21. Majapahit - Empire of the Islands

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0:30In the year 1815, the English colonial official Thomas Stamford Raffles would travel across the island of Java in what is today Indonesia.

1:00At 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

1:38Napoleon's. 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.

2:15With 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.

2:55He 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.

3:26At the age of just 30, Raffles found himself in charge of an island a thousand kilometers across, home to more than six million people.

3:45Raffles was fascinated by Java. He remarked on its dramatic landscape of soaring volcanoes and steamy rainforest, its fertile rice terraces, and remarkable culture, as he wrote home to King George III.

4:07The gracious permission which I have received affords me an opportunity of interesting Your Royal Highness in favour of the amiable and 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.

4:41Everywhere 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,

5:15Raffles 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.

5:45Images 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.

6:00Raffles 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 countless other islands in the Indonesian archipelago, and built what may have been one of the largest empires in Southeast Asia.

6:31This was the Empire of Majapahit.

6:38The 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,

7:10and 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.

7:20Raffles 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 Singhasari, and found there the crumbling remains of city walls, palaces, and carved statues of the Buddha alongside Hindu gods.

7:52But when he got to the valley of the Brantas 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.

8:10The 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 Traulan, Raffles hoped to find a magnificent ruined city,

8:46testifying to the former greatness of this power. But when he arrived, he would be disappointed.

8:56He 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,

9:27which 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,

9:59and perhaps Raffles should have listened to their warnings.

10:04Raffles 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.

10:28Just ten years later, he 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.

10:43As 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 koels and minor birds high in the trees.

11:14Perhaps 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,

11:45and then fallen all at once into ruin. Piano music Piano music Piano music

12:17My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to the Fall of Civilizations 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

12:49who 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

13:22and 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.

13:38The 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.

14:13The 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 oceanic crust

14:44which 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.

15:17Due 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.

15:39This ring of raging volcanoes stretches in a vast horseshoe shape for more than 40,000 kilometers 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

16:13the 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 alineation of volcanic spiracles

16:47is displayed in the numerous archipelagos which border the eastern coast of Asia. Beginning from the peninsula of Kamchatka, Japan, the Luchu, Philippines and Malaccas form a scarcely interrupted linear series of volcanic islands amongst which many contain vents in habitual activity and bearing marks of recent and extremely violent eruptions.

17:16The 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

17:50whose 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,

18:25reaches 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.

18:59Over time, whole islands form around these volcanoes, and on these islands, the lives and deaths and dramas and tragedies of millions of human lives have played out throughout history.

19:20Perhaps 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.

19:33Here, 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.

20:01The 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.

20:20The 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 Fa Xian, who sailed to India in the 4th century in search of rare religious manuscripts,

20:51describes the perils and beauties of this ocean. In this sea there are many pirates. The sea is boundless in 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

21:24and shining like fire, whilst shoals of sea monsters of every description surround the ship.

21:33Today, 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

22:06within 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.

22:36Other 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 larger than Japan, or the size of the United Kingdom and France combined. But while this archipelago is home to some enormous islands,

23:08these 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.

23:49Java is a volcanic island shaped like a cigar running just south of and roughly parallel to the equator. It's little over a hundred kilometres wide, north to south, but stretches for more than a thousand kilometres east to west, and the centre of the island is dominated by a rocky spine of conical volcanoes.

24:18A 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,

24:49not 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.

25:20They 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.

25:45It 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.

26:00More 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.

26:18This reputation for abundance goes back to ancient times, The Hindu epic poem, The Ramayana, written around 2,000 years ago, already mentions Java as a place of wealth.

26:37The 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.

27:01It 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 Yabadiu, a name which he says means the island of barley, possibly referring to the hardy grain millet, which has been an important foodstuff there for centuries, before the introduction of rice.

27:34As 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.

28:06But for the people who lived on the island of Java, it was the very center of the world.

28:14According 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 Brahma became a blacksmith. The earth served as his anvil, water as his tongs, light as his fire,

28:46and wind as his bellows, and the sky as his hammer. Lord Whiskwakarma 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.

29:14Since 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.

29:31The 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 Song Shi, or History of the Song Dynasty, describes the great abundance of this island.

30:02The 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.

30:32From about the 5th century on, this vast agricultural potential would give birth to thriving societies, and these would go on to construct elaborate, monumental architecture.

30:47For 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 Chiaruten River. The powerful, illustrious, and brave king, the famous Purnavaman of the Taruma Nagara kingdom, whose print of the foot-soles

31:17are the same as those of God Vishnu.

31:24The inscription is accompanied by a carved imprint of both of the king's feet, symbolically stamping his ownership on the territory.

31:41By 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.

32:02Kaling 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.

32:35These 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.

33:08The name Mataram comes from the Sanskrit word matur, 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 Merapi. The people of Mataram were the first to truly take advantage

33:38of 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.

34:11Living 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 Shailendras in the 8th century, Mataram began to drift further towards a new religion, Buddhism.

34:45In this period, Mataram would become what's known to historians as an Indianized Hindu-Buddhist kingdom with elements of both religions combined into a syncretic whole.

35:00These 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.

35:23Let us tell about Ma'ampu Palyat. 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 Bhatara Siwa Buddha, meaning the divine lord

35:55Shiva Buddha, a royal figure in whom the two sacred beings were fused.

36:03This 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.

36:28The kings of the mountain kingdom of Mataram were ambitious builders.

36:36Around 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.

36:54It 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.

37:13By 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 Senkala.

37:29This 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,

38:00fire, 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 Anin Watu, or Elephant Fire Wind Stone, due to a particularly violent eruption of the volcano Mount Agum that took place in East Bali. another year

38:31in which a fierce battle took place was named Paksha Shikara Babumi, or the force of violence moving upon the earth.

38:43Due 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.

39:01On the year that the kings of Mataram completed the Prambanan Temple, they were clearly proud of their achievement, and because of its eight towering main shrines, they named the year in honour 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.

39:32In 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 splendour, 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,

40:03such 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.

40:20But chief among their works is the structure that would become what is still the largest Buddhist temple in the world.

40:32It's thought that the Javanese of the time called it Bhumi Shampara Buddhara or the mountain of combined virtues of the ten stages of Buddhahood. But today, it is known by a name meaning only the Great Buddha or Borobudur.

40:56Borobudur rises like a mountain from the river plains, right in the shadow of the great volcano Mount Merapi.

41:06This 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.

41:30Borobudur, 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, Borobudur emerges from a delicate green

42:01background of tropical vegetation.

42:06The 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 friezes,

42:37and 500 Buddha statues created by the finest craftsmen the kingdom could find. The archaeologist Professor Raden 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,

43:07the highest degree of expertise that leads to the appropriate fulfillment of his duty. In both cases, Borobudur is the embodiment of such a deeply felt wish. It is a prayer in stone.

43:31The 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 bring 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

44:03his reign.

44:05And Borobudur was built to last.

44:09It 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.

44:37As 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

45:08feature of this monument is the thousands of reliefs carved all around its galleries.

45:23Many of these carvings show stories from the lives of the Buddha ascending through kilometers of galleries, trees, and in this way the monument is a story brought to life in stone.

45:39But alongside this religious narrative, others show scenes of simple daily life for all the different levels of Javanese society. In these carvings, we