Centered on the eastern half of Java and coming to control most of what would later become Indonesia, as well as Singapore, Malaysia and parts of Thailand during the 14th and 15th centuries, Majapahit may be the most significant empire that most people have never heard of. There are physical remains, but not as well-preserved or grand as those of Borobudur or Prambanan from an earlier period. And insofar as one might have heard of someone from Majapahit, it’s more likely to be the formidable prime minister Gajah Mada than one of the kings. Majapahit was calling out for an accessible history.
Herald van der Linde’s Majapahit: Intrigue, Betrayal and War in Indonesia’s Greatest Empire tells the story—or more accurately perhaps, a story—of the empire from its rather myth-soaked beginnings to its somewhat ignominious end in 1527. Sources for the period are rather better than for Srivijaya, the previous regional power based in Sumatra, but still very limited. As in the case of Srivijaya, it isn’t clear whether there just weren’t chroniclers or whether any chronicles, which would have been written on palm leaf, didn’t survive. Indeed, the primary Javanese source, the 14th-century Nagarakertagama by Mpu Prapanca, only exists in a single copy that survived the Dutch burning of a royal palace in Lombok (a couple islands over) in 1894.
The plot twists in a story rival the War of the Roses in drama.
The traditional date of the founding of Majapahit is 1293 by King (Raden) Wijaya, but van der Linde pushes the history back a few decades to include Ken Arok, the King of Singasari, the precursor of Majapahit and the founder of the line, who was
also, according to legend, the son of a Hindu god. But he was neither a saint nor the son of a nobleman nor a refined prince. He was a brutal robber, a liar, a cheat, a rapist and a murderer.
These early parts of the story are more Homer than Thucydides but become more solid later in the century. Van der Linde’s subtitle “Intrigue, Betrayal and War” underplays the plot twists in a story which rivals the War of the Roses in drama. In the late 13th century, Kertanegara, the king of Singasari had been in none-too-respectful discussions with Kublai Khan (a Chinese emissary had his nose removed); Kublai sent a fleet to teach the Javanese a lesson, but in the meantime Kertanegara had been overthrown by Jayakatwang of nearby Kediri. Kertanegara’s son-in-law and heir Wijaya enlisted the help of the Chinese to get his throne back and then turned on his foreign allies and ejected them from Java.
The 14th century proved hardly less dramatic. After rebellions and a regicide, the empire was ably ruled for more than a half-century by a woman, Queen Tribhuwana and then King Hayam Wuruk, with the assistance of the wily and ruthless Gajah Mada, during which the empire expanded to its greatest extent. Early in the 15th century, Majapahit was visited by Zheng He’s translator Ma Huan who wrote a detailed description, liberally quoted by van der Linde. But the founding of Malacca in 1400 was a harbinger of eventual decline as the empire suffered from civil war and strategic competition.
And “empire” is perhaps the wrong term: Majapahit was neither China nor Rome. Van der Linde deploys, as do many others, “mandala”, in which, as Eric Thompson put it The Story of Southeast Asia,
power radiated out from the central sovereign ruler, becoming weaker the farther one moved from that centre. Borders and territory were more loosely defined.
A continuing source of trouble were subsidiary power centers which would decide to do their own thing, such as deal with China directly.
Majapahit survived in Bali.
Van der Linde tells a good tale, but he will relate as fact what is inference. An early example involves the Nagarakertagama: “the court critics gave it the thumbs down,” he writes, “saying it was devoid of the magic, heroism and philosophical musings required.” There doesn’t seem to be any actual account of how the book was received at court. He goes on to say: “That was a setback for Prapanca. He lost face and became a source of gossip around town.” A reasonable guess, perhaps, but apparent conjecture nonetheless. He will also drop in colloquial editorial asides (“Tough crowd, these gods”; and that Queen Suhita “would have loved social media and online dating sites.”) Readability rather than explicit historical rigor might be a reasonable authorial choice, but there are trade-offs.
But van der Linde has certainly painted an engaging picture of a fascinating place and period and opened the door to what one hopes will be more books and studies for popular consumption. Women seem to have played a role in politics that is hardly matched even today, while some of the art is truly extraordinary, including one-of-kind masterpieces like the Prajnaparamita. Politically, Sunda—in the Western half of Java, and adjacent to Majapahit—was curiously never integrated into the empire; van der Linde points to a messed-up marriage proposal, but that doesn’t seem like enough of an explanation.
Majapahit itself returned more or less to the jungle, only to be “discovered” by Western explorers in the early 19th century. But Majapahit survived, van der Linde intimates, in Bali: