a successful invasion of Java's sister island, of Sumatra in the northwest. Now the kingdom of Singasari had grown to be a true sea-going empire,

and it controlled virtually all of the region's most crucial waterways. And the most important of these was the narrow sea corridor known as the strait of Malacca. The Malay Peninsula is a long body of land that stretches

southeast from the southern edge of the Asian continent, where Thailand meets Malaysia. And just off its southernmost point, and following the line of the continental shelf, is the island of Sumatra and then Java. Together these form a sea wall of more than 3,000 kilometers that stands between the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific and South. South China Sea. In this massive wall, there are only two narrow gates. The southerly one, known as the Straits of Sunder, and the northern one, the Straits of Malacca. The American sailor and writer Herman Melville, writing in the mid-19th century, describes the site of these straits. Those narrow straits of Sunda stand mid-way in the middle-way in the middle-year-olde. that vast rampart of islands, like the central gateway opening into some vast walled empire.

The inexhaustible wealth of spices and silks and jewels and gold and ivory with which the thousand islands of that oriental sea are enriched are thus guarded from the all-grasping Western world. For much of history, it has been the the wider and deeper straight of Malacca that has been used most heavily. In fact, today it is the busiest shipping channel in the world, seeing nearly 100,000 ships pass through it each year. Around a quarter of all global trade passes through this narrow waterway

where the massive cities of Singapore and Kuala Lumpur are today located. And in the 13th century, during the time of the Singasari kingdom, this waterway was no less crucial or lucrative. Around the year 1515, the Portuguese diplomat Tomei Pires passed through the Yemeni port of Aden on the Red Sea, and wrote that goods transported thousands of miles from Malacca featured prominently in the city. markets, where merchants would carry them on to Egypt and from there into Europe. The merchants from Cairo bring the merchandise which comes from Italy and Greece and Damascus to Aden, while the merchants of Aden take back with them all the products of Malacca. Clothes, nutmeg mace, sandalwood, Brazil wood, silks, seed pearls, musk, porcelain and

other things. Control of the narrow waterway of the Malacca Strait gave King Kertanagara immense power, despite the relatively small size of the kingdom of Singasari. Now anyone wishing to sail between China and India or the rest of the world either did so with Kerta Nagara's permission or had to take a detour of at least 2,000 kilometers through roughly. and stormy seas around this island wall. As a result of this control, the power and wealth of Singasari grew dramatically. But there were much larger empires in the region who had a strong interest in making sure that the flow of goods by sea could pass through these narrow straight. And as the 13th century came to an end, the kingdom of Singasari came into direct

conflict with one of these much larger powers. In the year 1289, King Kertanagara of the Javanese kingdom of Singasari received a group of ambassadors at his court. They came finely dressed, haughty and proud. and said that they had come to speak on behalf of the world's most powerful man. That was the Mongol Emperor of China, Kublai Khan. As we saw in our 19th episode, from their humble beginnings on the Mongolian steppe, over the last century, the Mongols had embarked on a remarkable series of campaigns to conquer all of China, Persia and the Middle East,

along with much of what is today Russia and Eastern Europe. Founded by the warlord Chingis Khan, the Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous land empire in history and combined the speed and power of Mongol horsemen with the craftsmanship of Persia and the ingenuity and manpower of China. By this point, the enormous Mongol Empire had split into four separate domains, but the largest of these was still the world's biggest empire at the time.

That was the one ruled from China by the grandson of Chinggis Khan, the Emperor Kublai. This hybrid Chinese-Mongolian power was known as the Yuan dynasty. but by this time the empire had begun to struggle. The emperor Kublai was now well into his 70s and his domain was plagued by political and economic problems. The Mongol Empire had been built on conquest, but now its terrifying engine seems to have run out of fuel. Eight years earlier, Kublai's forces had for the third.

second time failed to capture a foothold on the islands of Japan. His invasions of Burma and Vietnam had also fizzled out, with the Mongol forces struggling in the tropical heat. The aging Mongol emperor desperately needed a victory, and he had been increasingly casting his gaze southwards, across the sea and towards the wealthy island of Java. The Chinese chronicle, the Yuan Shi, or history of Yuan, describes this strange and faraway land. The customs and products of this land are not much known, but as a rule, the barbarian countries over the sea produce many rare and valuable things, which fetch a high price in China. The inhabitants are strange, and their nature and speech are not understood by the Chinese. By that time, Java's king Kersnagarra had been defying Kublai Khan for nearly a decade.

Two previous ambassadorial visits to his court had been sent home without any tribute for the Mongol Khan, and the defiance of this small island was beginning to make the empire look weak. For this reason, in 1289, Kublai sent a new party of envoys. to Java, to meet with the king and give him a final ultimatum. They demanded that King Kertanagara swear an oath of fealty to the Mongol emperor, pay him a hefty tribute, and send members of his royal family to the Mongol court in China to act as hostages. But when these ambassadors arrived, they would not find King Kertanagara in an agreeable mood.

The Javanese of the time considered repeated requests of this kind to be exceedingly rude. Tomei Perez writes about the proud nature of the Javanese people. The Javanese are men who, if they write once and do not get a reply, do not write again, although it may be of great importance to them. The Javanese are daring men and determined to die. They are gamblers and play for high stakes. King Kertanagara was no different, and he would now make a tremendous gamble for the highest stakes possible.

He ordered that the Mongol ambassadors be punished. By some accounts, their faces were branded with hot irons and their ears cut off, a punishment typically reserved for. bandits and pirates. We can only imagine the rage of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan upon hearing this news and seeing the mutilated faces of his ambassadors. The history of Yuan describes what happened next.

In the second month of the 29th year of the Yuan dynasty, the emperor issued an order to the governor of Fujian, directing him to send an army to... to subdue Java, to collect soldiers to the number of 20,000, to send out a thousand ships and to equip them with provisions for a year, and with 40,000 bars of silver. The emperor said to them, when you arrive at Java, you must clearly proclaim that they have lately cut the face of the imperial envoy,

Monchi, and that you have come to punish them. This expedition set sail three years later in the year 1292. But it was to be a difficult voyage. The history of Yuan describes the troubles they encountered on the Java Sea. The wind was strong and the sea very rough, so that the ships rolled heavily

and the soldiers could not eat for many days. The forces to attack Java were driven by the wind to one island and many ships were wrecked. Over a hundred men who were ill from the long beating about in the storm were unable to leave with the rest of the expedition and were left there. And today the Chinese live mixed up with the native families. Despite their troubles on the voyage, the Mongol forces eventually arrived on the shores of Java

in the next year of 1293, ready to punish King Kertanagaro for defying the empire and mistreating its ambassador. But when they arrived, they would find their enthusiasm for revenge had been somewhat deflated. In fact, in the preceding year, the defiant King Kertanagara had been overthrown and killed by a usurper named Jaya Katong. Jaya Katong was the ruler of a city called Kediri, which controlled a province covering much of central Java. For a long time, Qadiri has actually been the predominant power on the island,

but after its king Dandan Gendis had been defeated in battle by the hero Ken Angrok, Kediri had been eclipsed by the rise of Singasari. Now Kediri was a vassal of King Kirtanagarra, but it was by far the most powerful of his subjects, and, As a result, never sat comfortably within his kingdom. The epic poem, the Deshavanana, describes the new ruler of Qadiri, Jayakatong, as cunning and malevolent. There was a vassal king, a villain known by the name of Jaya Katong, who there in the life.

land of Kediri, desired to replace the king and was outstandingly clever at laying schemes. At the time, the majority of King Kertanagata's forces were away from Java, fighting to increase his territory across the sea in Sumatra. And so, Jayakatong saw his chance. According to the Pararaton or Book of Kings, Jaya Katong was encouraged to seize the opportunity by one of his allies, who sent him a thinly veiled message. The secret letter said, My Lord, I respectfully tell you,

If His Majesty has any consideration and desire to hunt, now His Majesty has the chance to sow hunt. It will be the best and the most opportune moment. There is no danger. There are no tigers, wild buffaloes, nor snakes or even thorns. There is only one tiger, but it has no teeth. Urged on by this coded message, King Jayakotong rose in rebellion. His city of Qadiri was not far from the capital of Singasari,

but it was on the other side of a number of towering volcanic cones, mounts Kelud, Arjuna and Kawi. To strike at Singasari and depose the king, he could either march north through the easier territory of the northern plains or south through the rugged hill country, riven by gorges and ravines. The cunning Jaya Katong considered his options and came up with a plan. In 1292, alarming news reached King Kertanagara's court.

messengers would have burst into his throne room and breathlessly told him that an army had been seen rampaging through the farmlands to the north flying the distinctive white and red banners of Kediri they had taken the toothless tiger King Kertanagara completely by surprise

Now King Jaya Katong mankata now King Jaya Katong set out to attend His army, coming from the north, consisted of bad people. They were full of flags and sounds. The area to the north was devastated. Dismayed at the destruction, the king appointed one of his son-in-laws to lead what forces he had remaining in Java. A man named Radin-Vijaya.

This young man marched north with the remains of the royal army and met Jayakotong's rampaging forces in battle as one Javanese inscription carved at a place called Kudadu describes. When King Jayakatong's troops reached the village of Jasun Wung Kal, King Kerta Nagara sent his son-in-law, Radenwijaya to fight the enemy. After the battle, the enemy fled while suffering a great loss. Seemingly, they disappeared forever. Raden Vijaya had succeeded in the north and defended his father-in-law's kingdom, which he was set to one day inherit. But now the true strategy

of Jaya Katong was revealed. While this loud northern force had been burning and sacking their way through the north of the kingdom, a much larger second force had also advanced in the south. This army moved much more stealthily through the ravines and valleys of the Central Highlands, as the Pararaton describes. Then a large army descended from Kidiri. coming from the banks of the Aksa River, heading towards La Oaoua. They were not allowed to carry flags or make any noise.

Upon arrival at Siddabawana, they headed straight for Singasari. This force would go completely unnoticed, and they apparently arrived at the kingdom's capital of Kutaraja, while King Kertanagara was drunk. Drinking in Java was a serious business, and a large number of alcoholic beverages were consumed for pleasure, especially on special occasions. One Javanese poem known as the Sumana Santaka

describes the drinks available at an idealized wedding. The drinks poured continuously from rock crystal pitches, like found, of palm syrup. Sugar cane, wine and rice beer were drunk one after the other, like holy water and mead welling up from glass vessels. But the influence of tantric Buddhism meant that drinking was more than just for fun. In fact, it was at times a spiritual practice and even a royal duty. The king was required to take part in ceremonies known as Chakrapuja, which involved the drawing of geometric designs on the earth with coloured powder,

after which the ritual could take place. The historian Miranda Shaw describes the unfolding of one of these rituals. An elaborate array of offerings and foods are laid out. The participants dons special insignia-like bone ornaments and crowns, and use musical instruments of archaic design, such as skull drums, thigh-bone trumpets and conch horns, for inducing heightened awareness. Practitioners sit in a circle and partake of sacramental meat and wine served in skull cups.

The feast culminates in the performance of tantric dances and music that must never be disclosed to outsiders. While this ceremony was a crucial part of King Kertanagarra's royal calendar, the timing couldn't have been worse. Jayakotong's concealed force arrived outside the city walls without warning. They took the garrison by surprise and poured over the walls of the city while the king was thus engaged. The city was taken and King Kertanagar was killed.

The king's son-in-law, Radan Vijaya, was still celebrating his victory in the north and he must have been distraught when the news reached him. He had won his battle but lost the war, and now everything he had stood to inherit had also been taken by the usurper Jaya Katong. Radan Vajaya now retreated to the rainforests of the northeast and left the capital and the throne in the hands of the rebel Jaya Katong. The city of Kuturakhton. The city of Kuturakhton, the city of Kutur The heart of the Singasari kingdom was looted and depopulated, and many of its people taken back to Qediri. Others simply fled into the safety of the countryside and never returned. Some stone masons working on a new temple in the city simply dropped their tools in the middle of carving their reliefs and never came back to finish them.

After that, the city was left to crumble and be taken over by the encroaching forest. Now the dispossessed prince Radenbejaya and the rebel usurper Jayakotan faced off against one another. But it seems neither side of this civil war was confident in victory. Radenvajaya wasn't strong enough to march south and take his enemy's capital. of Kediri. And meanwhile, Jaya Katong couldn't leave his city and risk losing his shaky grasp on the throne. Both parties entered into an uneasy negotiation and eventually the rebel king settled for buying off Radan Vajaya. In exchange for laying down his arms, the prince

would be granted a piece of land, and there he would be allowed to build a city. Rud and Vajaya, now completely out of other options, and stranded in the wild rainforest, had no choice but to agree. But it must have been with no small amount of bitterness. The prince must have felt bitter, too, when he reached the piece of land that Jaya Katong had granted him. It was a wild overgrown jungle in the middle of a sparsely inhabited area known as the Tardik forest. But his fate was sealed and he swallowed his bitterness and ordered his people to begin clearing the land for construction and farming. The old-growth forests of Java were dense and wild, fed by the volcanic soil.

Colourful hornbills roosted in the treetops, while hidden high among the branches, Gibbons greeted the rising sun with their long mournful songs. Troops of long-tailed macaque monkeys leapt through the trees, while sambar deer crept through the shade of the forest. Great pythons lay coiled in the trees. the trees, and dangerous animals like the Javan leopard and wild boar lurked hidden in the green undergrowth. Everywhere could be heard the creaking of cicadas and frogs calling to one another from hidden pools.

At sunset, fruit bats rose in their thousands from their hidden caves, while fireflies would have been invisible at night. The trees were the most ancient life of the forest. Towering hardwoods like teak, ebony and tamarind would have risen here, interspersed with bamboo groves, strangler figs, palms, and tangled liana vines, all competing for every shaft of sunlight. But when they began cutting down this forest, Radan Vajaya's men found that a particular kind of tree grew there in great quantities. This was the tree that grows a fruit which in Indonesia is called Maja, and is known elsewhere as a wood apple, elephant apple, or Indian quints. These Maja fruits are pear-shaped and the size of a large grapefruit.

with a thick, hard, woody rind that needs to be cracked with a hammer. Inside is an orangey yellow pulp that gives off the scent of roses, but tastes sweet and bitter, a little like marmalade. The word for bitter in Javanese is pahit, and due to the large numbers of these maja fruits growing in this region, the people named this place Maja Pahit, or bitter wood apple, as the Pareratan describes. When the Madarees were building the village, a hungry man, lacking supplies while cutting down the forest, ate a Maja fruit. He found it bitter and threw away all the major fruit he had picked.

The Maja fruit there became known for its bitter taste, and the place was then named Majapahit. For Radan Vajaya and his people, the name Majapahit was a perfect encapsulation of the bitterness of their situation. They had lost a kingdom and gained a plot of wild jungle in Rwai. return, and all because of the treachery of Jaya Khatong. They all must have shared a single desire to throw out the rebel king and unite Java once more.

Their chance would come in the year 1293 when the sales of the Mongol fleet appeared on the horizon. The Mongol fleet that had been sent to punish the people of Jaze. Java, was led by a commander named Sher Bee. When he heard of the death of King Kertnagarra, he must have found himself in a quandary. His emperor demanded vengeance, and he and his men had sailed for months to get there. He must have feared leaving empty-handed. It was while he was puzzling over this situation that Shur-Bee was a problem.

approached by a messenger from the bitter lord of the new city of Majapahit, the dispossessed prince, Raden Vijaya. The Chinese history of Yuan describes the deal that the Mongols struck. At that time, Java carried on an old feud with the neighboring country, and the old king of Java had already been killed. The son-in-law, the former, Radin Vijaya, had attacked. Jayakotong but could not overcome him. He therefore retired to Majapahit,

and when he heard that Shibi and his army had arrived, he sent envoys with an account of his rivers and seaports and a map of the country, offering his submission and asking for assistance. Shibi then advanced with all his forces. For the Mongols, the arrangement was a neat way to solve their problem. They would help Radan Vigaya overthrow the rebel Jaya Katong and place him on the throne as a kind of puppet king, swearing allegiance to the Mongols in China. Then Shur B could return to Kublai Khan and say that he had brought the defiant little island back under control.

But among Radan Vajaya's men, it must have been a controversial. proposal. The Javanese were a proud people, and few had any desire to be ruled by the far-off Mongol emperor. Some may even have called Radin Vijaya a coward and a traitor. But all this time, he was hatching a plot of his own. The later chronicle of the Pararaton describes the ensuing war, referring to the Mongols as Tatars. The Tata army came out from the north, while the Majapahit armies came out from the east. King Jayakatong was confused, unsure which to guard.

Then he was attacked heavily from the north by the Tata army. King Jayakatong, who was fighting with. to the north, armed with a shield, was attacked together by the Tata people, and was finally caught and imprisoned by the Tatar's. The Mongols had now become kingmakers, Abdullau-Wasaf, describes how they put Radaanvajaya on the Javanese throne. His majesty, Koblai, put the old king's son-in-law, Vijaya, on the steps of the throne. He bestowed on him a ceremonial dress of honour and conferred on him much grace.

And in exchange for the payment of tribute and taxes of pearls and gold, he left the island in his hands. The Mongol Emperor Kublai must have been ecstatic when he heard the news. finally here was a victory he could show to his people. The wealthy island of Java would now be added to his imperial domain, along with its control of major shipping lanes, and perhaps now the fortunes of his teetering empire would finally turn around. But that was not to be the case. That's because the new king, Radan Vajaya, had no intention of ruling Jainjah.

as a vassal of Kublai Khan. And the moment he got to power, he turned on the Mongol forces who had helped him seize the throne. The Chinese history of Yuan gives a terse account of this disastrous turnaround. Radin Vajaya asked permission to return to his country

in order to prepare a new letter of submission to the emperor and to take the precious articles in his possession back. to court. Shubi consented to this and sent two officers with 200 men to go with him. But on the way,

Radin Vajaya killed the two officers and revolted again, after which he availed himself of the circumstance that the main army was returning to attack it from both sides. The Mongol army believed their mission to be complete and were already packing their ships to leave.

The seasonal winds were about to change direction, and if they didn't move fast, they might become stranded on Java for another six months. When Radan Vajaya's soldiers burst out of the forest in ambush, firing arrows and darts from their blowguns, the Mongol Yuan troops were taken completely by surprise. The Javanese epic poem Beaumontaka describes a battle of this kind. They were thrown into disarray and in fear the demon army fled and many of the demons and their leaders were struck dead. They withdrew in haste to the shelter of the fort but were pursued. Others shuddering sought a way of resisting, but like the strength and, hit by arrows, floundered about.

out, and all of them left in fear and ran away. The whole fort was in up-war, and all shouted in confusion. The fires glowed and blazed up frightfully like an erupting volcano. Thousands were killed, and the remains of the Mongol army fled in disarray back to the ships, as the history of Yuan describes. Shee P was left behind and was cut off from the rest of the army. He was forced to fight his way back to the ships for a distance of more than 100 miles. At last he embarked again and reached China on a voyage of 68 days.

Of his soldiers, more than 3,000 men had died. When news of this betrayal reached the Emperor Kublai Khan, we can only imagine his rage. He ordered the general, Sherby, to receive 17 lashes, and commanded a third of his property to be confiscated as punishment for his failure. He ordered his ministers to begin immediate preparations for a full-scale invasion of Java with an even larger army of 100,000 men. But these plans would never come to fruition. The disaster in Java would be the last campaign of Kublai Khan's role,

reign, and he died the next year in February of 1294 at the age of 78. After that, the Mongol-Yuan dynasty would enter into a steady and irrevocable decline, and would collapse entirely little more than 70 years later. One great empire was coming to an end, but in its collapse it gave way for the rise of what was now the undisputed major power on the island of Java, and in the archipelago of Nusan Tarah, the new power of Majapahit. On the 15th day of the month of Kartika, the eighth month of the Hindu calendar, Radanvajaya was crowned king in the palace of Majapahat. What had once been a stretch of wild jungle

was now the beating heart of Java's most powerful kingdom. The Chinese history of Song described the appearance of the kings of Java and from this we might imagine how this new king looked on the day of his coronation. The king has hair in a knot upon the top of his head. He wears golden bells a silk row and shoes of leather.

He sits on a square couch and his functionaries who see him daily, salute him three times on going away. When he goes out, he rides on an elephant or sits in a carriage, and from five to 700 soldiers follow him. When the people see the king, they squat down until he has passed. Radenvejaya would rule as the king of Majapahit for 16 years, but his reign would be a troubled one. From the earliest days of his rule, he faced rebellions, many of them from men who had fought alongside him against Jayakotong and the Mongols.

Many of these disagreements were sparked over the question of who would become the king's Mahapati, a powerful and influential position that combined elements of a prime minister and head general, and essentially acted as the king's right hand. Whatever his skills as a diplomat, it seems Radin Vigaya struggled to manage the ambitions of the men who served under him. For this reason, he spent much of his rule putting down rebellions all over Java. In an effort to cement the legitimacy of his new dynasty, he would marry the remaining three daughters of his dead father-in-law, Kurtanagarra, and ensure that the royal line of succession would pass entirely through him.

But still the problems persisted, and the new kingdom teetered on the brink of destruction. When Radan Vigaya died in the year 1309, he must have hoped that his only son, Jaya Negra, would set things right. But due to the apparently deficient nature of Jaya Negra's character, this would not be the case. King Jaya Negra would rule for nearly 20 years after the death of his father, but he was a widely disliked character, so much so that the author of the Chronicle, the Pararaton, would give him the...

nickname Kala Gammet, meaning weak villain. Meanwhile, the Javanese folk tradition has remembered him by the name Bajang Ratu or Dwarf King, referencing either his short stature or simply the uninspiring nature of his rule. Jaya Negara faced multiple attempts on his life, and widespread rebellions even worse than his fathers, the most serious of which, was led by a man named Kuti. This uprising became so dangerous that the king was forced to abandon his capital for a time, and it's during this time of upheaval that a man would walk on to the historical stage who would turn around the fortunes of this new and struggling kingdom.

He was a soldier who led the king's bodyguard during the Kuti rebellion, and gained a position of trust in the royal court. His name was Gaja Mada. Gaja Mada's name came from the old Javanese word Gaja, meaning elephant, and Mada, which is a difficult to translate word describing a state of furious intoxication. This probably alluded to the period of a few weeks every year when male elephants enter their breeding cycle called must, and their testosterone levels explode.

During this time, a bull elephant seeps liquid from a gland around its ears and becomes extremely aggressive and dangerous. Elephants had long been used for warfare in Java. They formed the centerpiece of any army and allowed royals and generals to command the battlefield from an elevated position. Although prehistoric fossils of native elephants have been found in Java, this species had long been extinct by this point, and during the medieval period, elephants were imported from other lands.

They were enormous, expensive and prestigious. Their tusks sometimes adorned with metal implements to make them even more deadly, and their sides often oiled before going into battle to prevent the enemy from climbing on their backs. So this commander's name would have generated images of strength, vitality, and an unstoppable force. And by all accounts, it would be a good fit. Although the Elephant General Gajah Mada would eventually rise through the new kingdom of Majapahit to become one of its most influential statesman, his birth was relatively unexceptional.

We know little about his early life, but he was likely born into a poor family in the area around the city of Majapaiat, and his father was possibly killed in the war with the Mongols. But he would prove his worth and become the head of the king's elite royal bodyguard, the Bayankara, After successfully protecting the king through the Kuti rebellion, Gajamada would be rewarded with the governorship of a small province. Finally, he would be named Mahapati, or the right hand of the king. The epic poem, the Desha Varnana, describes this warrior statesman in the following terms. Gajamada is the excellent party of Maja Pahit, an officer Valid discerning in tactics with a firm foundation and loyalty and devotion to the king, eloquent and skilled in speech, polite and patient, constantly exerting himself, unremitting.

He watches over the king's position as supreme ruler of the world. King Jaya Negra was clearly a man ill-suited to rule, but with Gajamada's help, he was able to keep hold of his kingdom by his fingernails. And it's in the last decade of his reign that a visitor from a far-off land arrived on the shores of Java. He was a traveler from the northern Italian region of Friulia, then a territory of the Holy Roman Empire, and his name was Odurik of Pordonon. Around the year 13, 18, Oderick had departed from Venice and spent the next decade or so

travelling all over Asia, passing through Persia and seeing the ruins of the ancient city of Persepolis. He then sailed through the Strait of Hormuz to India and from there through the Straits of Malacca to Bursepol. Borgno, Sumatra and Java. When he returned home, he dictated the memoirs of his travels in a work entitled The Relatio de Mirabilibus Orientalium Tatarorum,

or the account of the marvels of the eastern Tatar's. In this text, he provides a remarkable snapshot of life in Java around the year 1320. There is an island which is called Java, which is a good 3,000 miles around. The king of this island has under him seven crowned kings as vassals. This island is very populous, and is the second best of all islands that be on the earth. One finds there coves, pepper, nutmegs, and many other precious spices that they grind there and all manner of necessities in great quantity.

Odrik was particularly impressed by the royal palace of Jaya Negra, which was richly decorated in gold, mined from the volcanic mountain ranges. The king of this island lives in a marvellous and very large palace. Its steps are of gold and silver alternately. The paving tiles are likewise one gold and the next silver. The walls are covered with plates of gold, and there are mounted men sculpted out of gold on them with golden circles round their heads, like the diadems we make for the figures of saints. And these circles are full of precious stones. To put it briefly, this is the richest and loveliest palace that there be in the whole world.

Oderick also records that many still remembered the war with the Mongol Yuan dynasty of China, now nearly 30 years in the past. The great Khan of Cathay, who is the sovereign emperor of all the Tartars, has often made war with this king and often brought battle to him, but this king has always defeated him. But despite the glowing report of Oderick, and the ongoing help, of the elephant general Gajamada, Jaya Negra's reign was a poor one. He was so insecure in his rule that he at one point seems to have considered marrying two of

his own sisters, named Diwiyat and Diar Gittarja, to ensure that no rivals could arise from the royal line. When opposition to this plan exploded in the court and their mother loudly produced, tested, King Jaya Negra gave up on this idea, but he still forbade his sisters from marrying anyone else. King Jaya Negra had two sisters born of the same mother. He did not permit them to be married to others, wishing to keep them for himself. Therefore, no prince dared remain openly at Majapahit. Any man who appeared was driven away lest he seek their hands, and the other nobles kept themselves hidden in fear.

Jaya Negara confined these two princesses for years in the women's quarters of the palace and prevented anyone from seeing them. It was a microcosm of a rule that seems to have been at every turn paranoid, petty and authoritarian. Over the course of his reign, the kingdom of Majapahit would falter. The island of Bali, just a short hop over the Sunda Strait, slipped out of his control around this time, and people must have feared that the whole kingdom would now disintegrate, and the land would return to destructive civil war.

But that was not to be the case. That's because of a woman who had made her name standing up to King Jaya Negara, the mother of the two imprisoned princesses, a woman named Dya Gaiatri. Diyah was a title that in old Javanese was given to princes and princesses of the royal line and Diyar Gaiatri had been the youngest daughter of King Kertanagara, the last king of Singasari. She had also been the most senior wife of the founder of Majapahit, Raden Vijaya, and all her life she had been a quiet force behind the lives of her.

of these great men. As a girl, she had watched her father brand the face of the Mongol envoys, and then saw her home of Singasari destroyed by the rebellion of Jayakatong. She had fled through the rice fields to safety, while her home burned behind her. As a young woman, she had watched the war with the Mongols unfold, then seen her husband found the kingdom of Majapahit, which now stood as his lasting legacy. By now she was a widow in her 50s and had retired to become a Buddhist nun in a forest monastery on the slope of a nearby mountain. But she was still known by the title Rajapatni, a word which means wife of kings,

and which gave her the prestige of a royal matriarch. The bumbling king Jaya Negara was her late husband's son by another less senior wife, and we can only imagine how Diagiatry felt now, watching from her monastery as he veered the empire from crisis to crisis and kept her two daughters under lock and key. she must have feared that the legacy that she and Radin Vijaya had built was about to be destroyed. But she refused to let that happen. To help her free her daughters, reclaim the kingdom and put it back on course, this royal matriarch would enlist the help of the man who had recently been rising

in prominence in the kingdom of Majapahat. The raging elephant who had become indispensable to the feckless king, the soldier and statesman who went by the name Gajamada. In the year 1328, it seems they took their chance. According to the official story related in the Royal Chronicle, the Pararaton, that year King Jaya Negra was suffering from an unpleasant condition, a painful boil or swelling of some kind. And when he summoned his doctor, a man named Tanka,

he apparently forgot that he had previously insulted or taken advantage of this man's wife. Enraged at this, the doctor Tanka took his revenge, as the Pareratan records. Tanka's wife was summoned before Gajama'iore Tanka's wife spread word that the king had treated her dishonorably. Tanka was summoned before Gajamada. At that time, King Jaya Negra was suffering from a swelling and could not leave his chambers. Tanka was ordered to perform an operation with a sharp lancet.

and he approached beside the royal bed. Tanka stabbed the king's boil once, then again with the blade, but the weapon would not burst it, for the king wore around his neck an amulet of protection. Then the king was asked to set this aside. He took off the charm and laid it beside the bed. Tanka stabbed him again,

and this time the blade burst the boil. But Tanka continued stabbing him, and he did not stop until the king died there upon the bed. The doctor-turned-a-taniya-tun-tendu-tanku-en-a-mok-siro-ring-pangulingan. The doctor-turned-assassin, Tanka, was swiftly killed by Gajamada, which meant, perhaps conveniently, that his side of the story could never be told. As historians, we can never actually know what happened in that room, but the slightly fanciful story involving a magical amulet and a vengeful doctor has left many historians wondering if the true story wasn't a simpler one,

that Gajamada and the Dowager Queen Dja Gaiatri had simply plotted together to kill the king, framing the poor doctor. Whether they had planned the whole thing or just seized the opportunity on a stroke of good luck, Gajamada and the Dowager matriarch Diagaiatri went on to seize control of the kingdom. And it seems King Jaya Negra was sufficiently disliked that few people were all that concerned about what might actually have happened to him. But the royal matriarch and the general prime minister faced a problem. Gajamada himself had risen from humble beginnings,

and as a commoner he had absolutely no legitimacy to rule under Javanese law. And while Dja Gaiatri was officially the next in line to the throne, she had already taken a vow to become a Buddhist nun, a position that prevented her from holding any person, positions of earthly power, and she had no sons who might take the throne. In fact, the histories record that she had only given birth to her two daughters, who were now allowed to leave the palace for the first time in years. The Desha Varnana describes these women in conventionally poetic terms.

And then the king, Jaya Nagara was left behind as king of Majapakhait, with his princesses, his younger sisters, who were the daughters of the worthy Raja Patni, the incomparable. They were both of the greatest beauty, surpassing the women of heaven. The older was princess of Jewana, and the younger ruled as princess of Daha. The Raja Patnii Dja Gaiatri soon appointed her young daughter, Diagitaja, to rule as queen in her place. Varelli, in the Shaka Yirahir, moon arrows two form. The princess of Jiwana succeeded in Majapahit as queen. It was the disposition.

of the great Raja Patni, that she should be the auspicious leader of the world, distinguished from others. It was she who made her ruler and watched over all her affairs. The princess soon took to the throne, and with her mother watching over her, she would be a far more capable ruler than her feckless brother. She would take a royal name that meant the exalted goddess of the three worlds who the glory of Vishnu radiates. Tribuvana Vijaya Tungadavi. Tribuvana was her mother's daughter.

She was a natural stateswoman and was able to stabilize the kingdom after the period of poor leadership that had preceded her. And she seems to have learned from the mistakes of both her father, and brother. Early in her reign she faced a rebellion by two men named Sardang and Keta, and a conflict arose in her court over which of her generals would lead her army into battle. These kinds of political disputes had plagued the last two kings, but Tribuvana resolved it in a simple way. Rather than show favor to one general over the other, She simply led the army herself, as the Deshavanana describes.

In Shaka Year, fires, Arrow's sons, the enemies were destroyed. Sadeng and Keita were defeated, overcome by her personal retinue. Further in the Shaka Year, arrows seasons, eyes, naval. The king of Bali was evil and base. He was attacked with an army, broken and completely crushed. Every kind of evil-doer was fearful and made off quickly. Tribuvana's early successes on the battlefield gave her a taste for conquest. And over her rule, this queen of Java would embark on a massive expansion of Majapahit.

to spread its influence all over the archipelago. To embark on this mission, she appointed as her Mahapati or Prime Minister, the general who had done more than perhaps anyone else to keep the young kingdom together, and who had worked with her mother to depose the previous king. This was the rampaging elephant himself, Gaja Maddo. By all accounts, Gajamada rose to this challenge. Spurred on by his warlike queen, the Pararaton records him swearing a remarkable oath of conquest before the entire royal court. Gajamada swore, until I have conquered the entire Nusantara archipelago, I will eat no spices, nor take any rest.

If I have conquered the Gorham Islands and the island of Seram, the kingdom of Tanjangpura, the kingdoms of Haru and Pahang, the Donpul regency, the island of Bali, the lands of Sunda, along with the Tumasik and Palembang of Sumatra, then and only then will I eat spices and take my rest. Over the next three decades, Gajamada would lead the armies, of Majapahit across the seas, and would bring ever more lands under the influence and control of the empire. The Italian traveller Ludovico di Vathema describes the weapons of the Javanese that he saw when he visited sometime later around 1505.

They carry bows and the greater part darts of cane. Some also use blowpipes with which they throw poison darts, and they throw them with the mouth, and however little they draw blood, the wounded person dies. The 12th century Javanese poem, the Boman Taka, describes an idealized army marching to battle, and gives a sense for what it would have been like to see the forces of Gajamada, landing on the shores of each island in turn and preparing for war. Their weapons were spears and lances, and there were also thousands of bows. Then came the riding elephants, and their weapons were spears, lances, javelins, and clubs.

Many heroes were mounted on horses, skilled riders in horseback combat. The spears and very sharp knives when whirled glowed brightly. Men came bearing lances and shields and others with slingshots. Their casings shone, wrapped in silk and gilded, and their various jackets were like clouds traveling over the earth. The Majapahit forces of Queen Tribuvana Vijayatungadevi crossed the sea to the east and reconquered the small island of Bali in 1343. After that, they went north.

northwest and absorbed most of the coastal regions of the larger island of Sumatra into her growing empire. Other kingdoms were incorporated peacefully into the empire as tributary subjects, such as the large island of Sulawesi, whose name means iron island, on account of the high-quality iron it produced and exported around the region. The later poem, the Desha Varnana, lists at length all of the island territories that were either conquered by Majapahit or agreed to pay it tribute without a fight. The islands and lesser islands in the first place coming under the territory of the Malay islands are Jambi and Palambang, Karitang, Tiba and Dharma Shaya following them. Gandis, Kawas, Manang Kabwa, Sayak, Wreckan, Kampa and Paneh, Kampa, Haru and Mandarhealing,

Tumihang, Palak and Barat, Luas and Samudra, as well as Lemuri, Batan, Lampung and Barus. Those are the main ones among the Malay Islands. All these countries are subject and obedient. The great queen Tribuvana Vijayatungad Devi would rule for 22 years, and her reign saw the rise of Majapahit to a true Thalasocracy, or an empire of the sea. but she must have known that her reign couldn't last forever. In 1350 her mother, the great royal matriarch Diagiatry died, most likely in her forest monastery after a long and accomplished life.

Her daughter Tribuvana had been ruling ostensibly on behalf of her mother, and it seems that once the old woman died, her situation would always. also become untenable. But luckily, by this time, she had had a son, who was now the first in the royal line, and he had just come of age at 16 years old. His name was Hayam Wurok. When this young prince, Hayam Wuruk, came to the throne, he would have been crowned with enormous ceremony and celebration. The historical The historian Herald van der Linder describes the rituals associated with a Javanese coronation. At sunset on the eve of the first day of the first month of the year,

priests entered the inner pavilion of the royal palace, followed by acolytes chanting sacred Sanskrit texts. King Hayam Wuruk sat on the throne in the amazing pavilion, where matted-haired Rishi hermits and religious leaders sprinkled holy water over him to wash away the evils of the past. As darkness descended, oil lamps were lit around the palace, a spectacular sight. At the striking of a gong, Gaja Mada led the senior ministers to a large pavilion in front of the palace gates before a growing crowd.

Hayamurok was a multi-talented king. He was apparently an accomplished singer and dancer. and a lover of Shadow Puppet plays. The poet of the Desha Wanana describes the auspicious omens that took place upon the birth of this prince as the island's great volcanoes rumbled their approval. At his birth in the Shaka Year, seasons, arrow, suns, the prince was already destined to be king.

The signs of his miraculous and extraordinary nature were that that earth quaked and rumbled. There was a rain of ash. Thunder and lightning zigzag through the sky. Mount Campo erupted and the wretched evil doers around it were annihilated and died without a gasp. Such is the nature of his reign that the whole of the land of Java has been humbled

and bows down in submission. Like her mother before her, Tribovana did not completely vanish from political life when she stepped away from her throne. Throughout the rest of her life, she would act as a counsellor and advisor for her son, and together they would usher in what is widely regarded as the golden age of the Empire of Majapahat. When Hayam Wurok came to the throne, he inherited a capital

city of no little magnificence. Over the preceding decades, it had been the site of constant construction and now bloomed with palaces and temples, complete with pillared audience halls and pavilions. In this era, all roads led to Majapahit, and its status as a crossroads of Java wasn't just a metaphor. The epic poem Deshavanana describes the royal palace. Let us describe the layout of the awe-inspiring royal palace. Its wall is of red brick.

It goes right around, and is thick and high. On the western side, the palace mouth faces onto the great, square in the midst of deep encircling with buddrys in rows and neatly shaped, all thick with festoons. On the north is the ceremonial gate, splendid and extraordinary, its doors of iron adorned with countless designs. To the south of this is the crossroads, otherworldly in its elegance. From these crossroads, great highways snaked off into the country in all directions. It was part of the usual ceremony of kingship that the king of Majapahit would routinely make journeys around the whole of Java, meeting his citizens and seeing the sights of the land, visiting villages, holy shrines,

and reminding vassal kingdoms about who was in charge. It was on one of these journeys that King Hayam Wurok brought his court poet, a man named Prapanka, who would go on to be the author of the poem Deshavannana. Propanka speaks of the honour in his poem, describing himself in the third person. In the Shaka year moon snake's sun in the month of Baja Pada, At the fullness of the moon, King Hayamuruk went on a journey to Lamajan to take note of all there was to see. All the princes of Java, with their wives again, went with the king, with servants and vehicles, officials and officers from the whole of Majapahit, and in particular the king's priests and court poets accompanied him.

So this man by the pen name of Prapanca joined in the pursuit of beauty, attending at the feet of the king. According to his own account, Propanka seems to have embarked on writing the Deshavannana because he felt unable to write the kind of poetry that the more senior court poets were producing, usually heroic epics about the Hindu gods, as he describes in the following extract. His motive was, after all, to follow the king wherever he went in the hope of being favoured, but he still does not know how to achieve poetic effects and is most unlikely to succeed in composing a song on the writing tablet. And this is the reason why he describes all the places passed through and sets out their names in order along the road. Ironically, the Desha Varnana is today one of the most famous pieces of literature to survive from the Javanese golden era,

and it is by far the most useful to historians. Today, the poem is a remarkable source that captures a snapshot of life on Java during the reign of Hayam Wurok. And for all of this, we have the poet Propanker's apparent inferiority complex to thank. Along their journey, Propanka watched the king carefully and noted down the beauty of the land they passed through. At Dampar and at Patanjungan, the king relaxed and made his way along the beach. To the east his path followed the level sands, which was so firm that the carriages could drive over them. He made a halt on the banks of a lake, thick with white and red lotuses in flower, and was absorbed in watching the giant shrimps moving about in the limpid water, clearly visible in the depths.

But the royal journey wasn't always an easy one. In his text we get a sense for the challenges of moving overland during the rainy season. The road, just at the point where it runs northward from the sea, over its whole length, was rough and narrow. On top of this, it rained, so that the steep places became slippery, and some of the carriages came loose and collided with each other. Due to these challenges, travel by road was largely only possible during the dry season. For the rest of the year, goods were transported by river, taking rice and other export crops downstream

to the great port cities on barges. These boats would then sail back up the rivers with luxury goods imported from China, India and elsewhere. These port cities were the beating heart of the Majapahit Empire, and the large numbers of Chinese coins found in their archaeological sites testify to the booming trade that went on. At each of these ports, the sails of hundreds of ships would be visible, coming and going with countless trade goods. And among these, the most lucrative were the spices grown on the islands of the archipelago that were prized all around the world, such as pepper, cardamom and ginger. But the rarest of all were cloves and nutmeg. Clothes and nutmeg were brought to

Majapahit on large ships that sailed from a small group of islands, which are called the islands of Maluku, and would come to be known as the Spice Islands. While cloves were grown all over these islands, nutmeg was extremely limited. in cultivation, occurring only on 10 islands in the tiny archipelago of Banda. Wild nutmeg had long been harvested by the peoples native to the Banda Islands, but it was a particularly difficult plant to cultivate. Nutmeg seeds will fail to germinate if they aren't planted in soil within a week, making them difficult to transport by sea,

And the particular environment of volcanic soil that they evolved in means that they are fragile and difficult to nurture to full size. As a result of these difficulties, the Banda Islanders claimed that Nutmeg was simply a gift of the gods and could not be cultivated by human hands. Instead, they would travel to the parts of the forest where it grew wild to collect its prized seeds, and they kept the location of these groves, a carefully guarded secret. But despite its extreme rarity, the fragrant nutmeg seeds that these islanders harvested travelled all around the world. The spice would reach Constantinople in the 6th century, and instantly became a sought-after

commodity and mark of luxury. Nutmeg would even be mentioned as a spice to flavour in the sixth century, and instantly became a sought-after commodity, and mark of luxury. English ale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which was written during the time of the Majapahit Empire. At times, Nutmeg would sell on the other side of the world for more than an equivalent weight of gold. As a result of this global trade, the rulers of the Banda Islands would come to be known around the region as the Orangqaya, or rich men. and the entirety of this trade passed through the major ports of Majapahat. To transport these goods across the seas and oceans, the sailors of Majapahit voyaged in large vessels, known as Jongs. These were the descendants of the Borobudur ships that had sailed to Madagascar and

Eastern Africa in the preceding centuries. And by this time, some of the Borobudur ships that had sailed to Madagascar and Eastern Africa in the preceding centuries. And by this time, some of these ships had reportedly grown to phenomenal proportions. Reports on the true size of these vessels vary, but some sources record jongs that reached a size of 80 metres long. They were built with layered hulls that made them exceptionally strong, and were able to transport a thousand soldiers and more than a thousand tons of cargo. The site of these massive Jongs astonished European explorers when they arrived in the archipelago in the 16th century.

One Portuguese admiral and explorer, Afonzo de Albuquerque, wrote about encountering one of these enormous vessels in 1511. The whole fleet went back along the coast in the same order as they had first come. And when they were in the latitude of the Powder Island, they sighted two very large junks and gave chase to them. One of these, which was from India, surrendered immediately. But the other junk would not do so. The Portuguese gave chase to the massive Javanese ship and made several attempts to board it.

But these were all unsuccessful. The Europeans even opened. fire on the Jong with their cannons, but found that the three or four layers of wood with which the Javanese built their ships simply absorbed the cannon fire and the vast vessel sailed on. In a letter written sometime later, one of the Portuguese captains, Fernao Pires de Andrada describes the massive Javanese ship. The junk was the largest seen by men of these parts so far. It carried a thousand fighting men on board, and your lordship can believe me that it was an amazing thing to see, because beside it, our own vessel, the Annunciada,

did not look like a ship at all. We attacked it with bombards, but even the shots of the largest cannon did not pierce it below the waterline. It was so monstrous that no man had ever seen the like. Eventually, the smaller and more maneuverable Portuguese ships were able to disable the larger Jong by breaking its two massive rudders. This finally brought the men on board to surrender. The Europeans were so impressed with the size of these Javanese jongs that they sailed one of them all the way back home, where it was used for a time as a warship in the fleet. guarding the Gibraltar Strait. Although we have little reliable data on when the ships of the Javanese reached such a massive

scale, it is reasonable to assume that they were at least approaching that size during the reign of Hayam Wadok, when the power of Majapahit was at its peak. These enormous ships would have been the crucial backbone of the Majapahit Empire, with their enormous capacity for cargo, and their ability to transport thousands of men, horses and even elephants from island to island, wherever they were needed. And of course, they would have made a powerful statement about the power and prestige of the empire of Majapahit. By now, the Madhapahit sphere of influence stretched over the sea for thousands of car. kilometers, and they had monopolized the lucrative spice routes from the Malaku Islands

so that their wealth would have swelled to previously unimagined heights. Over this period, Majapahit began to take on the form of what has been called a Mandala Empire. In Sanskrit, the word Mandala means circle. And it has come to describe a style of traditional geometric pattern used to represent a kind of map of the universe. Reflected in the shapes of the Buddhist temples at Sewu and Borobudur, these are designed to help an adherent achieve a state of meditation.

Although the forms of these mandalas differ, many show the sacred mountain Meru at the center of the world, sometimes surrounded by the world ocean. Around this is a square palace with four gates, and then a circle representing the continents outside it, the heavens and the world of the gods forming the outside of the pattern. The mandala presents the vision of a world ordered in a strict hierarchy radiating out from the center, and so it's no surprise it has long been used as a way. of visualizing royal power. As early as the 4th century BC, the Indian writer Coutilia, in his work the Arth Shastra,

described what he called the Raja Mandala, or Mandala of kings, in which a powerful ruler will bring other less powerful ones under his control. This idea has become popular among modern historians, seeking to understand how Southeast Asian states of this time were organized. And there's some evidence that this is also how the Javanese of the time would have thought of their world. The epic poem, the Deshavanana,

describes the structure of the Majapahit Empire, like the solar system, with power radiating out from the center, like the rays of the sun. The royal compound at Majabahit, the incomparable is as sun and the moon. And the courtyards of the many quarters, each with its own particular charm, are rays of light in relation to it. Like the stars and planets are the various remaining cities, Daha the foremost, and the other islands and all the surrounding countries which seek refuge and in numbers come into the presence.

It's still an open to-haw-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-mar. It's still an open question exactly how much power Majapahit exerted over its vassal states. Some empires, like the Roman Empire, ruled with direct control. When they conquered a new area, they erased previous forms of government and social structures. and imposed their own on absorbed territories. But we don't see much evidence of that in the case of Majapahit. Subordinate kings and rulers on the outer islands certainly paid symbolic homage to the king in Majapahat.

They likely provided an agreed-upon tribute each year and a certain number of soldiers and ships for any military action undertaken by the emperor. empire. But beyond that, it's likely that the lords of each island and tributary kingdom continued to exert more or less total control over their own affairs. This arrangement suited everyone well. Cultural identities on each individual island were relatively distinct and deeply entrenched. Local languages and customs were different on each island, and few people around the region wanted to be directly ruled by a Javanese governor or to have Javanese troops

stationed in their hometowns. And for the Majapahit, appointing governors and stationing troops to put down rebellions and uprisings would have been an unwelcome expense. The Mandala's structure was cheap and efficient. While times were good and the empire was strong, it ensured a maximum level of compliance and cooperation from subjects with the lightest possible touch, and allowed everyone to profit from the great traffic of trade that flowed along the great arteries of the sea. From the center of the Mandala in Majapahit, fleets of Jong ships sailed back and forth among the islands, bringing trade and tribute back to its booming ports. But as with any empire, sometimes its subjects had to be kept in line, as the Deshavanana describes.

The other countries, all that were under the care of Java, obeyed the king's commands, and each was true in what it did. Furthermore, any that transgressed his commands was attacked and wiped out completely by the squadrons of the various valiant naval officers. One such example occurred in the year 1375, when one of the subject kings of the empire seemed to get ideas above his station. The troublesome king in question was a man named Adityovarman, who had been put in power by Majapahit on the large island of Sumatra,

a short hop over the sea from Java. Adityovarman was something of a narcissist. He was fond of commissioning massive statues of himself, larger than any that have been uncovered of other kings in the region, and over the preceding years, he had begun to act in an insubordinate manner. At one point he had a stone tablet inscribed that showed a list of kings.

and he had the insolence to place his own name above King Hayam Wuroks. This all would have caused rumbles of consternation at the court of Majapahit. But Adityovamun would go too far when he sent his own envoys to the court of the Emperor of China, bypassing his king completely. One Javanese epic poem, the Prata Yuda, describes the rage of the demon king Ravana upon getting news of the death of his sons. But we might imagine it a fitting description of Hayam Wurok's reaction when he heard that Aditya Vaman had been going over his head

and making overtures to China without consulting him. The monarch was furiously enraged. He gnawed his mustaches. His countenance was inflamed, and his bosom red as the Warawari flower. Sweat exuded from every paw. The angles of his mouth trembled. His eyelashes stuck together. He vaunted.

He called aloud. He challenged all his enemies to meet him at once. Hayam Waruk summoned the Chinese ambassador to Sumatra, and after lambasting him, apparently had the man beheaded, and his head sent back to China in a bag. In perhaps a sign of the power of Majapahit at this time, the Chinese didn't respond in kind. Instead, they bashfully apologized for their mistake

and would eventually send a gift of fine fabrics and a batch of paper money to the Javanese court to make amends. But from the vain king Adityovamun, no apology would suffice. King Hayam Wuruk amassed his army, as many as 300 warships, and according to the Chronicles, 200,000 soldiers to crush this upstart king. And although we don't hear what happened to him, Adityovarman never appears in any other written records or inscriptions again. Now Hayam Wuruk was on. the warpath. After crushing Adityovarman, the Majapahit fleet rounded on another problematic

vassal. This man ruled the walled settlement of Singapore, now the modern city of Singapore, and his name was Paramesvara. After a month-long siege, the Majapahit forces broke through the walls and slaughtered the inhabitants. To this day, legend has it that the iron-rich, reddish-clay soil of Singapore was stained that colour by the blood spilled during this massacre. Paramesvara, the king of Singapore, fled north to the area of the Malacca Strait. But he would remain a thorn in the side of Majapahat for some time to come. The Adityavaman incident shows that the empire of Majapahit was held together by trade and diplomacy

and the promise of mutual peace and prosperity, but it was also very much backed by the threat of force. Over this period, the royal capital would flourish. But this golden age of Majapahit could not last forever, and its end of the capital would flourish. and its end would come about after the death of its last great king, Hayam Wurok. King Hayam Wuruk died likely in the year 1389, and with him the light began to leave the court of Majapahat. The great statesman and general Gajamada had died 25 years earlier, and Hayam Wuruk's mother, Queen Tribuvana Vijayatungadvi,

had also died a decade or so after that. There now seems to have been something of a vacuum of talent in the Majapahit court. Exasibating the problem was the complexity of Javanese succession laws, which had developed to deal with the fact that kings of this time always had multiple wives. In ideal circumstances, the law would unambiguously favor one successor over another, and there would be no confusion about who would take the throne. But fate had dealt Hayamuruk, a bad hand when it came to his succession. He had failed to have a son

by his principal wife, and so his closest legal heir was therefore a woman named Kusimo Vadani, his daughter by a lower-ranking wife. She had married a man named Vigmsi. She had married a man named Vikramovodna, and so it seemed likely that he would become king, despite having only married into the royal family. The Dashavannana describes this couple in glowing terms. They have as daughter, Princess Kusuma Wadani, a blameless young princess, who's paid homage in the royal compound of Kabbalan, and is of the utmost charm. Prince Wickramo Wadana will be her proper match, as everyone says they will be like a god and goddess when they marry later, bringing happiness to people's hearts.

But Hayam Wuruk did also have a son by a secondary, less senior wife. In the histories he is known only by the title Bray Virabumi, or the lord of a place called Birabumi. Being a man and the direct descendant of Hayam Wuruk also gave him a strong claim to the throne, despite his mother being of a lower rank than Kusima Vodonis. And this situation of two people having a comparable claim was a recipe for disaster. Hayamuruk seems to have sensed the danger while he was still alive. In an attempt to remedy the situation and cool off the rivalry

between these two men, he divided the empire into the Western Court, the capital of Majapahit, and the Eastern Court, where the Lord of Virabumi held sway. The exact details of this arrangement are unknown, but it was a clear and obvious rift, now splitting the kingdom's Javanese heartlands in two. The situation seems to have gotten so bad that at one point the Chinese-crow-examese-heartlands, Chronicle, the Ming Shi Lu, notes that the two different courts were each sending their envoys to meet independently with the Emperor's ambassadors. Like the rumblings and earthquakes before a great eruption, the signs of trouble must have been obvious to anyone who was paying attention.

And in the years that followed, the rift would tear apart the land of Java and the empire it rules. The name for the conflict that follows is found in the chronicle of the Pararaton. There it is called the regreg, a word that in Javanese means bit by bit, and can be used to describe something falling apart, piece by piece. As we will see, this was a fitting name, as the conflict would bring about the conflict would bring about the steady coming apart of the Mandala Empire of Majapahat, that had held together over the last century. The Pararaton describes the conflict that unfolded. They came to blows. There was division, and men died in the division. After three years, there

then arose again the reg-reg war. Both sides prepared themselves. All the lords asked themselves, whom shall I follow? Then the fighting began. The reg-reg-war would rage for two years, and over this time neither side could gain the upper hand. The Parah Ratton, describes the back-and-forth nature of the fighting. First, the Western Palace was defeated. Their lords were hard-pressed. In distress, they wished to flee. Then they said, do not flee yet.

Let us fight them. Then the Eastern Palace was defeated. The strength of the Mandala Empire system was in how light a hold it exerted on its vassals. It was a cheap and efficient way to run an imperial system, but this strength in times of stability became a weakness when times got hard. For the kings who swore allegiance to Majapai, it was all too easy when the empire was distracted to simply turn away and quietly stop paying its fees or sending it troops.

With the power of Majapahit's fleet and army now focused entirely on the war between its western and eastern courts, many of its formerly most loyal subjects simply slipped out of its grasp. One of these subjects was in the region of Malayu, which during the Reg-Reg War drifted under the sovereignty of the powerful kingdom of Ayutaya in what is now Thailand. On the island of Sumatra, a Chinese pirate named Chen Tzu-I from Guangdong even took advantage of the chaos caused by the Reg-Reg War to seize control of the wealthy port city of Palembang. This man would run Palembang as a pirate fortress for the better part of a decade,

using it as a base to raid the wealthy shipping that passed through the Malacca's. and using forged bronze seals to create counterfeit licenses and aid smuggling into and out of China. The Chinese Muslim writer Ma Huan wrote about the situation in his work, a survey of the ocean shores. Chanzu Yi plundered ships and preyed on both native and foreign merchants for several years. On the northern coast of Borneo, the Brunei kingdom had also begun to ignore the overlordship of Majapahit, and by 1405 Western Borneo had also drifted away. These small kingdoms would instead seek protection under the influence of another power that was now flexing its muscles with increasing confidence on the waves.

That was the rising Ming dynasty of China. By this time, the Mongol Yuan dynasty had collapsed, and the Mongols had been forcibly thrown out of China. Now a new dynasty known as the Ming had taken its place. The Ming ruled over a devastated land that had suffered immensely over the years of Mongol conquest, and misrule by the Yuan emperors, exacerbated by the ravages of the black death. But now China was rebuilding. Ultimately, the Ming Dynasty has been remembered as a paranoid

and inward-looking state, which virtually bankrupted itself with the construction of its vast great wall in the north, sealing itself off from the world. But at the start, start of the 15th century, Ming China looked quite different. This was partly due to the reign of an ambitious and outward-looking ruler known as the Yongleur Emperor. The Yongleur Emperor was a patron of learning and sponsored the writing of a great encyclopedia made up of 23,000 written scrolls in an attempt to record all the world's knowledge. He was fascinated by everything, and especially the world outside of China, as he recorded in his work, Ming Taizong Bao Shun, or the valuable teachings of Emperor Yongle.

Whenever I can find the time, I read history books and the classics, so as to avoid idle living. I constantly remind myself that the world is so vast and state affairs so important that I cannot succumb to laziness and complacency for even a moment. Once one has succumbed to laziness and complacency, everything will become stagnant. As a result of this fascination with the outer world, throughout his reign, he sent out a flurry of diplomatic missions to all corners of Asia, letting everyone know that China was once again open for business. And as part of this effort, he ordered the construction of a grand fleet, designed to sail around the region,

and remind the people of every land, of the might of China. To build his fleet, the Yongleur Emperor ordered the construction of a vast shipyard at a place called Long Jiang, or Dragon River. This sprawling industrial complex was built at the point where the Yangtze River is met by the smaller Chinwai in the main capital of Nanjing, and it would be the largest shipyard anywhere in the world. On its seven long large docks, at least 100 ships could be built at any one time. To help in his mammoth effort, the Yongleur invited more than 20,000 craftsmen to work here on his ships, and timbers of elm, cedar and camphor were brought in enormous quantities to the city of Nanjing,

transported from inland ports down the rivers on flat-bottomed barges. The noise of the shipwrights shouting and calling, the thump of the mass beams being lifted into place, the beating of chisels and hammers on nails. All of this would have sounded over the rooftops of Nanjing in the early years of the 15th century. For China, it was the sound of industry and progress. But for the power of Majapahit, far across the sea in the south, it might as well have been the sound of nails being driven into its coffin. By the year 1405, as the reg-reg civil war dragged on in Majapahit, the Yongleur emperor had completed his grand fleet, and now all he needed was an admiral to lead it.

The man he chose was a eunuch, a giant named Zhong He. In some ways, Zhong He was an unlikely candidate to become China's. most famous sailor and admiral. For one thing, he had barely any sailing experience, but he had spent much of his life serving the Yongleur Emperor as a military commander, and had proved himself a capable and loyal general. Zhong He was a Muslim, born into a devout family in the southwest of China, but he had been captured during the wars of the preceding decades, and had been castrated and brought up a eunuch as a kind of military slave. One writer named Yuan Zhongchir describes his towering stature, with perhaps some exaggeration.

He was seven feet tall and had a waist about five feet in circumference. His cheeks and forehead were high but his nose was small. He had glaring eyes, teeth as white, and well-shaped as shells, and a voice as loud as a huge bell. He knew a great deal about warfare and was well accustomed to battle. On the 11th of July 1405, under the command of Admiral Jung-Hur, this vast fleet set sail, and it would have made an awe-inspiring sight. It comprised a total of 317 vessels of the latest design. including at least 60 vast treasure ships that were among the largest in the world.

By some sources, these could have measured more than 120 meters in length and 50 in breadth, making them still among the largest wooden sailing ships built anywhere in the world. These vessels were each fitted with 24 cast bronze cannons and were beautifully decorated too, with their prows carved with animal heads, dragons, phoenixes and eagles, all painted in bright colors. Like the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Phoenicians and Romans, the Chinese painted eyes on the fronts of their vessels so that the ships seemed to take on a life of their own and see their wave through mists and stormy seas. On board these hundreds of ships were a total of 28,000 men, including sailors and soldiers, but also diplomats, astronomers, linguists, interpreters and doctors,

as well as carpenters and shipbuilders for if the vessels needed repairing while at sea. On one stone tablet that the Admiral later erected in Fujian, he describes this great voyage. We have traversed more than 100,000 lee of immense water spaces, and have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising sky high, and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away, hidden in a blue transparency of light vapors, while our sails loftily unfurled like Clouds, day and night, continued their course as rapidly as a star, traversing those savage waves. Although outfitted with cannons, the treasure ships were not primarily warships. They were in fact vast cargo vessels. Their holds filled to the brim with Chinese silks, cotton, tea,

wine, oil, iron and candles, along with other. luxuries, all intended for trade with the strange lands they would encounter along the way. From these lands they brought back spices, gemstones, and even in the year 1414, a live giraffe, which had been brought to Bengal by some African delegates from Malindi. Impressed at the site of the treasure fleet, these men had gifted one of these animals to the Chinese, who brought it home to no little amazement. The Yongleur Emperor was no stranger to receiving exotic animals as gifts, and there was even a part of his palace devoted to keeping and caring for them,

elephants and rhinoceruses from champa, bears from Siam, parrots and peacocks from Java, and ostriches from Aden. But of all these, it was the giraffe that he asked, his court artists to paint. Alongside the vast treasure ships sailed a countless array of different support vessels, some carrying horses and troops, others warships for defense. Other boats were floating water tankers ensuring the thousands of personnel wouldn't go thirsty on long voyages between ports. The ships communicated between one another using large flags, signal bells, a drum and gongs, along with ten lanterns that

could signal at night. They even carried carrier pigeons to communicate over longer distances. The ultimate destination of the treasure fleet was the city of Colicode in the modern Indian state of Kerala, but the fleet was ordered to stop at every. large port and kingdom on the way to demonstrate the might of the Ming Emperor. It was in 1406 that the Ming fleet arrived in Java, while the Regreg Civil War was reaching its bloody height. When the Chinese treasure fleet arrived in Java, they might have expected to encounter the scenes of wealth and prosperity that had been recorded by previous visits. visitors, but they would find instead a troubled land devastated by civil war.

The treasure ships anchored off the coast, and a group of Chinese soldiers and merchants came ashore in Western Java, hoping to trade. But the Western King Vikram Woddinah, the husband of Hayam Wuruk's daughter, believed that his rival in the East had brought the Chinese to East. intervene in the civil war. While the Chinese visitors were trading in the marketplace, King Vikramovodner's soldiers swept down on them from all sides. The cries of the Javanese warriors and the screams of the dying would have joined the pops and bangs of cannons that would have sounded all around the marketplace. The acrid smell of gunpowder and blood would have lingered on the

air. When the smoke cleared, 170 Chinese merchants and sailors were dead, and the rest had fled back to their ships. Admiral Zheng He had enough soldiers with him that he could have invaded Java in response, and perhaps like the Mongols more than a hundred years earlier, he could have decisively tipped the balance in this civil war. But he was a pragmatic man. and he decided to tread a more considered path. He treated his wounded on board the ships and sent envoys back to the Yongleur Emperor, asking him what to do.

In the time of Hayam Wurok 30 years earlier, China had steered clear of conflict with the powerful Majapahit Empire, sending money and goods in order to avoid a war, but now Majapahit was weakened and divided. This time it was King Vikram Wodner who would send a grovelling apology to the Chinese court, and the Ming Shilu, or records of the Ming dynasty, records what the emperor said in reply.

There is no doubt as to your guilt. You acted on the basis of greed and anger, and you have acted again. heaven. Is there anything more serious than this? Just as I was about to raise an army to punish you, I have seen that you are capable of repenting your mistakes. And I have thus leniently stopped the dispatch of troops. But what of the 170 people who died innocently? You must immediately pay 60,000 liang of gold as compensation for their lives and to atone for your Christ. A year later, a Javanese ship arrived in China with only a sixth of the sum of gold that the Chinese emperor had demanded, along with a letter explaining that the bankrupt kingdom could not afford to pay any more. The Chinese emperor responded magnanimously.

What I want from those people who live far away is that they acknowledge their guilt. But I do not want want to enrich myself with their gold. The point had been made, and the humiliation of Majapahet was total. Everyone in the region took notice. In 1424, Chinese records show that when one king in Sumatra died, his son sent out a letter asking permission to succeed him as king, and he sent it not to the kings of Majapagpat. Mahjahit in Java, but to the Chinese emperor in the Ming court. This shows just how far the star of Majapahit had fallen, and how the might of China was

on the rise. Although Admiral Zheng He had declined to fight on this occasion, the treasure fleet was more than capable of doing battle on the seas, and alongside their main diplomatic and mercantile mission, its admiral had been given some less peaceful tasks to complete on their voyage. Chief among these was a mission to destroy the pirate fortress that still held out at the Sumatran port of Palambang, which had risen up due to the weakness of the Majapahit Empire. The Ming Shi, or history of Ming, describes how the pirate chief Chen Zui had been playing a clever double game, attempting to mollify the Ming Emperor.

In the fourth year of the Yongle reign, the pirate chieftain of the old port, Chen Zhuge Yi, sent his son to the Ming court. However, although he sent tributes to the court, he was plundering the seas and thus obstructing the comings and goings of the tribute's envoys. On its way home through the Straits of Malacca, the enormous treasure fleet took its chance. They sailed along the mangrove-crusted coast of Sumatra towards Palambang, which the Chinese called the old port. We can only imagine the site that greeted the pirates of Palambang as the hundreds of colourful ships bore down on them on the horizon.

When they arrived at the port city, they demanded the surrender of the pirate chief Chen Zhu Yi. According to the Ming Shilu, or records of the Ming dynasty, the pirate chief attempted to use deception to gain the upper hand. When he arrived at the old port of Palemang, he came across Zhu Yi and others and sent people to bring them to negotiate their pacification. Zhu Yi and the others feigned surrender, but secretly plotted to attack the Imperial Army. Zheng He and the others found out about this, and marshalling the troops prepared their defenses. The ensuing battle would be the first test of the power of the Yongle Emperor's fleet. The Ming ships would have rammed into the pirate vessels, hurled gunpowder bombs from catapults, and fired special kinds of fireworks filled with scraps of paper,

designed to spread fire and terror and ignite enemy's sails. They would have also sent volleys of flaming arrows flying towards the pirate ships. The result was a resounding victory for the Ming Treasure Fleet. The pirate Zhu Yi suffered a great defeat over a great defeat over a very defeat. 5,000 of the bandit gang were killed, while 10 of the bandit ships were burned and seven were captured. Further, two counterfeit bronze seals were seized and three prisoners, including Zhu Yi, were taken alive. When they arrived at the capital in chains, it was ordered that all of the prisoners were to be beheaded. With this pirate threat crushed, the Ming Chinese quickly moved to establish a governor

of the area to prevent a resurgence of any piracy. The man they chose, a Muslim named Shi Jin Ching, had once been an official of the Majaparit Empire. The old port pacification superintendency was established, and it was ordered that Xi Jin Qing be appointed as the pacification superintendent. A seal, a title patent, headwear and a belt, patterned fine silks and silk oarses were conferred upon him. While the rulers of Majapahit had their backs turned fighting amongst themselves,

the Ming Chinese had swept in and stamped their seal of authority on the Malacca Strait. To strengthen this grip over the narrow and crucial waterway, the Chinese would also bring under their wing the young city of Malacca, which had recently been growing in wealth and importance. Malacca was a hub for another tide of change that was now sweeping through the archipelago. That was the steady spread of the religion of Islam. Islam had long had a presence in the Indonesian archipelago

and had arrived with traders who traveled back and forth across the Indian Ocean, bringing nutmeg and cloves to the markets of Egypt and Arabia. But now this young religion began to make advances in all directions. The European traveller Marco Polo remarked on the change already underway on the island of Sumatra when he passed through the town of Perlac in 1292. The people of Perlach used to be idolaters, but owing to contact with Saracen merchants, who continually resort here in their ships, they have all been converted to the law of Muhammad. Part of the reason for the spread of Islam on the archipelago was the prestige and protection that the religion brought.

One example of this in action is the king Paramesvara, the ruler of Singapore who had been besieged. by Majapahit under the reign of Hayamuruk, and had fled north to the coast of the Malaka Strait. There he had founded the city of Malaka, and in order to add an air of legitimacy to his new rule, Paramasvara seems to have ditched his original Hindu-Buddhist name and adopted a new Persian one, calling himself Sultan Iskander Shah instead. Muslim traders preferred where possible to trade with other Muslims, who were more likely to share their languages of Arabic or Persian, keep the same trading and prayer hours,

and shared a common moral code. And so this connection helped Malaka to rapidly expand. The new city's strategic location, right on the narrow sea corridor, meant the Ming Chinese were also very interested to bring its rulers under their patronage and protection. When Admiral Zheng He arrived at the port town of Malaka, he left a stone tablet inscribed with a poem that officially declared it under the protection of China. southwestern sea reaches under the Middle Kingdom, its waves cresting high as the heavens, watering the earth the same way for countless eons. Washed by sunlight, bathed in the moonlight, rain-swept cracks, and dewy rocks in its midst, luxuriant with vegetation. And in such a place, people live in harmony.

Its righteous king, paying his respects to imperial power, wishes his country to be treated as one of our imperial domains, and to follow the Chinese way. So, here writ large on everlasting stone, we do proclaim your loyalty. Posterity will smile upon your deed as time passes, and your sons and grandsons will have limitless good fortune. In this, the Chinese were right. The port town of Malacca would grow under Ming protection to become the largest and most important in the whole region. When Zhong He returned a few years later, he would build a fort at Malacca to protect it,

and in return, the people of the city would ensure that this crucial waterway would be controlled by China and China alone. Wealth and trade that would have once flowed through the ports of Java now passed through the new trading hub of Malaka instead. From this hub of commerce, the influence of Islam would spread all across the islands. For the kings of Java, who ruled according to legitimacy derived from their connection to the Buddha and the god Shiva, each new convert reduced their overall power. Subsequent voyages by Zheng He's treasure fleets would sail as far west as the

Strait of Hormuz, the city of Mecca, and Mogadishu and Mombasa on the East African coast. But eventually, the Ming would turn away from ocean-going exploration. When the adventurous young Leur emperor died, he was replaced by more inward-looking, rulers, who focused instead on the construction of the Great Wall in the North. At one point, the Ming even outlawed the construction of large ships, dismantling some, and perhaps even burning some vessels in harbour. But the decades when the vast treasure fleets had sailed the seas left a lasting impression on every culture that they touched. And the damage done to the image of Javanese power was immense. Eventually, the Reg-Reg

Civil War would come to an end in Java, and the Western King Vikram Avodana, Hayam Wuruk's son-in-law, would be victorious. Despite his humiliating and bankrupting experience of angering the Chinese Emperor, he managed to close in on his enemies in the Eastern Court, and in the final bloody confrontation, the Western forces broke through the walls of the Eastern Palace. The Lord of Virabumi fled in the night and escaped by boat. He was hunted down and beheaded, and his severed head was brought back to the capital of Majapahit. The Civil War was over, and the kingdom was united once. more. But the conflict had exacted a terrible cost. In only two years of fighting, the manpower of

Mahjapahit had been severely depleted. Its treasury was on the verge of bankruptcy, and its influence had been drastically curtailed, right at the point when powerful rivals were rising in the north, and the religion of Islam was spreading from port to port. The center of the Mandala of Power had now shifted irrevocably away from Java, and the age of Majapahit's empire of the islands would slowly but surely come to an end. While Majapahit lost much of its overseas empire through the beginning of the 15th century, it still remained the preeminent power on the island of Java, but steadily it's loss of regional status began to erode its power even in its heartlands.

When King Vikramavordana died in 1429, his daughter Suhita took to the throne. She was prepared to rule in the tradition of the great Javanese queens who had preceded her a century earlier, Dya Gaiatri and Tribuvana Bijaegadevi. for a number of reasons her rule would be beset by problems. Chief among these was a terrible famine that descended on Java around the year 1426, caused by a drought. But the only source for this is the chronicle of the Pararaton, and by this point its reports are becoming sparse and scarce, and contain little detail. Next, there was a period of food shortage that was very long in the year of the serpents biting people.

Unfortunately for historians, the decline of royal power in Java also resulted in a disruption of the major sources that we have relied on up to this point. Narrative texts like the Pararatan or Book of Kings were crucial sources during the golden age of Majapahit, but as we enter the 15th century, the text becomes increasingly obscure and difficult to understand. The Chronicles' notes get shorter, concerning only earthquakes and eruptions and the deaths of kings, and they come further and further apart. The final three pages of the Javanese Book of Kings are just a few scraps of seemingly unrelated information separated by decades, with its final note coming in 1481. Then a volcanic eruption occurred.

In the week of Watugunung in the Sakhar year, action of the San Francisco. Action of the Sky Sea Eccour. Perhaps in an attempt to alleviate the effects of the drought, Suhita had constructed a vast reservoir named Colam Segaran, just to the north of the city of Majapahit. This great pool was 800 metres by 500, and ringed all around by banks of red brick. Whether or not this alleviated the famine,

we will never know, but it shows the drastic situation that the empire was facing around this time, under pressure from the environment, from internal divisions, and increasingly from powerful rivals. When Suhita died in 1447, her brother, Cretta Vajaya, ruled for only four years. He was followed by a further four kings, all of whom ruled. for only a short time, and the relationships between them are unclear. The kingdom erupted in civil war again in the 1470s, and in 1478, one pretender broke through the defenses of Majapahit and killed his brother who sat on the throne. That year in Java would be given a name that seems to convey the mood in the kingdom at the time.

Sirna-elang-Kretaning Bumi, which has been translated as vanished and lost is the order of the world. Upon his victory, this new king had inscribed a series of stone inscriptions that made dire warnings of the fate that would befall any who failed to support his rule. They will end up in the realm of Yama, the king of the dead. They will be beaten by Yama's army for years innumerable. They will fall in the cauldron of hell. They will not be reborn.

So not only will they end up in hell, but they will stay there. And even if they are reborn, they will be reborn under miserable circumstances. It seems clear from these inscriptions that the new king didn't feel at all secure on the throne. Throughout this period of political instability, the situation for Majapahit would be made increasingly worse by the rise of a new kind of power on the coasts of Java. That is, the ever-increasing influence of Muslim traders. With the powerful rival of Malaka now exerting its influence, Muslim merchants had become wealthier and more influential in Java than ever before.

And in the vacuum left by royal power, these wealthy merchants became politically powerful too. Now more and more people on the coasts all around the archipelago began to flirt with the idea of this new religion. The Portuguese traveller Tome Pires describes the steady advance of Islamic power in Java at the expense of the Hindu Buddhists, who he calls heathens. At the time when there were heathens along the sea coast of Java, many merchants used to come.

Parasis, Arabs, Gujaratis, Bengalis, Malays and other nationalities. There being many moors among them. They began to trade in the country and to grow rich. They succeeded in way of the of making mosques and mullahs came from outside. In some places, the heathen Javanese lords themselves turned Muhammadan, and these merchant moors took possession of these places. The growing influence of these coastal traders would culminate in 1475 with the foundation of a true Muslim kingdom on the island of Java, a power that would call itself the sultanate of Denmark.

A port town looking north into the Java Sea, Denmark had been founded in the late 15th century, possibly by Chinese merchants, and its people had built a grand mosque there, combining elements of Muslim and Javanese architecture. The ruler of Damak was a man named Raden Pata, who was a vassal swearing allegiance to Majapahit. But he soon declared,

independence and claimed the title of Sultan. As Majapahit declined, the Sultanate of Demak would expand. It conquered the coastal region of Tuban by 1527 and was spreading inland as far as Malang by 1546. For the dwindling power of Majapahit, this was the final death knell. Due to the slow petering out of Royal Chronicles in Java, we have few details about what exactly happened to lead to the eventual destruction of Majapahit. But at this point, we are able to turn to the writings of some outside visitors to the island of Java. Around 1513, about 100 years after the end of the Reg-Reg War, the Portuguese traveller Tomei Pires visiting Java. He wrote in glowing terms about the beauty of the landscape and the abundance of the island,

but he found the power of Majapahit already a shadow of its former glory, as he recounts in his memoirs. They say that the island of Java used to rule as far as the spice islands on the eastern side and over a great part of the west, and that it had almost all the island. of Sumatra under its dominion and all the islands known to the Javanese, and that it had all this for a long time past until about a hundred years ago when its power began to diminish and it came to its present state. Pires also alludes to some degree of political instability in Java. According to his account, the power of its kings had diminished so that they were now little more than a figurehead, with the Mahapati or Prime Minister appearing to wield greater power.

Because the Javanese have lost a great part of their lands, the kings do not command, nor are they taken into account, but only the Viceroy and Chief Captain. This man is known and honoured like the real king. All the Lords of Java obey him, him they honour. This governor commands in everything. in everything. He holds the King of Java in his hands. He orders him to be given food. The King has no voice in anything, nor is he of any importance. Alongside this weakening of royal authority came the fragmentation of the kingdom. Local lords became steadily more powerful, with some even breaking away.

and now the Muslim sultanates began to taste blood in the water. The Sultan of the city of Demak, Radenpata, knew that only one thing stood between him and ultimate power on the island of Java. That was the lingering remnants of Majapahit. After only a few years, he gathered his forces and marched on the now isolation. city. The later Muslim epic verse chronicle, the Babad Tanajawi, recounts what happened next in heroic terms, as the Muslim forces bore down on the once great capital city. Then they agree to gather together all Muslims with their arms, then they set out to Majapahit.

The number of troops was immeasurable. The city of Majapahid was encircled. Many inhabitants submitted to Radenpata. Nobody dared to meet him in battle. Marching under blue and yellow banners, they soon arrived at the walls of Majapahit. The later Muslim chronicles imitated elements of previous Javanese legends and claimed that the last king of Majapahit was so awed at the sight of the army approaching the city

that he simply ascended to heaven right there on the spot, and the city was captured peacefully? At the moment, Prabhu Brawijaya ascended to heaven, something like a fireball was seen coming out of the palace of Majapai. It flashed like a bolt of lightning and sounded like a terrifying thunderclap. It fell down in Bindera. Radan Pada entered the palace, He was astonished that he did not encounter a single person.

He wept in his heart, then left the palace and returned to Bintara with his troops. But we can assume that the end of Majapahit was not as peaceful as these later chroniclers make out. The historian Herald van der Linder imagines an extreme version of the scenes that unfolded. The soldiers met almost no resistance, and within an hour they had taken control of the royal palace. It was a massacre. Priests were drowned in lotus ponds. Stable boys were stabbed as they tried to protect the king's horses. Everything was burned to the ground, the royal residences, the watchtower,

the pavilion with its intricate wood carvings, the army barracks, the elephant stalls. and the library. By noon, all that was left of Majapahit was a heap of rubble. However, there is little evidence of widespread burning at the site of the city, and no heaps of bodies or mass graves have ever been found. But what's clear is that at this point, human habitation at the city of Majapahit largely came to an end. Its people fled, and all of its houses and workshops, its temples and palaces, were left to fade and crumble.

For many ordinary people, life simply went on. But it must have been a time of great upheaval and confusion. The Javanese text, the Niti Shastra, records one vision of the end of the world, that must have captured the mood of many on the island of Java, as their world came to an end, and another began. The signs of the approaching end of this world will be all kinds of depravity among mankind. That is to say, the wise will turn foolish.

The holy men will become worldly. Children will abandon their parents. Princes will lose their empire. The little will become great and commit depredations. In short, everything will be in confusion. From this moment on, the Sultanate of De Mak would be the most powerful force on the island of Java, and the age of the Hindu Buddhist kingdoms on the island

would come to an end. Most remaining Hindus and Buddhists and Buddhists would flee east and took refuge on the small island of Bali, which became a sanctuary for their ancient culture. Epic Hindu poems like the Bohman Takar were largely forgotten on the mainland of Java, but in Bali they were preserved. One verse in this poem describes the destruction wrought by a demon king on the on the religious sanctuaries of a kingdom, and we might find it a fitting description for the final days of Java's last Hindu Buddhist sanctuaries. Heaven is being destroyed and the hermitage is swept away because of the swarming demons.

The hermits have left, have abandoned all and fled far away, constantly pursued. The miserable wretches. Their bodies are lying about in the monasteries, with their bark clothing and woven bags flung away. With its people gone, the city of Majapahit would have been swiftly reclaimed by the fast-growing forest around it. The sophisticated drainage system that its engineers had spent generations perfecting that channels the sluces and great reservoirs would have begun to silt up within a decade without maintenance. The water, with nowhere left to go, would have pooled and spread, turning streets into marshland and marshland into swamp. The red bricks that gave the ruins of Majapahit, its distinctive character,

were fired from the volcanic clay of the Brantas River plain. and in the wet heat of Java, they didn't last long. Mosses would take hold first, then lichens and ferns. The mortar softened and dissolved. The strangler figs and banyan trees would move in next, clambering over the red brick courtyards and ceremonial gateways of the Majapahit capital, their roots clenching the walls in their grass, and steadily but surely pulverizing the brick.

Slower growing teak and mahogany trees would arrive next, shading the crumbling walls of Majapahit beneath their canopies. As all this went on, the great rumblings of Java's volcanoes would have conspired to hide the ruins even further. More than ten major eruptions of the nearby Arjuno Wellerang and Angasmoro Volcanoes took place in the centuries that followed, each one burying the site of Majapahit in evermore ash,

until some of its structures lay as much as four meters beneath the surface of the earth. In the year 1849, a Dutch traveller called Walter Robert Van Hovel passed through the site of the old city, and described the overgrown ruins that still remained. The entire ruins were shrouded in a dark forest and covered with shrubs and trees. Majestic Banyan trees have rooted their roots between the stones and pushed walls apart, raising their crowns high above the ruins. That is why nowadays the Javanese also call the place Waningin Lawa, or Banyan Gate. The Muslim sultanates that destroyed Majapahit would not remain the most powerful force in Java for long.

The next century would see the arrival of other seaborne powers that would soon form their own Thalasocracies or Empires of the Sea. These were the powers of European colonialism. In 1511, the port town of Malacca was seized by the Portuguese, and from there their influence would spread all over the archipelago. Soon other European powers would arrive, and they would all begin to influence the fractious political life of the island of Java, and introduce the beginnings of an ideology more seductive and powerful than any religion, the force of capitalism. The Sultanates of Java would soon come under the sway of a massive international conglomerate,

and one of the first joint-stock companies in the world, the Dutch East India Company. In 1598, a Dutch fleet of eight ships under Jacob Van Neck became the first from the Netherlands, Netherlands to reach the Spice Islands of Maluku. In doing so, they bypassed the Javanese merchants who had long dominated the trade. When these Dutch ships returned to Europe in the year 1599, laden with cloves, nutmeg and mace, the expedition yielded an enormous profit of around 400%. One Dutch observer would reportedly make the following remark upon seeing the arrival of this fleet. As long as Holland has been Holland, there have never arrived ships as richly laden as these. The age of European colonialism in Southeast Asia had now begun.

Between 1602 and 1796, the Dutch East India Company dispatched almost almost a much of, million Europeans to Asia aboard nearly 5,000 ships, dwarfing the traffic of its nearest rival, the British East India Company, returning with more than 2.5 million tons of Asian goods and enslaved people. Throughout this colonial period, which would ultimately see Java become a European colony, the legacy of the ancient Javanese kingdoms was a largely ignored or intentionally obscured. The Dutch in particular had no desire to see the people of their new colonies rally around the memory of any ancient kingdoms, and mostly declined to investigate the ruins that could be found dotted around Java. The erasure was so extensive

that in his history of the Indian archipelago, published in 1820, the British writer John Crawford was able to write the following. The theory of a great monarchy and of an antecedent state of high civilization and improvement has been forged by the national vanity of the Javanese, unsupported by a shadow of proof, and contradicted by unquestionable internal evidence. But some memory of Majapagapagia, its glory lived on in the minds of Java's people, in their songs, their poetry, their shadow puppet plays, and in the manuscripts they kept in their libraries. In 1894, in a typical expansion

of European power in East Asia, the Dutch colonialist government intervened on the island of Lombok to the west of Bali, to depose its a man named Agung Ketut Karangasem, who was a renowned collector of ancient texts. After a protracted war in which the local people resisted fiercely, the Maharaja's palace was finally stormed by Dutch Marines on the 19th of November 1894. The Dutch poured into the palace and began a slaughter in which two 2000 were massacred. The Maharaja was captured and died a few months later in a colonial prison.

During the fighting, Dutch artillery set fire to the Maharaja's palace, and while its towers burned and its roofs fell in, the colonial troops looted the king's treasury and carried away more than 130 kilograms of gold. 3,000 of silver and countless works of art. This would become known as the Lombok treasure. But among the looters, there was also a Dutchman named Jan Lawrence Andrice Brandes, an expert in Sanskrit and old Javanese. This man had heard that the Maharaja Karangasem was an avid scholar

and a collector of rare manuscripts. As the Maharaja's palace burned, this man ran to the ruler's library and saved what he could. While others ran with gold heaped in their arms, Brandes frantically gathered all of the ancient books he could carry and fled before the roof of the palace could collapse. Much of the Maharaja's collection went up, in flames, and we will never be able to read what was contained within it. But what Brandes

was able to save was packed into a box and sent back to the colonial capital. Inside, he would later find the only existing copy of the poem, the Desha Varnana, written by the self-effacing scribe, Propanka, some 500 years earlier. In the pages of that work, the voice of the voice of the poet could once more bring to life, the description of its great king on his journey around the island, the lives and concerns of the people of medieval Java, and at least in words, the kingdom of Majapahit could live once more. I'd like to end this episode with an extract from an old Javanese poem called the Shiva Rattrikalpa, or the night ritual of Shiva, written during the years of the decline of the Majapahit kingdom.

In this passage, a hunter named Lubdaka stumbles upon the ruins of an ancient temple, and, like Thomas Stamford raffles, centuries later, would be struck by the strange melancholy of these places, where once so many lives passed, now, overgrown with jungle. As you listen, imagine how it would feel to watch the palaces and temples of the kingdom of Majapahit crumbling into the earth, as its people left and its reservoirs ran dry. Imagine wandering beneath the shade of that teak forest and watching the roots of banyans and silk-cotton trees slowly bind their way over the ruins. As the layers of ash fell from the sky, season after season, and covered the works of man.

Imagine turning away and setting off into the forest, as the sun finally set on Java's golden age. A great temple complex from ancient times rose near a mountain stream, and the path there was lonely. The curved trunks of the water elephants had fallen and crumbled, and for lack of care, its wall had almost tumbled down. The monster heads seemed to be weeping, as their covered faces were overgrown with creepers, and as though sad and weary, the temple guardians lay rolled over on the ground.

The pavilions in its courtyard were in ruins. Some of the buildings were now only wreckage, while others were rotting away. Their roofs were broken and had fallen in, and beyond repair their pillars stood askew, swaying back and forth. Heart-rending was the spectacle of the reliefs. Young maidens in stone stood gazing skywards,

full of sorrow, because now no wandering poets ever came to visit them. The tower temple soared on high, and its pinnacles served as a gathering place for weeds. The sides were cracked, overgrown by a shady fig tree which spread luxuriantly. All the statues were cracked by a fearsome tangle of vines, and only the main deity within was immovably in place, standing firm in the centre of its pedestal.

Pandan trees hung down over the rocks with an air of sadness, quite wrapped in the mist. How they longed to be visited by the thunder, which would bring with it the rushing of the rain. As if in sorrow they let their petals droop, petals on which someone had jotted down some words in a moment of inspiration. For is this not an admirable place

for a wandering poet to weave his verses? Thank you once again for listening to the fall of civilisations. podcast. I'd like to thank my voice actors for this episode, Henry Stenhouse, Michael Haji Antonis, Alexandra Bolton, Simon Jackson, Catherine James, Tom Marshall Lee, Chris Harvey, Jack Jacobs, Nick Denton, Amrit Sandu, Paul Cassell, Tim Stevenson and Amin Tahrir. readings in old and middle Javanese were performed by Ferry Senjaya and Kada Aditya. I'd also like to thank my historical advisor for this episode, Dr. Alex West.

Major sources used in the writing of this episode were Majapahit by Harold van der Linder, the Indianized states of Southeast Asia edited by Volta F. Bella, and translated by Sue Brown Coing, when China ruled the seas by Louise Levaths, and new insights on Majapahet, edited by Henry Yogosvara and others. A full public list of sources will be available on Patreon,

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