Kediri under Jayakatwang

Twelve months

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

Jayakatwang was lord of Kediri and a vassal of Singhasari — the kingdom that had destroyed Kediri at Ganter seventy years earlier and taken its place.

In 1292, with Kertanegara's army across the Java Sea on the Sumatran expedition and the capital thinly held, he revolted, marched on it, and killed the king.

The sources describe what followed as a restoration: the second kingdom of Kediri, using the same name the historiography gives the first.

Seventy years of waiting

It is worth stopping on what that means. Kediri had been the dominant power in eastern Java for a hundred and eighty years before Ganter. After 1222 its lords were subordinates in somebody else's kingdom, and stayed subordinates for three generations.

Then the overlord's army left the island, and the lord of Kediri took the throne back.

Whether Jayakatwang thought of himself as restoring his ancestors' kingdom or simply as seizing an opportunity is not recoverable. What is recoverable is that the sources — and the people naming the kingdom afterwards — treated it as the same Kediri coming back, which tells you the first one had not been forgotten in the seventy years it was gone.

And then a fleet arrived

He held it for about a year.

What ended it had nothing to do with Java's own politics. Kublai Khan had sent envoys to Kertanegara demanding submission, and Kertanegara had sent the last one back disfigured. The expedition dispatched to punish him was already at sea when Jayakatwang killed him, and it arrived in 1293 to find a different man on a throne it had no quarrel with.

The next chapter is what that fleet did.

The fleet he did not send for

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

Kublai Khan had sent envoys to Java demanding submission, and Kertanegara — in the account that survives — had the last of them branded on the face and sent back. The Yuan expedition dispatched to punish him arrived in 1293.

Kertanegara had been dead for a year. The man on the throne was Jayakatwang, who had killed him, and who had no quarrel with anybody in China.

Raden Wijaya, Kertanegara's son-in-law, met the Mongols, presented himself as Singhasari's rightful heir, and offered to guide them to the usurper. They took the offer. Kediri was destroyed. Raden Wijaya then turned on the expedition, drove it back to its ships, and founded Majapahit out of the same campaign in the same year.

It is a rare way for a kingdom to die: destroyed by an expedition sent against somebody else, in a war it had no part in starting.

Nothing else survives

A kingdom that lasted twelve months leaves almost no record of its own.

Jayakatwang raised revenue and troops the way Singhasari had raised them the year before, because there was no time to do anything else and no source describes him doing otherwise. There is no reform, no monument, no law, no inscription programme. What there is, is one revolt, one year, and one catastrophe arriving from a direction nobody in Java had chosen.

It is a complete history and it is almost empty, and those are not in tension. Some polities simply do not last long enough to be anything.