Majapahit

The Mongols come and go

Drafted from Hall, A History of Early Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and Societal Development, 100-1500 (2011)formation

In 1289 Kublai Khan sent an envoy to Kertanegara of Singhasari on Java demanding submission. Kertanegara had the man's face branded or his ear cut off — the accounts differ on which — and sent him back.

The expedition that came in response was substantial: something like a thousand ships out of Quanzhou, with twenty or thirty thousand men. It belongs with the two attempts on Japan among the overseas failures of Kublai's reign.

By the time it arrived Kertanegara was dead, killed by a vassal named Jayakatwang who had taken the throne.

What Raden Wijaya did

Kertanegara's son-in-law, Raden Wijaya, had survived and was in the forest with a few followers. He presented himself to the Mongol commanders as the rightful heir of the ruler they had come to punish, offered submission, and asked for help against the usurper.

They gave it. The combined force destroyed Jayakatwang and took his capital. Wijaya then asked leave to go home and fetch the tribute and the princesses he had promised, was allowed to go with a small escort, killed the escort, turned on the Mongol army while it was dispersed and celebrating, and drove it back to the ships.

It sailed in the same year it had arrived. Its commanders were punished on return.

Majapahit is dated from that: a state founded in the space cleared by an invasion it then expelled, by a man who had used the largest army in the world as a temporary ally and not paid for it.

What it was founded on

Not a new kingdom, formally. Wijaya's claim was descent by marriage from Kertanegara, and he had his father-in-law commemorated as the dynasty's founding ancestor.

That claim did a great deal of work. Singhasari had lasted seventy years, held eastern Java, taken the strait from Sumatra in 1275, and insulted the Mongols; its last king was dead at a vassal's hands and its capital was in that vassal's hands too. By presenting himself as Singhasari's heir, Wijaya turned an opportunistic alliance with a foreign invasion into a restoration — and then made the restoration permanent by expelling the people who had helped him.

Everything Majapahit later claimed about itself runs back through that. The dynasty descended from Kertanegara; the archipelago-wide overlordship it asserted was Kertanegara's Sumatran expedition continued; and the poem that lists its dependencies is arguing, among other things, that this was always one line.

Rice and sea

Drafted from Hall, A History of Early Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and Societal Development, 100-1500 (2011)expansion

Srivijaya and Majapahit were built on opposite things, and that difference is most of what there is to understand about either of them.

Srivijaya lived on tolls and nothing else. It sat on a strait with a swamp behind it. It had no agriculture worth taxing, no hinterland, no population to levy, and its whole apparatus — the oaths, the sea peoples, the Buddhist endowments — was a way of making a chokepoint pay in the absence of anything else.

Majapahit lived on land tax, tolls and tribute — in that order.

The volcano

Java's soil is volcanic and its rainfall is monsoonal and reliable, and the combination supports wet-rice terracing at densities almost nowhere else in the pre-modern world matched. The island was probably carrying several million people in the fourteenth century on an area smaller than England.

That gave the Javanese court something no Sumatran power ever had: a surplus it could tax without anybody's ships arriving. The rice fed the capital, fed the armies, and — the part that matters for the archipelago — fed the ports.

Because the archipelago's spice islands to the east could not feed themselves. Cloves came from a handful of small islands in the Moluccas and nutmeg from the Bandas, and those places imported their rice. Whoever supplied the rice had a hold on the spice trade that no amount of naval force on its own could produce.

Majapahit was a thalassocracy with a granary, and it is the granary that made the thalassocracy work.

What that bought

The eastern archipelago, in a way Srivijaya never had it.

Srivijaya's power ran along the strait between India and China — a line, with the polity sitting on it. Majapahit's ran east into the islands, where the goods originated, and the fourth chapter's list of dependencies is heaviest exactly where the spices are.

The mechanism was the same in both cases: overlordship over coastal chiefs, maintained by marriage, tribute, prestige and occasional force. A maritime power fights with other people's ships, and both of them did.

What is different is that Majapahit could also raise Javanese levies through the princes and the regional lords. It had a fleet it did not own and an army it did, and Srivijaya only ever had the first.

And what it cost

A Javanese state with an agrarian base and a maritime empire has two centres of gravity, and they pull apart.

The court was inland, at Trowulan, among the rice. The trade was on the north coast, in ports that dealt with Chinese, Indian and later Muslim merchants. For a century the court held both. The fifth chapter is what happened when a succession war weakened the court, and the sixth is what happened when the coast found a religion the court did not share.

Srivijaya, having no interior, never had this problem and never had the resources that produced it.

The other thalassocracy

Drafted from Hall, A History of Early Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and Societal Development, 100-1500 (2011)peak

Under Hayam Wuruk and his minister Gajah Mada, in the middle of the fourteenth century, Majapahit claimed authority over most of the archipelago — Sumatra, Borneo, the eastern islands, the Malay peninsula — through a mixture of naval force, marriage, tribute and the same oath-bound arrangements with coastal chiefs that Srivijaya had used four centuries earlier.

How much of that was administration and how much was aspiration is the central question of Majapahit historiography, and the next chapter is about the document the question turns on.

Why it cannot be measured

There is no figure for how large Majapahit was, and there is not going to be one.

Power over sea lanes does not convert into square kilometres of land under state control. Neither Majapahit nor Srivijaya nor any other maritime power in these islands appears in the tabulations that supply extent figures for the empires of the period, because those tabulations were built from a literature about territorial states and none of these was one.

That absence is itself informative. A polity that can put a fleet into the Moluccas, take tribute from Sumatra, and be obeyed on the Malay peninsula is by any ordinary standard a great power — and there is no number that expresses it, because the thing it controlled was traffic rather than ground.

What it actually held

The honest description is a gradient rather than a border.

Java itself was governed: taxed, administered through princes and regional lords, supplying the rice and the men. Beyond that came a ring of places where Javanese authority was real but negotiated — the north coast, the nearer islands, the ports that needed Javanese rice. Beyond that again came places that sent tribute when it suited them, took Javanese titles because titles were useful, and calculated annually whether any of it was still worth doing.

None of those three is the same kind of thing, and a map drawn in one colour cannot show the difference. The next hundred and fifty years are largely the story of the outer ring doing the arithmetic differently.

A list of dependencies

Drafted from Hall, A History of Early Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and Societal Development, 100-1500 (2011)aside?What aside means

The Nagarakertagama, composed in 1365 by the court poet Prapanca, describes Hayam Wuruk's realm and lists its dependencies — dozens of places across Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi, the eastern islands and the Malay peninsula.

How to read that list is the central question of Majapahit historiography. It could be an administrative record of a governed empire; it could be a claim of overlordship over places that sent occasional tribute; it could be a poet flattering a king with a catalogue of everywhere his ships had been. The scholarly consensus sits nearer the middle: real influence over a network of ports, exercised through tribute, marriage, force where necessary and prestige where sufficient, and thinner the further from Java it went.

Indonesian nationalism later read it as the first unification of the archipelago and made it a precedent for the modern state's boundaries — a use the poem was not written for, six hundred years after it was written, by people arguing about something else entirely.

The safest thing to say about the list is that it is evidence of reach rather than of rule, that it was compiled by somebody with an interest in the reach looking impressive, and that a poet cataloguing everywhere his king's ships had been is not lying even when he is not describing an administration.

The Paregreg

Drafted from Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008)contraction

Hayam Wuruk died in 1389 and Gajah Mada had died thirteen years before him. What followed, from about 1404, was a war between the western court and the eastern one over the succession — the Paregreg, which means something like the slow-burning or grinding one.

It ran a couple of years and was settled by negotiation rather than by victory. That is the whole problem in one sentence: the throne was hereditary in the dynasty, and there was no rule at all for deciding between two claimants who each had a court behind them.

What a succession war costs a thalassocracy

More than it costs a territorial state, and the difference is the point.

An empire with garrisons and provinces loses a few years of tax collection and picks up where it left off. The Ottomans went through an eleven-year interregnum in exactly these years, from 1402 to 1413, and came out of it stronger.

Majapahit's authority over the archipelago was overlordship: tribute sent by coastal chiefs who calculated annually whether sending it was still the right move. Two years of a Javanese court unable to sail anywhere is two years of that calculation coming out differently, and the arrangement does not resume on request.

The Chinese records show it. Before the Paregreg they deal with the Javanese court; afterwards they deal with the north-coast ports directly, and with Palembang, and with a new place on the strait.

Melaka

Melaka was founded on the Melaka strait at about this moment — the traditional date is around 1400 — by a prince out of Palembang, in flight from Javanese pressure, who took a position on the strait and made it pay.

Which is Srivijaya's arrangement, on Srivijaya's water, five hundred years and one collapse later. The strait was still the only sea route between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, and it did not stop being that when the polity holding it stopped existing. Somebody was always going to be there.

Melaka took Chinese recognition, became Muslim within a generation or two, and by the mid-fifteenth century was the trade centre of the archipelago.

So the polity that displaced Majapahit commercially, the polity that reoccupied Srivijaya's old position, and the city the Portuguese took in 1511 to open their route to the spices are all the same place — founded, on the traditional dating, in the same years Java was fighting itself over a throne.

And the court kept going

The thing worth holding onto is that none of this looks like a fall from inside.

The court at Trowulan went on. Hayam Wuruk's descendants went on reigning, a Javanese rival took the capital in 1478 and the dynasty continued east of it, and inscriptions and land grants continue into the sixteenth century. Ricklefs is careful about this, and it is why the kingdom is dated to 1527 rather than to one of the tidier years.

What ended was not the state. It was the state's reach, and it ended in a succession war nobody won.

1527

Drafted from Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008)end

Majapahit has no fall either. What 1527 dates is the point at which Demak — a Muslim sultanate on the north Java coast, founded by a family of the port aristocracy — absorbed what was left of the inland Javanese court. There is no siege anybody records, no treaty, and no last king whose death ends a line.

The Islamisation nobody planned

The north Java ports became Muslim over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, merchant community by merchant community, in the ordinary way of the Indian Ocean — through traders from Gujarat, Bengal and the Arab world who settled, married and stayed, and through Sufi teachers whom Javanese tradition remembers as the wali songo, the nine saints.

There is no conquest in it. The earliest Muslim gravestones on Java are in the port towns, and some of them are in Majapahit's own royal cemetery at Trowulan — Muslims of the court, buried with Javanese dating and Islamic formulae, while the king was still performing the old ceremonies a few hundred metres away.

What that produced was not a religious war. It was a coast with a different religion from its interior, in a state whose whole economic structure depended on the interior's rice reaching the coast's ships.

Why the traditional date is 1478

Javanese tradition puts the fall of Majapahit at 1478 and attributes it to Demak and to Islam, in a chronogram — sirna ilang kertaning bumi, vanished and gone the prosperity of the earth — that encodes the year.

Neither part is right. In 1478 the capital was taken by a rival Javanese prince who was Hindu. The dynasty went on for another fifty years. Demak's absorption of the remnant is later, and quieter.

The date stuck because a court tradition written under Muslim sultans needed a year at which the old order ended and the new one began, and because a chronogram is easy to remember. It is a common enough manoeuvre: Ghana is supposed to have been destroyed by an Almoravid conquest in 1076 that probably never happened, and Meroë is still widely credited to Aksum on evidence that will not carry it. Three kingdoms on three continents, and the same instinct to date the end of each to whoever turned up next.

What Bali kept

Drafted from Cowing, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (1968)afterlife

Coedès puts it in one sentence: Bali played the same role of preserver for Java as Tibet did for Buddhist India.

Indian culture took refuge in certain districts of eastern Java and, above all, on Bali — and the island became, and has remained, the place holding the essentials of an Indo-Javanese literature and religion that Islam caused to disappear rapidly on Java itself.

What crossed the strait

Not a court in flight, or not only that. What moved was a tradition.

Javanese court literature in the Old Javanese metres continued under the Muslim sultanates and was still being copied in the nineteenth century, but it continued on Bali as a living religious practice rather than as inherited literature. The Hindu-Buddhist observance the Majapahit court had kept is still there. So is the Javanese-derived aristocracy, which traced its own line back to the governing house Majapahit installed on the island in 1343 and went on tracing it for another three hundred years at Gelgel.

Gamelan and wayang stayed on both sides of the water. The Bharatayuddha, written at Kediri two centuries before Majapahit existed, is still performed in both places.

Two heirs, two kinds of claim

Majapahit was claimed by two successors and they wanted completely different things from it.

Demak — the Muslim sultanate on the north coast that absorbed the remnant — traced Raden Patah's line back to Majapahit's own royal family. That genealogy is the entire basis on which a trading port claimed a right to rule Java rather than merely to trade from it, and it was still being invoked a century later, when Pajang's founder claimed descent from Majapahit's last king and from the Demak sultan he had just overthrown, at the same time.

Gelgel wanted the opposite. Its claim was not a right to rule Java but a right to be what Java had stopped being: the place where the old observance continued, under a dynasty that had been installed from Majapahit and had never converted.

One heir claimed the throne and changed the religion. The other claimed the religion and never had the throne.

And a third claim, much later

Indonesian nationalism read the Nagarakertagama's list of dependencies as a first unification of the archipelago and made it a precedent for the modern republic's boundaries.

That is a twentieth-century argument about a fourteenth-century poem, made by people who needed a precedent, about a document written by a court poet who needed a patron flattered. It belongs to the history of the poem rather than to the history of the kingdom — but it is the reason Majapahit is the one polity on these pages whose name is still doing work in a national argument, six hundred years after the last king stopped issuing charters.