Gone Medieval - Medieval Indonesia

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

Long before the arrival of Europeans, the islands of Indonesia were home to powerful kingdoms who fended off Genghis Khan and took a part in global trade routes.Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by Dr. Alex West to explore the rich and often overlooked history of Medieval Indonesia; a world where Indian, Chinese, and Islamic influences converged to create a vibrant cultural mosaic, where oceanic trade networks brought spices, silk, and stories from the Levant to New Guinea - and how these exchanges shaped one of Southeast Asia’s greatest empires.MOREGenghis Khan to Tamerlane: Mongol Empire Rebornhttps://open.spotify.com/episode/62GXJOJWKCOHEijcyVLUu8Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. It was edited by Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianica and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades.

We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were. And how we got here. Imagine a time long ago when vast kingdoms rose and fell, where the roaring ocean was the lifeblood of empires, where legends were born beneath vaulting temple domes. From the fertile plains of Java to the bustling seas. of Sumatra. Indonesia's medieval period, spanning from the 5th to the 15th century, was a time of astounding transformation.

What we know begins with the earliest stone inscriptions in East Kalamantan, the first whispers of a new world unfolding in 350 CE. In the shadow of great mountains and along the shores of mighty rivers, the kingdoms of Tarmun Nagara, Kalinga, and Scrivejaya emerged, each carving their own legacy into history. In the bustling harbors of Scrivejaya, merchants from across the seas converged, trading silk, spices, and stories. And the first sparks of exchange with the Islamic world began to flicker. By the 9th century, towering monuments gave Boro Bore and Pramban their skylines. Stone testaments to the creativity, craftsmanship, and spirituality of the Scylindra and Sengaya dynasties,

where art, religion, and culture collided. And then, from the ashes of war, the kingdom of Majapahit was welded in the fires of ambition and unity, becoming the jewel of Southeast Asia, a sprawling empire whose influence reached far beyond the shores of Indonesia. But it wasn't just the power of kings and warriors that made medieval Indonesia formidable. Cultures, Indian, Chinese, and Islamic, fused and blended together to forge something unique. From the epic tales of the Mahabata to the grand temple architecture, these ancient traditions continue to echo in the heart of Indonesia today. In this episode of Gone Medieval, I'm delighted to be the ancient tradition of gone medieval,

I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Alex West. Alex is a lecturer at the Institute for Area Studies at the University of Leiden. Specializing in the Indo-Malaysian archipelago in the 15th century before the arrival of the Portuguese and the Islamization of Sunda, his translations and research have revealed the presence of commodities sourced from places as far apart as the Levant and New Guinea. So join us as we journey back to an age of empires and legends, where the winds of history whispered across vast oceans,

and kingdoms rose on the back of dreams. Alex, welcome to Gone Medieval. Thank you for having me. It's an absolute delight, although I suppose to a certain extent I've lured you here under false pretenses, because, you know, the headline that we tell people is that we're going to talk about medieval Indonesia.

But we start off with a problem immediately when we say medieval Indonesia, right, which is that there's no such thing. That's not real, right? Instead, we have all kinds of much more complex things going on, which is, I suppose, standard. But I think in Indonesia, as we call it now, things are much more complex than the European milieu is at the time. Would you agree with that? I don't know if it's more complex I mean, how do you define Europe? If you start with that as your question, it's pretty difficult. But yeah, I mean, Indonesia is basically a completely arbitrary country. I mean, it has literally straight lines on the map of the country, the kind of thing that shows you that this is actually just a colonial European empire

that got turned into a democratic republic. And it's basically just the Dutch Empire before the Second World War as a country. and that is what it is. So the borders are pretty artificial and using the term Indonesia is, of course, fraught with difficulties there. I mean, and there are people who are going to be kind of angry about it as well.

I mean, personally, I tend to cover things that also include Timor-Leste, Papua New Guinea to some extent, also Singapore and Malaysia, importantly as well, and Brunei. I mean, there's a lot of different countries in this part of the world. And Indonesia's just kind of a

It's an easy way to point people in the direction of what we're talking about More than anything else Because it is by far the biggest country over there It's the fourth biggest country in the world by population Behind the US Something like 270 million people living there Whereas Malaysia only has something like 30 something But I say only

I mean 30 million people are still a fairly, fairly big country Only, oh is that all Something like that anyway I have never really looked it up. But I assume it's something like that. So, of course, it's completely arbitrary. It's completely artificial. It's also quite useful.

So that's why I've gone for that. Or at least, well, we've gone for that. I mean, I suppose that that's the thing, isn't it? We're trying to talk about a huge conglomeration of islands with rather a lot of people in them. And so it's going to be messy to a certain extent. And, you know, I'm comfortable with that. I live in mess. You know, like, I'm a holyrolet.

Roman Empire person. I'm like the messier, the better. I'm not much more comfortable with it when things are a little bit more up in the air. And in this case, I should say, there is no agreed upon terminology. But there is no one phrase that you can use to refer to the splits. So it kind of doesn't matter that much. People say maritime Southeast Asia, okay, that usually includes the Philippines as well. Ireland, Southeast Asia, the same thing. And the Philippines is quite separate for at least my purpose. It really doesn't have very much to do with the other parts of island Southeast Asia.

So, Malaysia, Indonesia, and that sort of area, which are a bit more integrated. Whereas the Philippines is almost entirely separate. So, yeah. And there are a bunch of other expression. There is a local term as well, which is Nusantara, and that's a term that people nowadays use in Indonesia and Malaysia to refer to Island, Southeast Asia, maritime

Southeast Asia. And It's been adopted to such an extent that they've adopted it in Indonesia as the capital, as the new name of the new capital that's just been built on the island of Borneo. So it's literally going to be the name of their capital city from now on. They're moving from Jakarta because Jakarta is sinking, basically. It's one of the biggest cities in the world. It's one of the biggest cities in Southern Hemisphere, something like 30 million people in and around the city. They're drinking up the water. The water's sort of disappearing from the city itself, so the land's sort of subsiding.

not great. So anyway, it built this new capital on the island of Borneo. They've called it Nusantara. This is supposed to be the old name for the Indo-Malachian archipelago or for Indonesia or whatever you want to call it. In practice, it probably wasn't that. It's actually an old Javanese term, meaning the other islands, and it seems to have been more of a political designation

referring to allies and vassals of the Javanese kingdom and not a geographical designation for the archipelago. But, well, we don't really. enough. Maybe it was. Okay, so which brings me to sort of my first big question then. When we are attempting to extract historical terms from the past, you know, whether it's to name a new capital or just to have a conversation in general, what are we looking at in terms of sources for this area? Because, you know, it can be sort of fraught in the medieval period

certainly in Europe, to a lesser extent, in places like China. But, you know, it's rather a long time ago for doing something like going back to the 5th century. So what evidence do we have to work with if we want names or locations? Well, I soon to remember from Christopher to Hamel's book on European manuscripts, there's something like a million surviving medieval European manuscripts, something like that. And for Southeast Asia, as a whole, we probably have a dozen, like mainland and the islands. The oldest dated manuscript to which I'm aware at least is from 1334. Wow.

So quite late. I haven't checked the date in a while, but I think it's 1334. And even that one, some people are skeptical of. Some people doubt that one. From mainland southeast Asia, I think the oldest one, if I remember from a conference paper from years ago, was some jar-taker fragments in the Pali language from 1476. So we're dealing with a very small manuscript record, very, very small, and we're dependent for literary texts, for religious things,

on much, much later copies of texts from really the 10th century onwards, and most of those copies in the case of old Javanese, and the old Javanese language were copied on the island of Bali, not all of them, but a son that survived in Java as well. So it's a very fragmentary record. It's all over the place, all sorts of strange lines of transmission, of information. The sources that we're dealing with, the historical documentation is quite splas, quite limited. And interpreting the text themselves is also quite difficult.

So if you look at translations of old Javanese sects from 50 years ago, they're completely different from translations that we have now. Really? Wow. So this is why, you know, this term like Musantara, that now we can interpret in a certain way, was interpreted in quite a naive way decades ago. And yeah, that's pretty typical. That's not strange at all. At the same time, people were writing things down in Southeast Asia, probably from the early mid-first millennium AD.

Okay. We have inscriptions from that period. So the oldest inscriptions in Malay, for example, in Malay is like the big language in this part of the world. It forms the basis of the Indonesian language, which is the national language of Indonesia, and also the national language of Malaysia and so on. We have inscriptions in Malay from the 680s. In fact, we have a series of precisely dated inscriptions from the 680s. But then the oldest manuscript in Malay, of which we're aware, is from the late 14th century.

So, and we're making the differentiation between the transcriptions and the manuscripts. Where are we getting these? Well, the inscriptions on stone and things like that and copper plates as well. And also gold. There are some on gold, although there's a tendency in Indonesia these days to make fakes of gold inscriptions because they seem really cool. That's gold. So you can sell it for a high price. I mean, it is cool.

It is cool. It is cool. I mean, fair enough. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And there are some on tin, I think, and there are some on bamboo. I mean, that's really a sort of manuscript in a way. all sorts of different kinds of texts of different ages. But the inscriptions are always on non-organic materials,

always so much older than the manuscripts that we have. So there's a real disconnect between these kinds of things, between literature and official edicts and tax registers and all that kind of stuff that we have written in stone. Well, we love it when something's written in stone, don't we? Historians are just salivating. We're like, yes, great. Put it down.

It's going to work out. But you kind of hinted it something because one of the problems, as I understand it, from your work, is that we lack things like a lot of manuscripts from this period because it turns out if you write things down on organic material and store it in the tropics, it wroughts, right? Yep, yep. That's basically the issue. You know, in Java, well, it's about six degrees south of the equator, something like that. So this is really, Indonesia is really an equatorial country. it really straddles the equator, so it's, you know, really a few degrees north and south. And yeah, you get year-round heat, and in most areas year-round humidity as well, in higher altitude areas.

So there are quite a lot of mountains in Indonesia. It's full of volcanoes. And if you go up those volcanoes or up those mountains, then, yeah, you can get a bit of relief from the heat and also from the humidity. But, you know, we don't have so many of these. sort of scriptoria or archives surviving. They were built. We know that there were such things, and they were called Kabul Udun in Old Javanese and Old Sundanis,

which is the language of West Java. But yeah, we just don't have very many things surviving from them. And a lot of the ones that we do have are in kind of a fragile state, or they're owned by just ordinary people. The oldest surviving Malay manuscript is written on paper mulberry bark. Sheets. So is the sheets of bark. And it's from, as I said, early, it's from the late 14th century, maybe as late as 1420.

It's been radio carbon dated. And that's from Sumatra, from the island of Sumatra, from a region called Karinji. And that's just kept in somebody's house. People just own it. It's theirs. Well, I love that for them. Yeah, that's kind of the dream, isn't it? The guy who dated, who had it, radio carbon, dated, who took it off to be, you know, studied, said, well, I need to.

a small piece of the manuscript to take to, you know, university so that they can study it. And one of the owners just said, okay, Indus got our terraces. Oh, my God. Snip. Oh, okay. Oh, right. All right. I take it back.

Maybe I don't like that. No, I mean, it's their thing. Yeah. It's their thing. They can do what they want. Yeah. It's also the case with a lot of textiles as well, which is pretty cool, actually. There's a really, really good book on, I can't remember what it's called now.

Something like 500 years of Fidelitian textile or something. It's where they've radiocarbonated textiles from what is now Indonesia and found that they go back to the 14th century or earlier in some cases. And we're talking like Batik, which was invented in Java probably, sort of wax resist dying. And also ecats are kind of weaving, a kind of woven cloth. So, yeah, there is some surviving organic material from this part of the world from the time period that we're just talking. what I would call, personally, the Middle Ages. But, okay, that's another fraught term, of course. I'm going to force you to talk about that immediately, Alex.

Because this is the thing is that, you know, I think increasingly we are really looking at the concept of the Middle Ages as a global phenomenon, or at least we're attempting to, right? And the thing about what's going on in what is now Indonesia is it's got a lot of kind of big kingdoms, large civilizations that. do rise up in a really similar time frame to the big changes that we see over in Europe as well, which doesn't do much from stopping me, from calling things Middle Ages, frankly, because, you know, we've got, for example, like the new kingdoms that are coming on the rise up right around the 5th century as well, which is very, very similar to what's going on in Europe, right? Well, sort of, except that, of course, in most of Europe, this is, you know, preceded by the Roman Empire. which is a vast literary bureaucratic entity.

They didn't really have that in my climate. The development of writing, and especially writing in local languages and the development of local states and trade with different parts of the world kind of all comes at the same time, which is, as you say, probably 5th century or earlier. And we start to see that coming from,

the things coming from India, particularly, around that time, including writing, which is where most of the scripts We're used in island Southeast Asia and mainland Southeast Asia as well, this time it originally came from. For me, the interesting thing is not so much the development, you know, the sort of state formation and trade and stuff like. It's more that Java and Sumatra and all these kind of places were connected to lots of other parts of Afro-Eurasia in this period in quite a direct way. You know, in the sense that food, if you think of it like this, anyway, is how I like to think about food. that was grown on the island of Java or in Banda in eastern Indonesia

was being eaten in Denmark and in Japan and in China and in Ethiopia at this time, if you consider spices to be food, which I mean, they are. And on Java, on the island of Java, they grew cubets.

In fact, they are probably the only place in the world that the cubed pepper grew. It's unique, it's endemic to that part of the world. It's a bit bigger than a peppercorn, the kind of berry that gets produced. And it's a little bit citrusy. It's nice. That tastes pretty good.

Not very common nowadays, but they were quite popular back in the Middle Ages. And we could find quite a few descriptions of them in various medieval European texts and Chinese ones and whatever. Nutmeg and cloves. Those came from Eastern Indonesia, what is now Eastern Indonesia. The island of Banda, that's where all the nutmeg in the world came from. And also in North Maluku, what's now called the province of North Maluku. That's where all the cloves in the world came from. And we find those pretty extensively in European,

texts in Indian ones, in wherever. It doesn't matter which part of the word you're talking about. If you have a size of all manuscript record, you're going to find clothes and nutmeg and these kind of things. So, to me, that's what makes it the Middle Ages, is that clearly these people who are living in Java, were living in even further east, even close to New Guinea, are part of this interconnected sort of Afro-Eurasian hemisphere.

And there were Europeans who visited on the Southeast Asianist period. Marco Polo came through, for example. he didn't go to Java. Funny that. But he did go to Sumatra and he stayed there for a few months. And he wrote a description of Java based on hearsay. And in which he claimed that Java was the biggest island in the world, which it isn't. In fact, it's a little smaller than England, which is kind of amazing because Java nowadays has 145 million inhabitants, something like that.

So it has more people living on it than live in Russia or Japan, which is kind of amazing. I don't know. It's an incredible place. Well, you know, to a certain extent, perhaps, you know, if we can be kind to him, one way to interpret it is that it's certainly one of the most important islands in the world at the time. And I suppose for me, that's what's really interesting about this part of the world is that, I mean, with all due respect to China, which likes to describe itself as the Middle Kingdom, this is sort of the middle of everything at the time. You know, everything goes through this particular series of our country. archipelagoes. Because one way that we talk about the Silk Roads is by talking about the overland routes that, you know, go through Central Asia. But the Silk Road as a maritime road certainly exists as well. And that is going through here. And it's because just as much as you want silk from China, you want nutmeg. I mean, people are incredibly desirous of clothes

and nutmeg across Afro-Eurasia. So this is moving around at huge rates. And these people are kind of unimaginably wealthy and luxurious to a certain extent. And they're living these lives that everyone is jealous of. And yet we still kind of have an idea of these places as a place where products that we wish for and we desire come from, you know, like just saying the word Java, you know, which as a kind of old time you stand in for coffee, right? Or, you know, these are all things that we know off the top of our heads as, oh yeah, well, that's a place that things I want come from. And in the Middle Ages, it was even more important, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, I don't really like the term maritime Silk Road in this context because the maritime trade is so much bigger

in every respect than the Overland trade. And we're naming that maritime trade after what's happening, you know, through Central Asia, which is kind of a misnomer anyway. They weren't primarily trading silk probably, you know, certainly by the period that I'm in terms, in the sort of, in the second millennium, 80. Silk is everywhere anyway. People are producing silk in Java. They're producing silk in India. They're producing silk in Greece at that time.

Yeah. I mean, basically, in every way, the maritime trade is big a range of products. So you're saying clothes and nutmeg, but also things like pepper, of course, and also silk. And locally, also things like iron. Java, for example, is particularly poor in iron. It just doesn't have any. So it needs to kind of bring this stuff in from other countries. And we see these huge shipments of Chinese iron that are coming in from shipwrecks.

We could see them, you know, shipwrecks in the Java Sea and in the Straits of Malacca and places like that. We can see that people were importing a lot of iron from China and also from Sulu Aisu, which has a lot of iron. That's another island, around the big island in what is now Indonesia. So, you know, there's a lot of different things that are being traded. And there are also a lot of different groups of people who are being connected to one another through this trade and are interacting. And when we get kind of lists of sailors and things like that in Southeast Asian literatures, they're coming from all over the place. In the text that I'd worked on for my PhD years ago, there's a junk that's described in the text.

And a junk is this enormous ship. Originally a Southeast Asian ship, we think of junk as being these Chinese ships. But originally in medieval literatures, including European ones, and in Arabic as well, from the 14th century onwards, we get these descriptions. of junks referring to in Norse Southeast Asian ships capable of carrying hundreds and hundreds of merchants across the Indian Ocean, carrying vast amounts of stuff. And this is exactly, this is corroborated by the archaeological record as well. And the junk that's described, or at least one of the ships that's described in the text that I worked on, they've got arches

from China, they've got sailors from Sumatra, they've got people from Java as well working on. You know, it's very multicultural. And this is also what we find, We're looking at inscriptions from East Java in terms of things like tax, who's paying tax, and where are they coming from? They're coming from India. They're coming from all over the place. So it's a very multicultural place

in a way that, you know, in a similar way, I suppose, to the Overland Silk Road routes, but linking more people over much greater distances and involving a lot more money and so on. I think, I mean, yeah, we need to highlight this a lot more and kind of diminish maybe the importance of the Overland Silk Road thing

Maybe we should start calling the overland Silk Road, like the landlocked Silk Road or something like that. You know, let's say that we need to take them down a peg, you know, the really good stuff's coming by sea always, you know, frankly. But I mean, and there's a good reasons for this. It moves faster. Yeah. There's a bunch of things down there that you want and that you're going to want to pick up. Yeah. To bring through.

You know, one of the reasons why we kind of say the Silk Road, I think, up top is that it's a little bit more like, yeah, no, we're moving silk. We're moving fur. removing cloths of this description, whereas by sea, it's just so much more diverse in terms of... Yeah, ceramics is a big one. Huge. You know, especially the Middle Eastern. You know, I don't like using the term Middle Eastern either. But, you know, the Middle Eastern desire for ceramics is absolutely enormous.

And we have these huge cargoes that are moving through constantly. And, you know, we found all kinds of shipwrecks that have, you know, the full, the full set of ceramics. the same in Southeast Asia. Whole stacks of Chinese blue and white porcelain and celadon and all sorts of amazing things like that that have found at shipwreck sites.

And you couldn't transport that easily overland because it breaks. If you carry it in a caravan and a wagon, something like that, goes over a bump. You've got a real problem. Whereas waves are relatively gentle. I suppose if you pack them tightly and put them in a hold,

it sort of seems to work, which is why in medieval Europe we find almost no Chinese porcelain at all. I think there are two pieces, maybe more from the 14th century and later, one that supposedly brought back by Marco Polo in Venice, which is plausible, actually,

and another one that was given to, you know, one of the Arjoling kings of Hungary or whatever it was, something like that. But in Southeast Asia, in East Africa, enormous amounts of Chinese porcelain all over the place. because they could transport it very easily by sea.

So, yeah. This is the other thing, of course, is that if you want to get from the Middle East, or let's say, let's say, let's say, whatever. If you want to get from the Middle East and you want to get to China, and you want to do it the quickest and most efficient, effective way, then you just use those monsoon winds to take you across the Indian Ocean to the Malacca Strait to Sumatra, somewhere like that, and then, again, take those monsoon winds up north, up to South China Sea.

to China. And that's how you do it. And that's how people did do it. And so even, you know, these areas that we don't think of as being necessarily connected to Southeast Asia are they're connected to one another through Southeast Asian. Initially, there's a pretty good book on the Southeast Asian Spice Trade by the Cambridge. I guess he was a geographer, Robin Duncan. And it's called Between East and West. And it's about cloves and nutmeg, which come from between extreme southeast, of this whole trading network, but they were sort of halfway between China and India and Western Africa, Asia. So in that sense, between Eastern West, which is kind of what this place is. But it also has its own stuff. It's economically productive in its own way. They have their

own food. They have their own stuff going on. It's not just taking things from other places and developing on them. So, okay, can we talk about that a little bit? Because I suppose I get so bogged down in the trade because it's cool and sexy, I'm afraid. And it's so easy to understand it as an important place because of what it means to other people. You know, if you ask Chinese people, they'd be like, oh, yeah, well, you've got to have good trade links with this. And the same thing with Europeans. But they have their own important cultures and kingdoms going on at the time. So what do we know about what is happening in what is now Indonesia itself?

Well, it sort of depends which time period you're talking about. Just do it all, Alex. Go. I think that one of the key things to know here is that the people who live in Western Indonesia, live in Malaysia and Indonesia, that sort of varies, Sumatra, the Malapenicia, Borneo, Java, those kind of places. They speak Austronesian languages. So languages in the Austrian language family and specifically within the Malaya Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. So their languages are related to Malgash, which is spoken. on the island of Madagascar, which was settled from Borneo, bizarrely, in the first millennium. They're, like, Malgash is most closely related to some Bornean languages, which just seems

completely bizarre. That is where it is. And they're also related to Hawaiian, Samo and Fijian, and all the languages of the wider Pacific. So this is a very, very widespread language family. And of course, those people have their own things going on. They brought to their own culture, sort of with them when they migrated into the area, a few thousand years ago. So we've got a bunch of different languages that are recorded in the sources.

The main one, the biggest one in terms of the corpus, is old Javanese. And that's a language that's spoken basically in the eastern two-thirds of the island of Jatford. And the political situation in Java is quite difficult to summarize on its own. There seems to have been a Javanese kingdom, probably in the early to mid-1st millennium AD, and it was centered somewhere in central Java. We have these beautiful little Indian-influenced Hindu and Buddhist sculpture from that period. We start to get a few inscriptions.

Some of the inscriptions are in Malay or in old Malay, which is a bit strange. Some of them are in Old Javanese. Some of them are in Sanskrit, and some of them are in two or more of those languages. the same time. And that's also the place where we get some of the most famous and most interesting monuments, most surviving things, really, from Indonesia, including Borobudur, which is in central Java, and it is the world's biggest Buddhist monument. And that was built

in the 9th century. And it's incredible. I mean, I recommend everyone to visit it. It should be a bucket-loose item for everybody. It's an incredible place. It's a just, just, a huge kind of Buddhist stupor with bar reliefs on several terraces that you can, you know, see as you go around. It's amazing. It's beautiful. Quite near that and built at around the same time is a what is often described as a Hindu site called Prambanan. Probably built by the same kingdom. It's this mixing of Hindu and Buddhist things that happens quite often in Southeast Asia. And then at some point in the early 10th century, this Central Javni's kingdom seems to collapse.

Probably around 928. The inscriptions cease. We just don't get any more. And then we get this huge development in East Jav. And East Javni stuff is totally different. The art styles are different. If you look at Central Javanese period art, so before 928, kind of like chubby people,

very Indian-inspired, very kind of classical Indian. Look, you look at the East Javney stuff, everyone's very wiry, long noses. it's a completely it's like a total transformation and we see the same thing happening with like inscriptions and scripts the way the scripts look

how they're designed it seems like the things that are coming from India are being increasingly indigenous made more Javanese so and then there's a succession of different Javanese kingdoms that take over in that part of the world

the most famous one is Majapai'it which is also the name of the capital. That's usually the case for these Chavani's kingdoms. They're named after the capital. And Myra Bhayat was founded in 1292, 93, something like that, right after a Mongol invasion of Java. So, Mongols invaded in 1292, they were kind of repelled. They would sort of defeat it. It's good for Java, you know. Like, one of the only ones to ever do it. I love to hear it, you know. But this was what people thought in medieval Europe. of this reached Europe.

People were really impressed that the people in Java had managed to defeat the Great Car. Yeah, no kidding. So, you know, this was like a big thing. In practice, in reality, there was actually a civil war going on. The Mongols back to the right side in the Civil War. So was it a defeat?

Kind of not. So, yeah, I mean, very strange, but they realized that there was no point in trying to control this very strange place where people did things differently. They just left. Very difficult to run a lot of horses through Java to be fair. So it's a little bit culturally distinct.

They had a lot of horses in Java, actually. This is, yeah, it's... It shows what I know. There you go. In fact, that some Indonesian islands were quite famous for their horses. Really? At least within the Indo-Valachian archipelago, and certainly when Europeans turned up, when Portuguese people turned up in the 16th century, they're quite impressed by the quality of horses from islands that you wouldn't expect.

The island of Sumbawa, for example, which is really quite far to the east. You know, it's sort of, if you look on a map, it's sort of northwestern. bit of Australia, famous for its horses. So, yeah, this is not a culturally, completely bizarre place. They had, you know, Buddhism. They had, you know, Hindu things that were recognizable. They had camels, I mentioned in some old Germanese texts, which obviously are not native. So, yeah, it wasn't completely bizarre, but it was like, okay, this is just too chaotic a kingdom. We're not going to get involved. I think that was the attitude. I'm going to completely reframe my relationship to this and say, see, the Mongols were trying to invade because of

the good horses now. And that's what I'm doing now. I actually can't remember what the instigating incident was, but it was something the Javanese did. I can't remember. They mutilated an envoy or something like this. Oh, yeah, that'll do it. Yeah.

Yeah. So, and they thought they were unfutcheable because they're so far away from everything. This kingdom, Madrapati, basically survives from 1292 or 1293 to some point, probably in the 1480. That's pretty good run. It's not fair, certainly, for a Javanese kingdom.

They're usually a little bit shorter than naturally. Anyway, so what happens in the late 15th century is that Muslims turn up in large numbers, or people are converted to Islam in large numbers, certainly in the port cities around the Javanese coast, especially the north coast of Java. And this seems to be a very bad thing from the perspective of the Hindu Buddhist. it's a kind of a mixed cult of Hindu and Buddhist things at that point state, you know, inland. And so these cities start to break away. That means that the economic power is taken away from the centre.

And by the time the first Portuguese expedition, you should say, in 1513, this came that was basically gone. There's a sort of real rump state in the extreme east of Java. But basically it's turned into lots of little mostly Muslim. polities along the coast and interior. And then in western Java, there's the kingdom of Sunda, which seems to go back quite a long way. We don't really know when it began. It's not very well evidenced, and it probably had quite a small population because they have volcanoes across Java. In fact, it's the most volcanic island in the world.

That's usually how it was described anyway. And the volcanoes in West Java produce apparently much more acidic ejection. hectares and stuff that comes out of them is not as good for agriculture. It doesn't contain as many nutrients. And then combine that with really heavy rainfall that leeches the nutrients out of the soil that does actually exist and you get, well, not really a great agricultural base. And so this was probably quite a small kingdom in terms of population, but it seems to have been governing that Western third of Java for a few hundred years. And when the Portuguese turned up, they were quite impressed by it and they wanted to establish a

alliance with Sunder. And in 1522, they actually did. And then, well, because the Portuguese and the various Muslim policies in Southeast Asia saw each other as mortal enemies, the armies of these Muslim Javanese cities on the coast, then invaded Sunder and no more Sunder, basically by about 1570 something. And then there's Sumatra, which has a, yeah, well, I mean, how long have you got for all these things? I don't know. But anyway, so Sumatra is this own thing. The most important thing that people probably need to know about Sumatra is that there was a kind of a kingdom. I don't want to call it an empire. There was called Shrivi Jaya.

A lot of people say that it didn't exist. There are inscriptions with that word on. So, I mean, it existed in some form. And this was probably based at the city of Palembang in South Sumatra. There have been quite a few finds there, archaeologically speaking, including a bunch of inscriptions in old Malay from the 7th century. and it seems to have been basically a Buddhist place and the place that had a lot of trading connections. If you look on a map, Palembang is right there at the bottom,

the southern end of the straight of Malacca, which is still one of the world's most important waterways in terms of trade. They were probably trying to control that. And this polity exists in some form from the 7th century, certainly all the way through to probably the 14th, something like that. At various points, it's invaded by various different groups of people. There's an invasion in the 11th century coming from southern India, the Chorla dynasty,

people of the Tamil kings there, invaded. I think it was 1025. They invaded South Sumatra, you know, kicked out the king. They seem to have sent some diplomatic missions to China as well from there, so they seem to have actually taken it over for a little bit. but it doesn't seem to last. There isn't some sort of long-lasting Indian kingdom in Southeast Asia or anything like that. And then later on, Palembang itself is taken over by Chinese pirates,

which is good fun. And when the treasure fleets in the early Meng Dynasty at the beginning of the 15th century, when they're sent out into the world by the Yonglo emperor, one of the things that they do in Sumatra is to kick out these pirates, arrest the ringleader taking back to Beijing and have him executed. So, yeah, it's a very interesting place. Fair enough. You know.

So. I mean, there's a lot more to say about Sumatra. There's always so much more to say about all of these places. So in the northern Sumatra as well, there are a lot of very interesting little kingdoms. And other things, I mean, not even kingdoms. I don't even know what's called little polities, little something. There's a place called Baru that was very famous for producing camphar.

It comes from the inside of trees. And you can use a lot of, you know, it's mentioned in the Quran. It's mentioned in lots and lots of different medieval texts from across Afro-Eurasia. Some recipes for gunpowder from medieval Europe include camphor as well. If you want to supercharge your gunpowder, put some camphor in it. Okay. And the word that they're using that word camphor change from a Malay word. The Malay word originally was Kapur, which also means chalk because it's sort of white substance.

And it was originally called Kapur-Barrus, which means chalk from barus. in Sumatra. And a very interesting place. There were some Tamil inscriptions from there as well from the 11th century. And there's also a description in Arabic by a Coptic priest from the 13th century, where he claims that there were Christian churches that had been built in Varus. But he describes them as Nestorian, so many, probably some Indian church at the east, something like that. So they were probably Tamil-speaking Christians. But we don't really know. This is just one text, one opinion. We certainly haven't found any churches there, but they probably would have been made with wood.

So, who knows? I mean, I guess that wouldn't be particularly surprising, given the excellent links that they have with East Africa and, you know, as you say, India and places like that, I would not be surprised at all that some Christians got on a boat at a point in time. You know, that there's rather a lot of different ways. Yeah. Not remotely surprising. Yeah, and there are some texts in the Cairoganesa as well that talk about Jewish merchants who visited this part of Sumatra at around the same time.

And in fact, one of them died there, at least one of them, is known to have died in Sumatra. And the text in the Cairoganesa is saying, by the way, this guy's died. So, you know, in this really far-off place, by the way, it's called, you know, Baros. They don't actually use the word Barus. They use the word Fansur, which is the Arabic name for the place.

It's very common cases. But this is a name for a nearby place. It's known as Batterson, basically, every other text. This is the thing, though. We get a lot of historical documents that tell us little bits and things about it that are coming, you know, out of Arabic or different cultural traditions because they're spending so much time in contact with, you know, you got to get someone over to Sumatra immediately or, you know, where are all your goods going to come from? So, you know, we have excellent records in Arabic of trade relations. We certainly know that things are being sent to. different sultans, you know, if you are, if you're anyone who's anyone, kind of on the Arabian peninsula at some point in time, you're going to want some things that are brought over. So we know there are lots of contractual obligations that are being made. And there is just rather a lot of cultural back and forth here, which, you know, I suppose this is completely unsurprising because we have these very wealthy empires and kingdoms. And of course, they're going to end up in

contact with one another. Basically, yeah. Actually, I'd say probably the most important record are in Chinese. Not to me, person. I don't really care particularly about, you know, who was in power this year or whatever. But that's the kind of thing that we get from Chinese text. If you look at a lot of dynastic histories, they will say, in such and such a year, we received a visit from an embassy from Java or an embassy from this kingdom. And philologists will have worked out over time that this kingdom is referring to a place in Sumatra or Borneo or wherever else. So the Chinese texts are most important for that kind of thing. If you want to know a sort of rough outline, a chronology of who's in power, where, and when, those Chinese texts are the most important ones.

Yeah, and then Arabic, of course, there's a lot. Also, in European languages, to some extent, Marco Polo, of course, left where he didn't write it, but, you know, there's the Marco Polo travels, and we get quite a lot of interesting information in there. It doesn't tell us, like, really granular detail, but he did stay in Sumatra for several months, and he does. talk about the different kingdoms that were there. There were other European visitors as well. I mean, there's Niccolo de Conti in the 15th century. He says that the Javanese are the worst people in the world. They're the cruelest.

They kill one another for fun. You know, if they buy a new sword, they just test it out on a person. You know, this kind of, they eat mice and rats and dogs and whatever, this kind of thing. So, yeah, he has a very low opinion. I think this is because by the time he was there, well, I don't know. I think this is just bigotry to some extent. But I think this is partly because at that point, you know, this kingdom, Madhapai in East Java is breaking down. A lot of this kind of stuff is not going so well over there.

So maybe that's it. Ibn Ubatuta as well, you know, writing in Arabic, he also has a very low opinion of people in Java. But he didn't really visit very many non-Muslim places. And he does seem to have been quite bigoted towards people who, weren't Muslims, and that included people in Java at the time. So, who knows? There's a sort of limit to what we can infer from this. So is there a particular reason why we see this breakdown in power in the 15th century? You know, is this kind of symptomatic of the generalized changes that we see globally in at this time? I don't think so. No, I think, well, most people say,

you know, that basically Muslim merchants are arriving in the North Coast of Jal. They want to have and tax breaks from the local government, the Javanese government. The Javanese government seems to give them these tax breaks. That means that money is no longer flowing to the central government. And they also don't have an ideological, you know, relationship, really. There's these Muslim traders on the coast, and then there's these inland farmers who disdain trade, who think it's just this terribly uncouth thing to do. If you look at old Javanese literature, very often ships are shipwrecked.

you know, this is a thing that happens if you go out on the sea. It's a terrible place to be. Don't go there. You know, so does this real disconnect between the coast and this inland government, this inland kingdom. It's something to do with that, really. There's sort of breakdown in authority as a result of no longer having very much money. I suppose that that's just kind of the name of the game, isn't it? If you're in these areas that are incredibly wealthy and can access huge parts of the world with goods, then the minute money stops going in the right direction, everything is just a problem, isn't it? Yeah. And this didn't mean that everybody suddenly had horrible lives, I don't think, because, you know, that East Java is quite agriculturally productive. You know, they had this pretty good rainfall.

they've got the volcanoes that produce this wonderful soil. So, you know, they seem to have had pretty decent agricultural surplus, large population, all of those kind of things in East Java. But it doesn't mean you automatically get to control all the money and the power on the island. And that's probably what happened over time. It's just, yeah, money stopped flying. Well, you know, it's one of those things where I suppose they've got all the spice already. They've got all the wonderful food that everybody wants.

And so, you know, if trade breaks down, it's sort of like, oh, well, I guess we'll have to keep eating our delicious food. That's terrible, you know. You know, what's it? They did have some spices, of course. I mentioned cubets, which came from each other. We've grown and half a day. We actually had some texts about tax exemptions for people growing cubits, which is pretty cool. And for growing some other things as well, like black pepper. And I actually gave a paper on this once. But I can't remember what the other ones were. Okay, whatever. Anyway, it's like four. or nice spices. But stuff like cloves and nutmeg, those had to come from somewhere else. They came from the east. So what's really interesting, actually, is that in the old Javanese corpus, we very, very rarely find any reference to these things. Interesting. They just don't talk about cloves or spices in general. Huh. I think cloves come up once, and I think it's more in a kind of Indian sort of context.

Claves often appear in Indian literature in this form of as a truce. tree, actually. They didn't grow in India, but there's this idea of clove trees as emblematic of southern India. And it's kind of appearing in that role in Java. Because it just might be one of those things where it's so common, why would you talk about it? But then on the other, yeah, you know. It's got to be that, hasn't it? Like, yeah. By saying, oh, wow, there's air around me right now. You know, I'm not going to write that down, am I? But it is so funny because of what, I guess it's the trouble with being defined as a place because of what everybody else wants. from you. And the trouble that we have in terms of sources and knowing exactly what's happening on the ground over there is that you end up with these hopelessly foreign definitions of a place that is its own place. It's so frustrating. I mean, it's frustrating for me. I can't imagine how difficult it is for you, the guy who wants to have these sources, you know.

Well, no, I guess. I don't know. I think if people cared more about this, what it would be a problem. But, you know, it's a part of the world that people don't have very many misconceptions about because they just don't have very many preconceptions about it. It's just a part of the world people don't know anything about. You say Java, people think coffee. You say Sumatra. Oh, yeah, that must be some sort of exotic island somewhere. You know, instead of Java, the world's third most populous landmass, which is what it is, you know, after Afro-Eurasia and the Americans.

This is so interesting because it's sort of the... opposite problem to European medieval history, right? Where Europe, you know, I don't want to be one of those people who says that Europe isn't important because, of course, it's important. Everywhere is important. Stop that. That's nonsense. But, you know, I spend all of my time fighting misconceptions about, you know, a part of the world that we know a lot about, even though, you know, let's say, I don't know, England isn't going to rank very high on someone in Java's imagination at the time. But then you go to the other part of the world, which is hugely populous, hugely important, massively wealthy, and nobody knows anything about it. I think what's interesting actually in that connection is that people in England knew the name of the island of Java.

But people in Java did not know the name of England, or even of Europe. They have no conception of it, as far as we can tell from the text that we have. So they knew about Delhi. Certainly by the 14th century, we get these references, these sort of lists actually, different place names. And a lot of them are in the Indo-Malaysian archipelago. They're in Malaysia. They're in Indonesia. But they include China.

They include Cambodia, the Delhi Sultan. Or, you know, Tamil kingdoms in southern India and, you know, Arabia and Africa. There's an old Javanese word for East Africa, which is Jungi. we don't really know where it came from and it might be well who knows I'm not going to go there actually there's a whole

etymological argument about that word but anyway so that's the name that they have for East Africa so they're aware of this kind of Indian Ocean South China Sea world connected by the monsoon winds and they're not really aware of Europe so you can spend that one way you can say

oh Europe was poor and irrelevant which is not the case I don't think at all And in fact, you know, it's driving a lot of that trade. Europe is a huge, you know, buyer of these spices that are coming straight from Java. So you can spin it that way. You can say, oh, Europe's relevant. Or you could just say, actually, people in Europe just had more texts. They had more manuscripts to be able to draw on going back, you know, much further back in time because of a more favorable client.

Yeah, certainly. I mean, it's just one of these things about the vagaries of how. history works. You know, we're dependent on documents making it for hundreds, if not thousands of years. And that can be really difficult. You know, the things that I worry about as a Europeanist are like, you know, a library catching on fire. Or I don't know, Henry the 8th. I worry about him a lot. He's not good for source survival. But just like, you know, Maria Theresa deciding she's going to reorganize her library. These are the things that get us in trouble. But in Indonesia, the issue is just literally the weather and it's such a huge one you know. Well, that you know, also fires

and, you know, destruction and deliberate you know, that there must have been quite a sizable literature in the Malay language in old Malay. We don't have any of it really, but we do have quite a lot of classical Malay texts or so-called classical

Malay texts. And this means basically Muslim literature in Malay and written in the Jawi script, which is the Arabic script adapted for writing Malay. And that first of years, we've had an inscription in Jawi from 1303, I think it is, from Trenganu, on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula. So people have been writing in Jawi for, you know, a good 700 years. We don't have anything really before that.

And people must have kind of suppressed, to some extent, the Hindu and Buddhist stuff that was originally written in Malay. So there's definitely deliberate destruction We obviously don't know We don't have the sources They're probably deliberate destruction And then there's also the weather And then there's also any random event

You know, volcanic eruption Or big storm, who knows? So yeah, not a lot survives Like I said, maybe a dozen manuscripts From before the 16th century, probably more I don't know Libraries don't want to date them They're very fragile

So chemically dating them is hard And not very many of them have dated colopharmes So it's tough. It's hard out here. So, I mean, I guess that what we do have, though, is some pretty cool stone work. We've got some nice things to work with archaeologically, of course. But then again, as you said, the minute something is built in wood, that's also kind of out the window after a few hundred years. Yeah, I was in Japan last month.

And we went to Nara, which is a very beautiful place. And they have the oldest wooden buildings in the world there. from the 7th century, you know, the Horyugian temple and the Shorsoin, which was built as an archive. And it's amazing to see these things, you know, imagining that if they had had that in Java, and they probably did have something analogous to that, you know, Hugh Jaka, it just wouldn't have lasted. There wouldn't have been really any feasible way to make these things last. So we know a lot more about Japan than we do about Java, and I think that plays a role in the importance of Japan in popular culture today and the relative unimportance of Java,

even though Java has more people, you know, in a history that is, in principle, just as old and just as long and just as interesting. Oh, yeah, I mean, here we are, we're sitting around talking about what is now the largest Muslim country in the world, and where there's a certain amount of guesswork about what happened before Islamist cessation.

You know, it's really boggling. But I think that's why it's so important, right? It's not just important because of how important it was in the medieval period, which of course it was. But I think having these conversations where you talk about the difficulties of just literally doing history as a discipline and how that shapes public imagination. So in the same way that, you know, medieval people in Java are probably not busy sitting around thinking about England. We're just not able to imagine en masse what it's like to be in the Strait of Malacca as a result of these

little things. And I don't know, it's it's kind of romantic, but also it's a little bit frustrating. Yeah, it means it's quite a small field, partly because there isn't that much to work on. On the other hand, there's so much more to do. I think the reason to get in interested in the reason to start reading about these things is just that there's so much great stuff in Old Chavnese-Lift Shia, so much great stuff in Old Sundanese as well. There's a lot of just wonderful things to read, different perspectives that you haven't heard before. So it's It's not just, oh, this place was important in trade, all this place was important because they were rich and they had, you know, big kingdoms and big monuments. It's also, you know, they're people and they have different ways of doing literature and different ways of doing our religious practice.

And, I mean, the text that I worked on from my PhD that I mentioned, Projangamanik, the edition, by the way, is being published next month by Brill. Congratulations. Wow. Well, it's taken a while. But, okay, anyway, so that text is very, very interesting. It has a lot of references to all sorts of interesting things. It has a very stark, simple, Spartan way of describing things, but it just sort of layers on these little details, you know, just like a little dab of paint here and there. It's a great effect.

It's a really, really nice text. I can know if you could, you know, if you look at the manuscript, it's a little palm leaf manuscript. It's not inked. It's just the letters are cut into the leaf using a knife. And when you look at it, it's not exactly like sort of tre richeure or something like that. It's not some amazing, glorious, illuminated manuscript or something. But in its own way, it is beautiful. And I think, you know, these kind of things people need to be aware of just because they're nice.

They're little human things that we should know about and appreciate. In Sunda, there were two different classes of manuscript from what we can tell. They had one which was like a presentation manuscript. And that is ink on a different kind of leaf, thicker, leaf, much, you know, much more elegant, much more beautiful, and presented usually in like red lacquer boxes, very, very nice. The kind that I was working on this,

Brangamagnol, this text, it's in a black lacquer box, but the lacquer's all scuffed up and rubbish. And anyway, it's broken. And the, you know, the leaves are kind of small, they're all different colors a little bit, had the leaves, you know, it's not quite as good. And we know that this was supposed to be a text that you actually used.

There was actually spoken aloud for an audience, which I think is kind of more interesting. I love that. No, to me, these are the ones, right? Because the more people have listened to or got their hands on a particular manuscript, the more I like it. I don't care. If you have the most beautiful, if you're the treasurer, okay, like, I'm not. Don't let anyone say that I don't like the treasurer because I do. But fundamentally, what a king has or a duke has that five people are going to see is not. as important to me as what actually influences culture. What I want to hear about is what large groups of people are involved in. And that's what we're talking about here. Yeah, to some extent. I think with the old Javanese literature, we are talking about, you know, fancy pants people honing fancy pants manuscripts and fancy pants stories. I mean, but those are interesting as well. And they give us a lot of insights into daily life and these kind of things. There's actually a really

wonderful book by Helen Crees that I would recommend if you're interested in Javanese literature. It's called Women of the Kakaouin world. Kakaouin is the sort of premier old Javanese poetic tradition. And it's about women's lives as portrayed in these texts. So we've written by men, but that seem to portray something of the life of a noble woman in Java over a period of several centuries. And they have all sorts of interesting things in there, like same-sex, attraction between women and that kind of thing. So, yeah, I think that's actually a really good place

to begin if you're interested in Japanese literature. Frankly, everybody should be. That's signing everyone homework. Go read Japanese literature if you want to impress me. I mean, you can. You should be able to find these things online if you really want to. There are quite a few of them have been translated into English. Not always amazingly, but increasingly, yeah, they are available in, you know, bilingual editions. So get up there, have a look. I guess, Alex, to kind of wrap us up, is there anything, you know, other than signposting where people can get their hands on some cool literature? Is there, what is the takeaway that you want an audience to get when, you know, we're talking about a huge number of people, a lot of land, and we just

covered about, you know, a thousand years or so, give or take in this conversation. Yeah. Yeah, Something like that. What does that matter between friends? You know, if we were to tell an interested audience, this is the takeaway, what is it that you want to impress upon people? I don't know. I guess the fact that it is this hugely important region, basically everywhere. It isn't important for one reason. It's like a continent.

It's like Europe. It's like the Middle East, whatever we want to call it. It's like India. It's like China. has this ancient history. It has lots of different literary traditions. It has all these trade connections. It has people talking about it in other countries. They were infated by the Mongols. You know, it's like this hugely interesting place in every way. And you won't lose anything. Well, you lose some time maybe. I don't know. Maybe you don't find it very interesting.

But you won't lose anything by becoming interested in it and reading about it and learning about. It will enrich your life. Alex, this has been such a pleasure. And I'm sorry for trying to. get you to cram so much into such a short time. But thank you so much for letting me drag you along to pick your brain. Well, thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. Thanks to Alex West and to you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my recent episode, The Medieval Apocalypse, and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com

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