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. The 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,

29:45and 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. The country is flat and fit for agriculture. Its products are rice, hemp, and peas, there being no wheat. Salt is obtained by boiling seawater,

30:16and 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 see people carrying woven baskets for winnowing and steaming rice, and stirring milk rice in pots. We see people working in the fields and shopping in a bustling urban marketplace.

46:09People carrying baskets of tropical fruit and nets full of fish, all of their faces looking out from the stone, frozen in a moment that passed by more than a thousand years ago. The Chinese history of Liang describes the dress and appearance of the people of Java, which can be seen in the reliefs of Borobudur.

46:39Men and women have the upper part of the body naked. Their hair hangs loosely down, and around their lower limbs they only use a sarong of cotton. The king and the nobles have a thin flowered cloth for covering the upper part of their body. They wear a girdle of gold and golden rings in their ears. Young girls cover themselves with a cloth of cotton and wear an embroidered girdle.

47:04In these carvings we also get a sense for courtly life. We see the king coming and going on his elephant, his courtiers and the palace women.

47:18In some carvings we see the king and his nobles enjoying a splendid feast known as a mahamangsa.

47:28One 12th century Javanese epic poem known as the Bomaantaka or Death of Boma describes the sumptuous sight of one of these feasts. The dishes were salted eggs, the pork neck cuts, ayung-ayung and pabekan, vegetables in hot sauce,

47:58lichen and checa, red mints of tripe with its various red salads, and sizzling dripping eating of turtle. And the boiled vegetables, langsuban with marrow and tongue in rolls, mushrooms steamed in leaves, crisp flakes of jellyfish, liver with rump accompanied by roasted lungs, breastbone, intestines on skewers, with fat and hot kebabs. The banana heart was sweet, and there was no lack of prawns,

48:29crabs, salted fish and mussels. Pickled meats, grilled meats, wuku and various skewered meats, doves, pupuk birds, and wild pigeon made them clutch in all directions.

48:51Some of these 9th century carvings even depict recipes that are still enjoyed in Indonesia today. Among them a dish called tumpeng, a tall cone of rice surrounded by side dishes, which is still prepared for special occasions.

49:12But one particular feature of these carvings has always captured the imagination of those who visit the ruins. These are the so-called Borobudur ships. in among the scenes of daily life are carved the shapes of five large sea-going

49:42vessels, graceful and high-sided, which show just how accomplished the Javanese had become as shipbuilders and sailors. And so it's no surprise that it was around this time that the people of Java began to gain a reputation around the world as traders and pirates. The Javanese of the Mataram period

50:13sailed in large ships that were often built from teak.

50:19This kind of wood was prized for its strength and its high oil content, which gives it a natural water resistance even without varnishing and gives it a distinct rich aroma like fine leather. These ships were built without nails, using only interlocking joints and wooden dowels and with ingenious arrangements of sails. The third

50:49century Chinese writer Wan Chen in his work Nanju Yiwuzhe or Strange Things of the Southern Lands describes the site of these majestic vessels. The people sometimes rig as many as four sails, which they carry in a row from bow to stern. The four sails do not face directly forward, but are set obliquely,

51:20and so arranged that they can all be fixed in the same direction to receive the wind and to spill it. If it is violent, the sailors diminish or augment the surface of the sails according to the conditions. Thus, the ships sail without avoiding strong winds and dashing waves, by the aid of which they can make great speed.

51:46To Wan Chen and other Chinese writers, these Javanese ships were so remarkable because China itself would not develop large ocean-going vessels until around the 9th century or 600 years later. In fact, the Chinese held the ships of these islanders in such reverence that no foreign craft were permitted to sail within range of the main port of

52:17Guangdong or Canton, as the 16th century Portuguese diplomat Tomei Perez recounts. They say that the Chinese made this law about not being able to go to Canton for fear of the Javanese and Malays, for it is certain that one of these people's ships would rout 20 Chinese ships. Such is their fear of Malays and Javanese.

52:48This fear appears to have been warranted. The inscriptions of the Cham people of Vietnam and the Khmer in Cambodia frequently reference the arrival of fearsome sea-going raiders who are thought to have sailed from islands like Sumatra and Java.

53:12One inscription in the Po Nga Temple in Vietnam describes one such raid in the year 774.

53:24Ferocious, pitiless, dark-skinned men born in other countries, whose food was more horrible than corpses, and who were vicious and furious, came in ships, took away the temple statue, and set fire to the temple.

53:43The Javanese were in part able to become such successful sailors due to the extremely predictable wind patterns that take place in this part of the world.

53:57During the rainy season from December to March, the winds blow in over Java from the Asian mainland in the northwest, picking up moisture over the South China Sea and Pacific Ocean and bringing the monsoon. But during the dry season from April to September, the winds reverse direction and blow from the southeast and the deserts of Australia, bringing dry air and a lower probability

54:27of rain. this meant you could travel whichever direction you wanted so long as you wisely chose your season to sail.

54:40As their confidence grew on the waves, we have evidence that the Javanese also undertook some even more ambitious voyages. one Italian explorer who arrived in Java around 1505, named Ludovico di Varthama of Bologna, sailed to the island of Java and was

55:12amazed to see the captain of the ship navigate even when the North Star was no longer visible.

55:20When the chartered vessel was supplied with provisions, we took our way towards the beautiful island called Java, at which we arrived in five days, sailing towards the south. My companion asked the Christians, now that we have lost the North Star, how does he steer us? Is there any other North Star than this by which we steer? The Christians asked the captain of the ship this same thing, and he showed us four or five stars, among which there was one which he said was the opposite to our North Star.

55:50This was the so-called Southern Cross, the distinctive pattern of stars that could be seen in the southern hemisphere in the direction of the South Pole. The Europeans were amazed at this discovery, but the captain then told him that the Javanese had sailed into the south following these stars, and had there come upon an icy and frozen land. He also

56:22told us that on the other side of the said island towards the south, there are some other races who navigate by the said four or five stars opposite to ours, and moreover, they gave us to understand that beyond the said island, the day does not last more than four hours, and that there it was colder than in any other part of the world. If this is true, it means that the Javanese had already sailed to and around Australia and set out

56:54into the Antarctic Ocean. But, tantalizingly, we have only this second-hand story to go by, and the rest will have to be left to our imaginations. But, as the centuries of the first millennium went on, there is a great deal more evidence that the people of Java were making their mark in even further lands.

57:277,000 kilometers away on the shores of East Africa, the 10th century Persian writer Buzurg Ibn Shariyad gives an account of a series of raids undertaken by a people from a faraway land that he calls the Wakwak.

57:48The Wakwak set out with a thousand ships to launch a determined attack upon the town of Kanbala. But, they were unable to capture it, for the town was strongly fortified and were surrounded by an arm of the sea in the midst of which Kanbalo rose like a fortress. When the people of the African coast eventually came to terms with the attackers, they learned more about

58:19why they had come and how far they had traveled.

58:25The people of that country demanded why they had come to Kanbalo rather than to any other place. They replied that it was because the country possessed merchandise of value in the Wakwak country and in China, such as ivory, tortoise shell, panther skins, and ambergris, and also because they wanted to obtain some of the Zeng people who, being strong men, are able to stand heavy labor. Their voyage, they said,

58:55had lasted a year. If the story told by these people be true, this proves that the Wakwak islands are situated opposite to China.

59:08The location of these Wakwak islands has long been debated. One clue can be found in the Persian chronicler Ibn Khordadbe, whose description has made many historians believe that they may have been the islands of Indonesia.

59:29East of China are the lands of Wakwak, which are so rich in gold that the inhabitants make the chains for their dogs and the collars for their monkeys of this metal. They manufacture tunics woven with gold. Excellent ebony wood is found there. Gold and ebony are exported from Wakwak.

59:51This detail of dogs wearing collars made of gold was also mentioned by early European explorers who visited Java, leading many to conclude that the Wakwak really were Javanese.

1:00:09If this story does relate an attack on eastern Africa by the people of Java, then it shows the extent of their shipbuilding and seafaring prowess, and that they had become a formidable threat for all the peoples who lived around the Indian Ocean.

1:00:29From these raids, they would have brought back gold, ivory, and slaves to Java. But in other places, they didn't simply raid and sail away. In the large island of Madagascar, just off the coast of eastern Africa, the people's language has always puzzled linguists. The Madagascan

1:00:59language of Malagasy shares little in common with those of the African mainland, and it was only when the grammar and syntax were compared with Indonesian languages that a remarkable similarity was noticed. Although separated by the entire Indian Ocean, the language of Malagasy shares a grammatical structure with several Indonesian languages like Javanese, and they even have a number of different words in common.

1:01:30Just one example is the word for island, nosi in Malagasy, and nusa in Javanese. In fact, the closest living relative of Malagasy is thought to be a language called Manian, which originated on the south coast of Borneo. The most modern analysis of mitochondrial DNA in Madagascar has confirmed this connection, and shows that the people there can trace their lineage back to

1:02:01about 30 mothers who arrived on the island from what is now Indonesia. This suggests a single boatload of settlers who had travelled across one of the world's widest oceans to find a new home. They also brought plants and crops with them.

1:02:22Botanists estimate that a full 7% of the plant life on Madagascar today originated in Indonesia. These include bananas, plantains, taro and yams, and all of these were already well established there by the medieval period. In 1602, another Portuguese explorer, Diogo do Couto, described these far-reaching journeys of the Javanese.

1:02:53The Javanese are all men very experienced in the art of navigation, to the point that they claim to be the most ancient of all. It is certain that they formerly navigated to Africa's Cape of Good Hope and were in communication with the east coast of the island of Madagascar, where there are many brown and Javanese-like natives who say they are descended from them.

1:03:19The Javanese of this period navigated using the stars, but also magnetic compasses and maps written on the bark of the paper mulberry tree.

1:03:33In 1512, only 20 years after Columbus had first reached the Americas and 12 years after the first Europeans set foot in Brazil, a Portuguese conquistador fighting on the Malay Peninsula captured a sea chart from a Javanese sailor. He was amazed to find that it had already been updated with all the new discoveries that had been made on the other side of the world, as he

1:04:03wrote in one letter to King Manuel I of Portugal. We found a large map of a Javanese pilot containing the Cape of Good Hope, Portugal, and the land of Brazil, the Red Sea and the Sea of Persia, the Clove Islands, the navigation of the Chinese and Japanese, and how the kingdoms border on each other. It seems to me, sir, that this was the best thing I have ever seen, and your highness will be very pleased

1:04:34to see it. In 2003, a modern team was able to pilot a replica of an old Javanese sailing ship from Indonesia to Madagascar and around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, thus proving that this journey was possible with the technology available at the time. But despite its remarkable achievements in architecture and

1:05:04its voyages of discovery, the Shailendra dynasty of Mataram would eventually decline, and all of its grand monuments would decline with it. The reasons for the fall of Mataram are unclear, since no true chronicles have survived from this time.

1:05:35But the kingdom's decline may have been related to a series of dramatic volcanic eruptions that occurred sometime in the 10th and early 11th. centuries.

1:05:49The people of Java have always lived with a particular paradox, that the immense productivity of their land also comes from its most destructive force.

1:06:04Many landscapes that experience a monsoon season as heavy as Java can suffer from poor soil quality, as the seasonal rains wash away topsoil, and leach nutrients away.

1:06:19But in much of Java, the hundreds of active volcanoes counteract this effect. Due to the island's particular geology, its volcanoes are especially beneficial for the soil, filling it with minerals like magnesium, potassium, and phosphorus that plants thrive on, all blasted out of the depths of the earth itself.

1:06:46Volcanic soil is also uniquely porous, and retains moisture exceptionally well, while allowing air circulation for plant roots. minerals. But of course, a volcano is a violent phenomenon. When they erupt, they scorch the earth with pyroclastic flows, spew lava, and rain huge boulders down from the sky across a large area. This poses an obvious

1:07:18problem, that the areas of the greatest agricultural productivity on the island were also the most dangerous.

1:07:30This meant that while the volcano's overall effect on the island was positive, a year in which a great eruption took place could wipe out a good proportion of any kingdom's food supplies. And of all these volcanoes, by far the most active was the one that the Javanese call by a name, which means the mountain of fire, or Merapi.

1:08:07Rising to nearly 3,000 meters, or 10,000 feet, Mount Merapi is the most active volcano in the whole of Indonesia and is considered one of the most active and dangerous in the world. It has erupted regularly for at least the last 500 years, with small eruptions occurring every 2 to 3 years, and larger ones every 10 to 15. Then, every few hundred years, the mountain explodes in a

1:08:39truly catastrophic fashion. time. The Javanese chronicle, the Babad Tanajawi, records the devastation caused by one eruption of the great Mount Merapi that took place in the 16th century. Then, Mount Merapi erupted with fire. It made a terrifying, thundering noise. A rain of ash fell. A volcanic mudflow ran down

1:09:10the Ompak River. Big rocks rose from the flow and landed on the land. When the piles of wood on the Ganang Giddle Mountains were set on fire, the mountains became a blaze of fire. The gong, kiai, bichak, was beaten ceaselessly. All tried to save their lives and ran in all directions.

1:09:38Added to this obvious physical destruction, the Javanese also held the volcanoes in great spiritual reverence, and viewed eruptions as signs and portents from the gods. After the deaths of great kings, Javanese chronicles often describe the mountains rumbling in mourning. At the death of his majesty, the wailing in the palace was as loud as thunder.

1:10:09Mount Merapi rumbled, joining in with the sound of a rainstorm. It was believed that the eruptions, earthquakes, and various rumblings of the land were not just seismic events, but actually one of the primary ways that the gods weighed in on the affairs of humanity. For this reason, their timing could have real life or death consequences.

1:10:39One chronicle recounts the story of a lucky prisoner held by a 17th century Javanese king.

1:10:49The king wanted to kill the prisoner Radan Masuya Kasuma, but this did not happen, because every time they wanted to kill him, Mount Merapi flared up with a terrifying noise. In the end, the man was set free and promoted and given the lordship of 1,000 rice fields.

1:11:13A particularly devastating eruption would not only cause immense economic damage to the kingdom, it could also be considered a clear sign that the gods were angry with the current ruler. For any king who didn't have a firm grasp on power, this could be a devastating blow. From some inscriptions left in Java, we know that as the 9th century came to an

1:11:44end, the kingdom of Mataram descended into civil war, with three kings ruling in only two years.

1:11:55When the dust of this civil war settled in the year 929, a king named Rakehino Pusindok took to the throne. But, curiously, it seems the kingdom of Mataram had by this point moved. All of the inscriptions issued by this king would be written in East Java, far away from its original heartlands, around the volcano Mount Merapi. It seems that around the beginning of the

1:12:2710th century, the entire Mataram kingdom simply upped sticks and fled its original wealthy province, leaving its towering temples and cities abandoned. And what's perhaps most significant is that no other power seems to have swept in to the empty lands. This suggests that some kind of cataclysm took place there.

1:12:57Archaeological evidence shows that the early 10th century layer of human occupation at the great temple of Borobudur, for instance, is sealed by up to half a meter of volcanic ash, suggesting a major eruption. The peoples of this land were no strangers to erupting volcanoes, so we can imagine that it must have taken one of particular violence, or a series of

1:13:30eruptions taking place in frighteningly quick succession to cause the wholesale abandonment of this kingdom and its re-establishment hundreds of kilometers to the east.

1:13:45One inscription known as the Puchangan stone describes a kind of disaster sweeping the land.

1:13:57In the time of the great catastrophe that overwhelmed the island of Java, in the Saka year 928, when King Waruwarri came forth from Waram, the whole of Java seemed transformed into a single raging sea. Many of the foremost men of the realm perished. Chief among the dead was the divine king. Unfortunately, the exact dating of volcanic eruptions is difficult, and it's hard to say whether this was truly the cause of Mataram's downfall.

1:14:33But whether from volcanic causes or not, it's clear that for one reason or another, life had become unlivable for the people of Mataram in central Java.

1:14:46The kingdom eventually reached a level of stability in its new home in East Java, away from the destruction it had faced. But its confidence in itself, and in the gods' approval of its rulers, had been fatally reduced. Within a century, the remains of Mataram was facing destruction, now at the hands of human enemies. An invasion by a neighboring king wiped out what was left of it, and the kingdom of Mataram disappeared,

1:15:24living on only in the stone carvings left lining the walls of its great temples. Thousands of moments of everyday life, now sealed beneath a thick layer of volcanic ash.

1:15:44After the fall of Mataram, a number of successor kingdoms would rise up. In the 11th century, much of Java was reunited again under the rule of a king named Ayrlanga, whose name meant he who leapt over the water. He was born on the small island of Bali, and crossed the sea to Java.

1:16:14The Puchangan stone describes how this king was spared from the destruction that swept the land during the fall of Mataram.

1:16:28At that time, His Majesty was only 16 years old, still too young to have mastered the art of war. Yet because he was the very manifestation of Vishnu, all the gods protected him from being swept away by the great destruction. Ayrlanga would rule successfully for several decades, but when he died, the land divided again. The kingdom that would truly give birth to Java's golden era was named Singhasari.

1:17:03Singhasari derived its name from the Sanskrit word Simha, meaning lion. And this lion kingdom was founded by a king named Ken Angrok.

1:17:21Ken Angrok's name means the man who overturned everything, and he was a revolutionary force on Java. In the centuries since he lived, the legend of Ken Angrok has grown to mythic proportions, and he has inspired theatre, song, and poetry in Indonesia.

1:17:48The story of his life is largely told in a fragmentary chronicle known as the Pararaton, or the Book of Kings, written sometime later in the 16th century.

1:18:05According to this chronicle, Ken Angrok was actually the son of the Hindu god Brahma, who appeared to his mother, a poor woman named Ken N. Dok, The god Brahma descended there and lay with Ken N. Dok.

1:18:35This meeting took place in the fields of Lalaten. The god made a vow with the woman. You must not go to your husband again. If you lie with him, he will die, and my child will be corrupted. That child is named Ken Angrok, and he will one day rule the land of Java. With that, Brahma vanished. The woman held true to her word, and soon Ken Angrok was born.

1:19:15But the family was extremely poor, and couldn't provide for the little boy. His parents abandoned him in a grave, but he was found by a common thief named Lembong, who was perhaps plundering the graveyard for valuables.

1:19:40When her time was full, she gave birth to a boy. Ken N. Dok abandoned him in a burial ground for children. Not long after, a thief named Lembong wandered into the same place. There he saw something glowing. Drawn to it, he heard the sound of a child crying. When he came closer, he saw that the light was coming from the child himself. Lembong picked him up, carried him home, and raised him as his own son.

1:20:15I was born, and raised him as his own son, and raised him as his own son, and raised him as his own son.

1:20:24Brought up by this thief, Ken Angrok would learn all the tricks of his trade, until he was the most accomplished thief in Java. But one day, he met an Indian holy man who identified him as the son of Brahma, and an embodiment of the god Vishnu.

1:20:49This holy man convinced Ken Angrok to give up his sinful life. As a reward, Ken Angrok gained a magical weapon, a kind of Javanese knife known as a keris. These are long daggers, often created with a distinctive rippled blade, and they were worn by Javanese men as a sign of status, as a talisman against various evils,

1:21:21and of course, as a practical sidearm for self-defence. One Chinese visitor to Java at the start of the 15th century, named Ma Huan, writes about the importance of these blades. From little boys of three years to old men of a hundred years, they all have these knives, which are all made of steel, with most intricate patterns drawn in very delicate lines.

1:21:52For the handles, they use gold, or rhinoceros horn, or elephant's teeth, engraved with representations of human forms, or devil's faces, the craftsmanship being very fine and skilful. With this magical sword by his side, Ken Angrok rose to prominence in Java, and eventually, through the overwhelming force of his various virtues, became its king,

1:22:23as the Pa Raraton describes.

1:22:31Not long afterwards, Ken Angrok was acclaimed as king of Tamapel. His realm was called Singasari. His enthronement was witnessed by learned men of both the Shaivite and Buddhist traditions of Kediri. Those who had once shown Ken Angrok kindness in his days of hardship were summoned, granted protection, and generously rewarded for their loyalty.

1:23:07Not everyone easily accepted the rule of this commoner.

1:23:13In the nearby rival kingdom of Kediri, the king was named Dandang Gendis, and he refused to accept Ken Angrok as his king.

1:23:26Dandang Gendis gathered his armies and marched to fight Ken Angrok. But he was no match for the divine power of the god-made man. He fell because he was attacked on all sides by the forces of Singasari, who came on like a flood pouring down from the mountains. The army of Kediri scattered like a swarm of bees,

1:23:58fleeing in panic, abandoning the field like startled goats, casting aside their parasols. King Dandang Gendis withdrew from the battle and fled into the realm of the gods, rising up into the air with his horse, his grooms, his parasol bearers, and those who carried his drinking vessels and his mats, all of them ascending into the sky. Thus, Kediri was utterly defeated by Ken Angrok.

1:24:29Needless to say, this section of the Pararaton Chronicle is considered to be largely mythical and reflects the propaganda of this king's new regime.

1:24:57But this story would be repeated across the towns and villages of Java by trained storytellers, who together wove a new national myth around the figure of Ken Angrok. One of the most important mediums in which this story was told was that of the Javanese shadow puppets.

1:25:27The exact origin of Javanese shadow puppetry is a mystery, but it's clear from a number of oblique references in Javanese literature that it was already a well-established practice by at least the 10th century. This form of shadow theater is known as wayang.

1:25:51Wayang in Javanese means shadow or ghost, but it can also mean imagination. And these plays would retell stories from the Hindu epics like the Mahabharata, local Javanese stories, such as how rice came to the earth and the stories of their kings and ancestors.

1:26:16The Chinese visitor to Java at the beginning of the 15th century, Mahuan, describes witnessing these performances.

1:26:28Each time the performer unrolls and exposes a section of the picture, he thrusts it forward toward the audience and speaking with a loud voice in the foreign language, he explains the derivation of this section. The crowd sits around and listens to him, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, exactly as if the narrator were reciting one of our popular romances. These shadow plays would typically start at nightfall and go on until dawn

1:26:59and would be conducted behind a screen of white cotton fabric using a lamp burning with coconut oil, usually cast in metal in the form of the sacred bird Garuda. The puppets were typically made of goat hide or buffalo skin, mounted on bamboo canes and placed in a trunk of banana palm lying behind the screen. The puppets had jointed limbs

1:27:29and were punctured all over with intricate patterns of holes that allowed the light through so that their shadows could then be cast onto a screen.

1:27:41These puppet shows were often accompanied by music. In small village performances, this could simply be the drumming of the puppeteer on the box where the puppets were kept. But in the royal court, a puppeteer would perform alongside a full orchestra of musicians, known as a gamelan, with a whole host of 15 instruments.

1:28:09These night-long plays would unfold according to strict traditions. In the hours between sunset and midnight, the puppeteer introduced the characters and set up the conflict. And then, at the stroke of midnight, the drama burst out into a frenzied clash between good and evil. The Portuguese traveller and apothecary Tomei Pires, who visited Java around 1513,

1:28:40wrote about seeing these forms of theatre and shadow puppetry.

1:28:47The land of Java is a land of performers and masks of various Javanese kinds. And both men and women do thus. They have entertainments of dancing and stories. They mime. They wear actors' dresses and all their clothes. They are certainly graceful. They have music of bells. The sound of all of them playing together is like an organ. These actors show a thousand graces like these by day and night. At night, they make shadows of various shapes.

1:29:22Over time, the performance of these shadow plays took on a spiritual meaning. The puppeteer, or Dalang, was thought to become possessed by the power of the gods as he worked. And in the performance, all the holy elements were represented. The banana palm representing the earth, the cloth screen, the sky, the fire in the coconut oil lamp, and of course, the interplay of light and darkness,

1:29:54good and evil, as the stories of gods and demons played out across the screen. These performances were considered to have real power. Some, such as the Bratayutta, or a Javanese version of the Indian epic, the Mahabharata, were considered too potent to ever perform in their entirety, as Thomas Stamford Raffles records.

1:30:24Although the Wayang may represent any portion of the Bratayutta, there is a prevalent superstition that a great war will be the inevitable consequence of performing at one sitting the whole of this poem. It is gravely asserted that a chief of Kendal tried this experiment about 50 years ago, but that the performance was no sooner completed than his country was laid to waste and destroyed.

1:30:52Other of these shadow plays were performed at auspicious times in order to bring about certain effects, with stories of the goddess of rice told during the harvests and the great myths told during times of trouble and strife. One particular shadow play was reserved solely for times when a plague of mice or rats had descended on a village, and its goal was to convince

1:31:22the rodents to depart and dwell in the kingdom of vermin instead. Over the next centuries, the story of Ken Angrok, the first king of Singasari, would be told again and again in these kinds of performances and would take on

1:31:53more and more fantastical elements. And for that reason, it's impossible to say definitively which parts may have a grain of truth to them. But it's likely that some elements are true, that Ken Angrok was a common man of uncertain birth and lineage, that he had been a thief or brigand of some kind, that he rose to power in the kingdom in a violent upheaval and crushed the nearby kingdom

1:32:24of Kediri in open battle.

1:32:28But after he comes to the throne, the tone of the chronicle shifts and becomes more grounded in historical reality. Many events recorded during his reign are dated, and so this second half of the chronicle is considered to contain more historically verifiable information.

1:32:56What we know for sure is that over the course of the 13th century, Ken Angrok's new kingdom of Singasari would gradually expand its power, wealth, and prestige. But it was under the reign of his great-grandson, the fifth king of Singasari, that it would grow into a true empire. His name was King Kertanagara, and during his time on the throne,

1:33:26he would order expeditions to extend the kingdom's influence not just over most of Java, but across the sea to the large island of Borneo to the north, the small island of Bali to the east, and even conduct a successful invasion of Java's sister island of Sumatra in the northwest. Now the kingdom of Singasari had grown to be a true seagoing empire, and it controlled virtually all

1:33:58of the region's most crucial waterways. And the most important of these was the narrow sea corridor known as the Strait of Malacca. The Malay Peninsula is a long body of land that stretches southeast from the southern edge of the Asian continent, where Thailand meets Malaysia.

1:34:31And just off its southernmost point, and following the line of the continental shelf, is the island of Sumatra, and then Java.

1:34:42Together, these form a sea wall of more than 3,000 kilometers that stands between the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific and South China Sea.

1:34:56In this massive wall, there are only two narrow gates, the southerly one known as the Straits of Sunda, and the northern one, the Straits of Malacca.

1:35:11The American sailor and writer Herman Melville, writing in the mid-19th century, describes the site of these straits. Those narrow straits of Sunda stand midway in that vast rampart of islands, like the central gateway opening into some vast-walled empire. The inexhaustible wealth of spices and silks and jewels

1:35:41and gold and ivory with which the thousand islands of that oriental sea are enriched, are thus guarded from the all-grasping western world.

1:35:57For much of history, it has been the wider and deeper strait of Malacca that has been used most heavily. In fact, today, it is the busiest shipping channel in the world, seeing nearly 100,000 ships pass through it each year.

1:36:17Around a quarter of all global trade passes through this narrow waterway, where the massive cities of Singapore and Kuala Lumpur are today located.

1:36:30And in the 13th century, during the time of the Singhasari Kingdom, this waterway was no less crucial or lucrative. Around the year 1515, the Portuguese diplomat Tomei Pires passed through the Yemeni port of Aden on the Red Sea and wrote that goods transported thousands of miles from Malacca featured prominently in the city's markets,

1:37:01where merchants would carry them on to Egypt and from there into Europe. The merchants from Cairo bring the merchandise which comes from Italy and Greece and Damascus to Aden, while the merchants of Aden take back with them all the products of Malacca. Cloves, nutmeg, mace, sandalwood, brazilwood, silks, seed pearls, musk, porcelain, and other things. Control of the narrow waterway

1:37:35of the Malacca Strait gave King Kertanagara immense power, despite the relatively small size of the Kingdom of Singhasari.

1:37:46Now anyone wishing to sail between China and India or the rest of the world either did so with Kertanagara's permission or had to take a detour of at least 2,000 kilometers through rough and stormy seas around this island wall. As a result of this control, the power and wealth of Singhasari grew dramatically. But there were much larger empires

1:38:17in the region who had a strong interest in making sure that the flow of goods by sea could pass through these narrow straits. And as the 13th century came to an end, the Kingdom of Singhasari came into direct conflict with one of these much larger powers.

1:38:53In the year 1289, King Kertanagara of the Javanese Kingdom of Singhasari received a group of ambassadors at his court. They came finely dressed, haughty and proud, and said that they had come to speak on behalf of the world's most powerful man. That was the Mongol

1:39:24Emperor of China, Kublai Khan.

1:39:36As we saw in our 19th episode, from their humble beginnings on the Mongolian steppe, over the last century, the Mongols had embarked on a remarkable series of campaigns to conquer all of China, Persia, and the Middle East, along with much of what is today Russia and Eastern Europe. Founded by the warlord Chinggis Khan, the Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous land empire

1:40:08in history, and combined the speed and power of Mongol horsemen with the craftsmanship of Persia, and the ingenuity and manpower of China.

1:40:21By this point, the enormous Mongol Empire had split into four separate domains, but the largest of these was still the world's biggest empire at the time. That was the one ruled from China by the grandson of Chinggis Khan, the Emperor Kublai. This hybrid Chinese-Mongolian power was known as the Yuan Dynasty.

1:40:53But by this time, the empire had begun to struggle.

1:40:59The Emperor Kublai was now well into his 70s, and his domain was plagued by political and economic problems. The Mongol Empire had been built on conquest, but now its terrifying engine seems to have run out of fuel. Eight years earlier, Kublai's forces had for the second time failed to capture a foothold on the islands of Japan. His invasions of Burma

1:41:30and Vietnam had also fizzled out, with the Mongol forces struggling in the tropical heat. The aging Mongol Emperor desperately needed a victory, and he had been increasingly casting his gaze southwards, across the sea, and towards the wealthy island of Java. The Chinese chronicle, the Yuan Shi, or History of Yuan, describes this

1:42:00strange and faraway land. The customs and products of this land are not much known, but as a rule, the barbarian countries over the sea produce many rare and valuable things, which fetch a high price in China. The inhabitants are strange, and their nature and speech are not understood by the Chinese.

1:42:24By that time, Java's king, Kersanagara, had been defying Kublai Khan for nearly a decade.

1:42:33Two previous ambassadorial visits to his court had been sent home without any tribute for the Mongol Khan, and the defiance of this small island was beginning to make the empire look weak.

1:42:51For this reason, in 1289, Kublai sent a new party of envoys to Java to meet with the king and give him a final ultimatum. They demanded that King Kertanagara swear an oath of fealty to the Mongol emperor, pay him a hefty tribute, and send members of his royal family to the Mongol court in China to act as hostages. But when these ambassadors

1:43:22arrived, they would not find King Kertanagara in an agreeable mood. The Javanese of the time considered repeated requests of this kind to be exceedingly rude. Tomei Perez writes about the proud nature of the Javanese people. The Javanese are men who, if they write once and do not get a reply, do

1:43:52not write again, although it may be of great importance to them. The Javanese are daring men and determined to die. They are gamblers and play for high stakes. King Kertanagara was no different, and he would now make a tremendous gamble for the highest stakes possible. He ordered that the Mongol ambassadors be punished.

1:44:24By some accounts, their faces were branded with hot irons and their ears cut off, a punishment typically reserved for bandits and pirates. We can only imagine the rage of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan upon hearing this news and seeing the mutilated faces of his ambassadors. The history of Yuan describes what happened next.

1:44:56In the second month of the 29th year of the Yuan dynasty, the emperor issued an order to the governor of Fujian, directing him to send an army to subdue Java, to collect soldiers to the number of 20,000, to send out 1,000 ships and to equip them with provisions for a year, and with 40,000 bars of silver. The emperor said to them, when you arrive at Java, you must clearly proclaim that they have lately cut the face of the

1:45:26imperial envoy, Mongchi, and that you have come to punish them. This expedition set sail three years later, in the year 1292, but it was to be a difficult voyage. The history of Yuan describes the troubles they encountered on the Java Sea. The wind was strong and the sea very rough, so that

1:45:56the ships rolled heavily and the soldiers could not eat for many days. The forces to attack Java were driven by the wind to one island, and many ships were wrecked. Over a hundred men who were ill from the long beating about in the storm were unable to leave with the rest of the expedition, and were left there, and today the Chinese live mixed up with the native families.

1:46:23Despite their troubles on the voyage, the Mongol forces eventually arrived on the shores of Java in the next year of 1293, ready to punish King Kertanagara for defying the empire and mistreating its ambassadors. But when they arrived, they would find their enthusiasm for revenge had been somewhat deflated. In fact, in the preceding year, the defiant King

1:46:53Kertanagara had been overthrown and killed by a usurper named Jayakartong.

1:47:12Jayakartong was the ruler of a city called Kediri, which controlled a province covering much of central Java.

1:47:24For a long time, Kediri had actually been the predominant power on the island, but after its king, Dandan Gendis, had been defeated in battle by the hero Ken Angrok, Kediri had been eclipsed by the rise of Tsingasari. Now, Kediri was a vassal of King Kertanagara, but it was by far the most powerful of his subjects, and as a result, never sat comfortably within

1:47:54his kingdom. The epic poem, the Deshavanana, describes the new ruler of Kediri, Jayakartong, as cunning and malevolent.

1:48:14There was a vassal king, a villain known by the name of Jayakartong, who there, in the land of Kediri, desired to replace the king, and was outstandingly clever at laying schemes.

1:48:33At the time, the majority of King Kertanagara's forces were away from Java, fighting to increase his territory across the sea in Sumatra, and so Jayakartong saw his chance.

1:48:53According to the Pararaton, or Book of Kings, Jayakartong was encouraged to seize the opportunity by one of his allies, who sent him a thinly-veiled message.

1:49:14The secret letter said, My lord, I respectfully tell you, if his majesty has any consideration and desire to hunt, now his majesty has the chance to so hunt. It will be the best and the most opportune moment. There is no danger. There are no tigers, wild buffaloes, nor snakes, or even thorns. There is only one tiger, but it has no teeth.

1:49:52Urged on by this coded message, King jayakartong rose in jayakartong rose in rebellion. His city of Kediri was not far from the capital of Singhasari, but it was on the other side of a number of towering volcanic cones, mounts Kelud, Arjuna, and Kawi. To strike at Singhasari and depose the king, he could either march north through the easier territory of the

1:50:23northern plains or south through the rugged hill country, riven by gorges and ravines. The cunning jayakartong considered his options and came up with a plan. In 1292, alarming news reached King Kertanagara's court. Messengers would have burst into his throne room and breathlessly told him that an army had been seen

1:50:54rampaging through the farmlands to the north, flying the distinctive white and red banners of Kediri. They had taken the toothless tiger King Kertanagara completely by surprise. Now King Jayakartong set out to attack. His army coming from the north consisted of bad people. They were full of flags and sounds.

1:51:26The area to the north was devastated.

1:51:35Dismayed at the destruction, the king appointed one of his son-in-laws to lead what forces he had remaining in Java, a man named Raden Vijaya.

1:51:49This young man marched north with the remains of the royal army and met Jayakartong's rampaging forces in battle, as one Javanese inscription, carved at a place called Kudadu, describes.

1:52:07When King Jayakartong's troops reached the village of Jasun Wunkal, King Kertanagara sent his son-in-law, Raden Vijaya, to fight the enemy. After the battle, the enemy fled while suffering a great loss. Seemingly, they disappeared forever.

1:52:34Raden Vijaya had succeeded in the north and defended his father-in-law's kingdom, which he was set to one day inherit. But now the true strategy of Jayakartong was revealed.

1:52:51While this loud northern force had been burning and sacking their way through the north of the kingdom, a much larger second force had also advanced in the south. this army moved much more stealthily through the ravines and valleys of the central highlands, as the Pararaton describes.

1:53:19Then, a large army descended from Kidiri, coming from the banks of the Aqsa River, heading towards Lawor. They were not allowed to carry flags or make any noise. Upon arrival at Sidabawana, they headed straight for Singhasari.

1:53:47This force would go completely unnoticed, and they apparently arrived at the kingdom's capital of Kutaraja while King Kertanagara was drunk. drinking in Java was a serious business, and a large number of alcoholic beverages were consumed for pleasure, especially on special occasions.

1:54:15One Javanese poem, known as the Sumana Santaka, describes the drinks available at an idealized wedding.

1:54:25The drinks poured continuously from rock crystal pitches, like fountains of palm syrup. Sugarcane, wine, and rice beer were drunk one after the other, like holy water and mead welling up from glass vessels.

1:54:45But the influence of Tantric Buddhism meant that drinking was more than just for fun. In fact, it was at times a spiritual practice, and even a royal duty. The king was required to take part in ceremonies known as Chakra Puja, which involved the drawing of geometric designs on the earth with coloured powder, after which the ritual could take place.

1:55:15The historian Miranda Shaw describes the unfolding of one of these rituals. An elaborate array of offerings and foods are laid out. The participants don special insignia like bone ornaments and crowns, and use musical instruments of archaic design, such as skull drums, thigh bone trumpets and conch horns, for inducing heightened awareness. Practitioners sit in a circle and partake of

1:55:46sacramental meat and wine served in skull cups. The feast culminates in the performance of tantric dances and music that must never be disclosed to outsiders.

1:55:58While this ceremony was a crucial part of King Kertanagara's royal calendar, the timing couldn't have been worse.

1:56:09Jayaka Tong's concealed force arrived outside the city walls without warning. They took the garrison by surprise and poured over the walls of the city while the king was thus engaged. The city was taken and King Kertanagara was killed.

1:56:37The king's son-in-law, Radhan Vijaya, was still celebrating his victory in the north and he must have been distraught when the news reached him. He had won his battle but lost the war and now everything he had stood to inherit had also been taken by the usurper Jayaka Tong.

1:57:04Radhan Vijaya now retreated to the rainforests of the northeast and left the capital and the throne in the hands of the rebel of the rebel Jaya Katong. The city of Kutaraja, the heart of the Singhasari kingdom, was looted and depopulated and many of its people taken back to Kediri.

1:57:29Others simply fled into the safety of the countryside and never returned.

1:57:37Some stone masons working on a new temple in the city simply dropped their tools in the middle of carving their reliefs and never came back to finish them. After that, the city was left to crumble and be taken over by the encroaching forest.

1:57:59Now, the dispossessed prince Radhan Vijaya and the rebel usurper Jayaka Tong faced off against one another. But it seems neither side of this civil war was confident in victory.

1:58:15Radhan Vijaya wasn't strong enough to march south and take his enemy's capital of Kediri. And meanwhile, Jayaka Tong couldn't leave his city and risk losing his shaky grasp on the throne. Both parties entered into an uneasy negotiation and eventually the rebel king settled for buying off Radhan Vijaya. In exchange for laying down his arms,

1:58:46the prince would be granted a piece of land and there he would be allowed to build a city.

1:58:54Radhan Vijaya, now completely out of other options and stranded in the wild rainforest, had no choice but to agree. But it must have been with no small amount of bitterness.

1:59:13The prince must have felt bitter too when he reached the piece of land that Jayaka Tong had granted him. It was a wild overgrown jungle in the middle of a sparsely inhabited area known as the Tariq Forest. But his fate was sealed and he swallowed his bitterness and ordered his people to begin clearing the land for construction and farming.

1:59:46The old growth forests of Java were dense and wild, fed by the volcanic soil.

1:59:56Colourful hornbills roosted in the treetops while hidden high among the branches gibbons greeted the rising sun with their long, mournful songs.

2:00:09Troops of long-tailed macaque monkeys leapt through the trees. While sambar deer crept through the shade of the forest, great pythons lay coiled in the trees and dangerous animals like the Javan leopard and wild boar lurked hidden in the green undergrowth.

2:00:35Everywhere could be heard the creaking of cicadas and frogs calling to one another from hidden pools. At sunset, fruit bats rose in their thousands from their hidden caves, while fireflies would have been visible at night. the trees were the most ancient life of the forest. Towering hardwoods like teak, ebony and tamarind would have risen here,

2:01:06interspersed with bamboo groves, strangler figs, palms and tangled liana vines, all competing for every shaft of sunlight.

2:01:19But when they began cutting down this forest, Radhan Vijaya's men found that a particular kind of tree grew there in great quantities.

2:01:31This was the tree that grows a fruit which in Indonesia is called Maja and is known elsewhere as a wood apple, elephant apple or Indian quince. These Maja fruits are pear-shaped and the size of a large grapefruit with a thick hard, woody rind that needs to be cracked with a hammer.

2:01:57Inside is an orangey yellow pulp that gives off the scent of roses but tastes sweet and bitter, a little like marmalade. The word for bitter in Javanese is pahit and due to the large numbers of these Maja fruits growing in this region, the people named this place Maja Pahit or Bitter Wood Apple as the Pararaton describes. When the

2:02:36Madhari's were building the village, a hungry man, lacking supplies while cutting down the forest, ate a Maja fruit. He found it bitter and threw away all the Maja fruit he had picked. The Maja fruit there became known for its bitter taste, and the place was then named Maja Pahit.

2:03:06For Raden Vijaya and his people, the name Maja Pahit was a perfect encapsulation of the bitterness of their situation.

2:03:17They had lost a kingdom and gained a plot of wild jungle in return. And all because of the treachery of Jayakartong. They all must have shared a single desire to throw out the rebel king and unite Java once more.

2:03:40Their chance would come in the year 1293 when the sails of the Mongol fleet appeared on the horizon.

2:03:53The Mongol fleet that had been sent to punish the people of Java was led by a commander named Sherby. When he heard of the death of King Kertanagara, he must have found himself in a quandary.

2:04:24His emperor demanded vengeance and he and his men had sailed for months to get there. He must have feared leaving empty-handed. It was while he was puzzling over this situation that Sherby was approached by a messenger from the bitter lord of the new city of Majapahit, the dispossessed prince Raden Vijaya. The Chinese history of Yuan describes

2:04:55the deal that the Mongols struck.

2:05:01At that time, Java carried on an old feud with the neighbouring country and the old king of Java had already been killed. The son-in-law of the former, Raden Vijaya, had attacked Jayakathong but could not overcome him. He therefore retired to Majapahit and when he heard that Shibi and his army had arrived, he sent envoys with an account of his rivers and seaports and a map of the country, offering his submission

2:05:31and asking for assistance. Shibi then advanced with all his forces. For the Mongols, the arrangement was a neat way to solve their problem.

2:05:47They would help Raden Vijaya overthrow the rebel Jayakathong and place him on the throne as a kind of puppet king, swearing allegiance to the Mongols in China. Then Shibi could return to Kublai Khan and say that he had brought the defiant little island back under control.

2:06:11But among Raden Vijaya's men, it must have been a controversial proposal.

2:06:19The Javanese were a proud people and few had any desire to be ruled by the far-off Mongol emperor.

2:06:29Some may even have called Raden Vijaya a coward and a traitor. But all this time he was hatching a plot of his own.

2:06:43The later chronicle of the Pararaton describes the ensuing war, referring to the Mongols as Tatars. The Tatar army came out from the north while the Majapahit armies came out from the east. King Jayakatong was confused, unsure which to guard.

2:07:15Then he was attacked heavily from the north by the Tatar army. King Jayakatong who was fighting to the north armed with a shield was attacked together by the Tatar people and was finally caught and imprisoned by the Tatars. The Mongols had now become kingmakers in Java.

2:07:46The 13th century Persian historian Abdullah Wasaf describes how they put Radhan Vijaya on the Javanese throne.

2:07:58His Majesty Koblai put the old king's son-in-law Vijaya on the steps of the throne. He bestowed on him a ceremonial dress of honor and conferred on him much grace and in exchange for the payment of tribute and taxes of pearls and gold he left the island in his hands.

2:08:23The Mongol emperor Kublai must have been ecstatic when he heard the news. Finally here was a victory he could show to his people. The wealthy island of Java would now be added to his imperial domain along with its control of major shipping lanes and perhaps now the fortunes of his teetering empire would finally turn around. But that was not to be the case. That's

2:08:55because the new king Radhan Vijaya had no intention of ruling Java as a vassal of Kublai Khan and the moment he got to power he turned on the Mongol forces who had helped him seize the throne. The Chinese history of Yuan gives a terse account of this disastrous turnaround. Radhan Vijaya asked permission to return to his country in order

2:09:25to prepare a new letter of submission to the emperor and to take the precious articles in his possession back to court. Shubhi consented to this and sent two officers with 200 men to go with him. But on the way Radhan Vijaya killed the two officers and revolted again after which he availed himself of the circumstance that the main army was returning to attack it from both sides.

2:09:58The Mongol army believed their mission to be complete and were already packing their ships to leave. The seasonal winds were about to change direction and if they didn't move fast they might become stranded on Java for another six months. When Radhan Vijaya's soldiers burst out of the forest in ambush firing arrows and darts from their blowguns the Mongol Yuan troops were taken completely

2:10:29by surprise. The Javanese epic poem Bomantaka describes a battle of this kind. They were thrown into disarray and in fear the demon army fled and many of the demons and their leaders were struck dead. They withdrew in haste to the shelter of the fort but were pursued. Others shuddering sought a way of resisting but lacked

2:10:59the strength and hit by arrows floundered about and all of them left in fear and ran away. The whole fort was in up war and all shouted in confusion. The fires glowed and blazed up frightfully like an erupting volcano.

2:11:23Thousands were killed and the remains of the Mongol army fled in disarray back to the ships as the history of Yuan describes.

2:11:37Xi Pi was left behind and was cut off from the rest of the army. He was forced to fight his way back to the ships for a distance of more than a hundred miles. At last he embarked again and reached China on a voyage of 68 days. Of his soldiers more than 3,000 men had died. When news of this betrayal reached the emperor Kublai Khan, we can only imagine

2:12:08his rage. He ordered the general Shui Bi to receive 17 lashes and commanded a third of his property to be confiscated as punishment for his failure. He ordered his ministers to begin immediate preparations for a full-scale invasion of Java with an even larger army of 100,000 men. But these plans would never come to fruition.

2:12:39The disaster in Java would be the last campaign of Kublai Khan's reign and he died the next year in February of 1294 at the age of 78.

2:12:54After that, the Mongol Yuan dynasty would enter into a steady and irrevocable decline and would collapse entirely little more than 70 years later. One great empire was coming to an end, but in its collapse it gave way for the rise of what was now the undisputed major power on the island of Java and in the archipelago of Nusantara the

2:13:25new power of Maja Pahit.

2:13:35On the 15th day of the month of Kartika, the eighth month of the Hindu calendar, Radhan Vijaya was crowned king in the palace of Maja Pahit. What had once been a stretch of wild jungle was now the beating heart of Java's most powerful kingdom. The Chinese history of Song describes the appearance of the kings of Java and from this we might imagine how

2:14:05this new king looked on the day of his coronation.

2:14:12The king has hair in a knot upon the top of his head. He wears golden bells, a silk robe, and shoes of leather. He sits on a square couch and his functionaries who see him daily salute him three times on going away. When he goes out he rides on an elephant or sits in a carriage and from five to seven hundred soldiers

2:14:42follow him. When the people see the king they squat down until he has passed.

2:14:59Radenvijaya would rule as the king of Majapahit for sixteen years but his reign would be a troubled one. From the earliest days of his rule he faced rebellions many of them from men who had fought alongside him against Jayakartong and the Mongols. Many of these disagreements were sparked over the

2:15:29question of who would become the king's Mahapati a powerful and influential position that combined elements of a prime minister and head general and essentially acted as the king's right hand.

2:15:45Whatever his skills as a diplomat it seems Radenvijaya struggled to manage the ambitions of the men who served under him. For this reason he spent much of his rule putting down rebellions all over Java. In an effort to cement the legitimacy of his new dynasty he would marry the remaining three daughters of his dead father-in-law Kirtanagara and ensure that the royal line of succession

2:16:15would pass entirely through him. But still the problems persisted and the new kingdom teetered on the brink of destruction.

2:16:28When Radenvijaya died in the year 1309, he must have hoped that his only son Jayanegra would set things right. But due to the apparently deficient nature of Jayanegra's character, this would not be the case.

2:16:53King Jayanegra would rule for nearly twenty years after the death of his father, father. But he was a widely disliked character, so much so that the author of the chronicle, the Pararaton, would give him the nickname Kalagamet, meaning weak villain. Meanwhile, the Javanese folk tradition has remembered him by the name Bajang Ratu, or Dwarf King, referencing either his short stature

2:17:23or simply the uninspiring nature of his rule.

2:17:30Jayanegra faced multiple attempts on his life and widespread rebellions even worse than his father's, the most serious of which was led by a man named Kuti. This uprising became so dangerous that the king was forced to abandon his capital for a time, and it's during this time of upheaval that a man would walk on to the historical stage who would turn around the fortunes

2:18:00of this new and struggling kingdom. He was a soldier who led the king's bodyguard during the Kuti rebellion and gained a position of trust in the royal court. His name was Gajamada.

2:18:24Gajamada's name came from the old Javanese word Gaja, meaning elephant, and Mada, which is a difficult to translate word describing a state of furious intoxication. This probably alluded to the period of a few weeks every year when male elephants enter their breeding cycle called must, and their testosterone levels explode. During

2:18:55this time, a bull elephant seeps liquid from a gland around its ears and becomes extremely aggressive and dangerous.

2:19:05Elephants had long been used for warfare in Java. They formed the centerpiece of any army and allowed royals and generals to command the battlefield from an elevated position.

2:19:20Although prehistoric fossils of native elephants have been found in Java, this species had long been extinct by this point, and during the medieval period, elephants were imported from other lands.

2:19:36They were enormous, expensive, and prestigious. Their tusks sometimes adorned with metal implements to make them even more deadly, and their sides often oiled before going into battle to prevent the enemy from climbing on their backs. So this commander's name would have generated images of strength, vitality, and an unstoppable force, and by all accounts it would be a good fit.

2:20:12Although the elephant general Gajamada would eventually rise through the new kingdom of Majapahit to become one of its most influential statesmen, his birth was relatively unexceptional. We know little about his early life, but he was likely born into a poor family in the area around the city of Majapahit, and his father was possibly killed in the war with the Mongols. But he would prove his worth

2:20:42and become the head of the king's elite royal bodyguard, the Bayankara. After successfully protecting the king through the Kuti rebellion, Gajamada would be rewarded with the governorship of a small province. Finally, he would be named Mahapati, or the right hand of the king.

2:21:07The epic poem, the Desha Varnana, describes this warrior statesman in the following terms. Gajamada is the excellent party of Majapahit, an officer valid, discerning in tactics, with a firm foundation in loyalty and devotion to the king, eloquent and skilled in speech, polite and patient, constantly exerting

2:21:37himself, unremitting. He watches over the king's position as supreme ruler of the world. King Jayanegra was clearly a man ill-suited to rule. But with Gajamada's help, he was able to keep hold of his kingdom by his fingernails. And it's in the last decade of his reign that a visitor from a far-off

2:22:08land arrived on the shores of Java. He was a traveler from the northern Italian region of Friulia, then a territory of the Holy Roman Empire, and his name was Odorick of Pordenon. Around the year 1318,

2:22:39Odorick had departed from Venice and spent the next decade or so traveling all over Asia, passing through Persia and seeing the ruins of the ancient city of Persepolis. He then sailed through the strait of Hormuz to India and from there through the straits of Malacca to Borneo, Sumatra, and Java.

2:23:04When he returned home, he dictated the memoirs of his travels in a work entitled The Relatio de Mirabilibus Orientalium Tatarorum, or The Account of the Marvels of the Eastern Tatars. In this text, he provides a remarkable snapshot of life in Java around the year 1320.

2:23:32There is an island which is called Java, which is a good 3,000 miles around. The king of this island has under him seven crowned kings as vassals. This island is very populous and is the second best of all islands that be on the earth. One finds there coves, pepper, nutmegs, and many other precious spices that they grind there, and all manner of

2:24:02necessities in great quantity.

2:24:08Odirik was particularly impressed by the royal palace of Gaya Negra, which was richly decorated in gold, mined from the volcanic mountain rangers.

2:24:20The king of this island lives in a marvellous and very large palace. Its steps are of gold and silver alternately. The paving tiles are likewise one gold and the next silver. The walls are covered with plates of gold, and there are mounted men sculpted out of gold on them with golden circles round their heads like the diadems we make for the figures of saints, and

2:24:51these circles are full of precious stones. To put it briefly, this is the richest and loveliest palace that there be in the whole world.

2:25:04Odirik also records that many still remembered the war with the Mongol Yuan dynasty of China. China, now nearly 30 years in the past.

2:25:16The great Khan of Cathay, who is the sovereign emperor of all the Tatars, has often made war with this king and often brought battle to him, but this king has always defeated him.

2:25:33But despite the glowing report of Odirik and the ongoing help of the elephant general Gajah Madha, Jaya Negra's reign was a poor one.

2:25:47He was so insecure in his rule that he at one point seems to have considered marrying two of his own sisters named Dya Vyat and Dya Gitarja to ensure that no rivals could arise from the royal line.

2:26:05When opposition to this plan exploded in the court and court and their mother loudly protested, King Jaya Negra gave up on this idea, but he still forbade his sisters from marrying anyone else.

2:26:28King Jaya Negra had two sisters born of the same mother. He did not permit them to be married to others, wishing to keep them for himself. Therefore, no prince dared remain openly at Majapahit. Any man who appeared was driven away, lest he seek their hands, and the other nobles kept themselves hidden in fear. Jaya Negra

2:27:03confined these two princesses for years in the women's quarters of the palace and prevented anyone from seeing them.

2:27:13It was a microcosm of a rule that seems to have been at every turn paranoid, petty, and authoritarian. Over the course of his reign, the kingdom of Majapahit would falter.

2:27:31The island of Bali, just a short hop over the Sunda Strait, slipped out of his control around this time, and people must have feared that the whole kingdom would now disintegrate, and the land would return to destructive civil war. But that was not to be the case. That's because of a woman who had made her name standing up to King Jaya Negra, the

2:28:01mother of the two imprisoned princesses, a woman named Dya Gayatri. Dya was a title that in old Javanese was given to princes and princesses of the royal line.

2:28:31Dya Gayatri had been the youngest daughter of King Kertanagara, the last king of Singhasari. She had also been the most senior wife of the founder of Majapahit, Raden Vijaya, and all her life she had been a quiet force behind the lives of these great men. As a girl, she had watched her father brand the face of the Mongol envoys, and then saw her home

2:29:01of Singhasari, destroyed by the rebellion of Jaya Katong. She had fled through the rice fields to safety while her home burned behind her.

2:29:15As a young woman, she had watched the war with the Mongols unfold, then seen her husband found the kingdom of Majapahit, which now stood as his lasting legacy. By now, she was a widow in her fifties, and had retired to become a Buddhist nun in a forest monastery on the slope of a nearby mountain. But she was still known by the title Rajapatni, a word which means wife of kings, and

2:29:47which gave her the prestige of a royal matriarch.

2:29:52The bumbling king, Jaya Negara, was her late husband's son by another less senior wife. And we can only imagine how Dhyagayatri felt now, watching from her monastery as he veered the empire from crisis to crisis, and kept her two daughters under lock and key.

2:30:17She must have feared that the legacy that she and Radhan Vijaya had built was about to be destroyed. destroyed, but she refused to let that happen.

2:30:31To help her free her daughters, reclaim the kingdom, and put it back on course, this royal matriarch would enlist the help of the man who had recently been rising in prominence in the kingdom of Majapahit, the raging elephant who had become indispensable to the feckless king, the soldier and statesman who went by the name Gajamada.

2:30:59In the year 1328, it seems they took their chance.

2:31:13According to the official story related in the royal chronicle, the Pararaton, that year, King Jayanegra was suffering from an unpleasant condition, a painful boil or swelling of some kind. And when he summoned his doctor, a man named Tanka, he apparently forgot that he had previously insulted or taken advantage of this man's wife.

2:31:40Enraged at this, the doctor Tanka took his revenge, as the Pararaton records. Tanka's wife spread word that the king had treated her dishonorably.

2:32:02Tanka was summoned before Gajamada. At that time, King Jayanegra was suffering from a swelling and could not leave his chambers. Tanka was ordered to perform an operation with a sharp lancet, and he approached beside the royal bed. Tanka stabbed the king's boil once, then again with the blade, but the weapon would not burst it, for the king wore around his neck an amulet of protection.

2:32:33Then, the king was asked to set this aside. he took off the charm and laid it beside the bed. Tanka stabbed him again, and this time, the blade burst the boil. But Tanka continued stabbing him, and he did not stop until the king died there upon the bed. The doctor

2:33:09turned assassin, Tanka, was swiftly killed by Gajamada, which meant, perhaps conveniently, that his side of the story could never be told. As historians, we can never actually know what happened in that room, but the slightly fanciful story involving a magical amulet and a vengeful doctor has left many historians wondering if the true story wasn't a simpler one, that

2:33:39Gajamada and the dowager queen, Djar Gayatri, had simply plotted together to kill the king, framing the poor doctor. Whether they had planned the whole thing or just seized the opportunity on a stroke of good luck, Gajamada and the dowager matriarch Djar Gayatri went on to seize control of the kingdom, and it seems King Jayanegra was sufficiently disliked

2:34:11that few people were all that concerned about what might actually have happened to him.

2:34:18But the royal matriarch and the general prime minister faced a problem.

2:34:26Gajamada himself had risen from humble beginnings, and as a commoner he had absolutely no legitimacy to rule under Javanese law. And while Djar Gayatri was officially the next in line to the throne, she had already taken a vow to become a Buddhist nun, a position that prevented her from holding any positions of earthly power, and she had no sons who might take the throne.

2:34:57In fact, the histories record that she had only given birth to her two daughters, who were now allowed to leave the palace for the first time in years.

2:35:10The Desha Varnana describes these women in conventionally poetic terms. And then the king, Jaya Nagara, was left behind as king of Majapahit, with his princesses, his younger sisters, who were the daughters of the worthy Raja Patni, the Incomparable. They were both of the greatest beauty, surpassing the women of heaven.

2:35:41The elder was princess of Jiwana, and the younger ruled as princess of Dha. Niro, Nerepe Dha Siro Pramusu Siniwi.

2:35:53The Raja Patni Dhyagayatri soon appointed her young daughter, Dhyagitaja, to rule as queen in her place. Tuhun rin cakap dendu bono dwirupo. Nerepe Jiwana Verily in the Shaka year, moon arrows to form, the princess of Jiwana succeeded in Majapahit as queen. It was the disposition of the great Raja Patni that she should be the auspicious leader of the world,

2:36:24distinguished from others. It was she who made her ruler and watched over all her affairs. The princess soon took to the throne and with her mother watching over her, she would be a far more capable ruler than her feckless brother.

2:36:51She would take a royal name that meant the exalted goddess of the three worlds who the glory of Vishnu radiates, Tribhuvana Vijaya Tungadevi.

2:37:14Tribhuvana was her mother's daughter. She was a natural stateswoman and was able to stabilize the kingdom after the period of poor leadership that had preceded her. She seems to have learned from the mistakes of both her father and brother. Early in her reign, she faced a rebellion by two men named Sardang and Keta, and a conflict arose in her court over which of her generals would lead her army into

2:37:45battle. These kinds of political disputes had plagued the last two kings, but Tribhuvana resolved it in a simple way. Rather than show favor to one general over the other, she simply led the army herself, as the Deshavanana describes. Rin Agnipuari Chokotan Catru Cirno In Shaka year,

2:38:15fires Aroh's sons, their enemies were destroyed. Sardang and Keta were defeated, overcome by her personal retinue. Further in the Shaka year, Aroh's seasons, eyes, naval, the king of Bali was evil and base. He was attacked with an army, broken and completely crushed. Every kind of evil doer was fearful and made off quickly.

2:38:47Tribuvana's early successes on the battlefield gave her a taste for conquest. And over her rule, this queen of Java would embark on a massive expansion of Majapahit to spread its influence all over the archipelago.

2:39:07To embark on this mission, she appointed as her Mahapati or prime minister, the general who had done more than perhaps anyone else to keep the young kingdom together and who had worked with her mother to depose the previous king. This was the rampaging elephant himself, Gajamada.

2:39:34By all accounts, Gajamada rose to this challenge. Spurred on by his warlike queen, the Pararaton records him swearing a remarkable oath of conquest before the entire royal court. Gajamada swore, until I have conquered the entire Nusantara archipelago, I will eat no spices nor take

2:40:04any rest. If I have conquered the Gorham Islands and the island of Seram, the kingdom of Tanjang Pura, the kingdoms of Haru and Pahang, the Don Pu Regency, the island of Bali, the lands of Sunda along with the Tomasik and Palembang of Sumatra, then and only then will I eat spices and take my rest.

2:40:34Over the next three decades, Gajamada would lead the armies of Majapahit across the seas and would bring ever more lands under the influence and control of the empire. The Italian traveller Ludovico di Varthema describes the weapons of the Javanese that he saw when he visited sometime later around 1505. They carry bows and the greater part darts of cane.

2:41:05Some also use blow pipes with which they throw poison darts and they throw them with the mouth and however little they draw blood the wounded person dies. The 12th century Javanese poem the Boman Thaka describes an idealised army marching to battle and gives a sense for what it would have been like to see the forces of Gajamada landing on the shores of each island in turn and preparing for war.

2:41:38Their weapons were spears and lances and there were also thousands of bows. Then came the riding elephants and their weapons were spears lances javelins and clubs. Many heroes were mounted on horses skilled riders in horseback combat. The spears and very sharp knives when whirled glowed brightly. Men came bearing lances and shields and others with slingshots. Their casings shone

2:42:09wrapped in silk and gilded and their various jackets were like clouds traveling over the earth.

2:42:24The Majapahit forces of Queen Tribhuvana Vijaya Tungadevi crossed the sea to the east and reconquered the small island of Bali in 1343. After that, they went northwest west and absorbed most of the coastal regions of the larger island of Sumatra into her growing empire.

2:42:49Other kingdoms were incorporated peacefully into the empire as tributary subjects, such as the large island of Sulawesi, whose name means iron island, on account of the high quality iron it produced and exported around the region.

2:43:10The later poem the Desha Vanana lists at length all of the island territories that were either conquered by Majapahit or agreed to pay it tribute without a fight. The islands and lesser islands in the first place coming under the territory of the Malay islands are Jambi and Palambang, Caritang, Tiba, and Dharmasraya following them. Gandhis, Tawas, Manang-Kabwa,

2:43:40Sayak, Vrekan, Kampa and Pane, Kampe, Haru, and Mandahiling, Tumihang, Palak, and Barat, Luas and Samudra, as well as Lemuri, Batan, Lampung, and Barus. Those are the main ones among the Malay islands. All these countries are subject and obedient.

2:44:02The great queen Tribhuvana Vijayatungadevi would rule for 22 years and her reign saw the rise of Majapahit to a true thalassocracy or an empire of the sea.

2:44:20But she must have known that her reign couldn't last forever.

2:44:37In 1350, her mother, the great royal matriarch Djargayatri, died, most likely in her forest monastery after a long and accomplished life.

2:44:52Her daughter, Tribhuvana, had been ruling ostensibly on behalf of her mother, and it seems that once the old woman died, her situation would also become untenable. But luckily, by this time, she had had a son who was now the first in the royal line, and he had just come of age at 16 years old. his name was Hayam Wuruk.

2:45:28When this young prince, Hayam Wuruk, came to the throne, he would have been crowned with enormous ceremony and celebration. The historian Herald van der Linde describes the rituals associated with a Javanese coronation.

2:45:48At sunset on the eve of the first day of the first month of the year, priests entered the inner pavilion of the royal palace, followed by acolytes chanting sacred Sanskrit texts. King Hayam Wuruk sat on a throne in the amazing pavilion, where matted-haired Rishi hermits and religious leaders sprinkled holy water over him to wash away the evils of the past. As darkness descended, oil lamps were lit

2:46:19around the palace, a spectacular sight.

2:46:23At the striking of a gong, Gaja Mada led the senior ministers to a large pavilion in front of the palace gates before a growing crowd. Hayam Wuruk was a multi-talented king. He was apparently an accomplished singer and dancer and a lover of shadow puppet plays. The poet of the

2:46:54Desha Wanana describes the auspicious omens that took place upon the birth of this prince as the island's great volcanoes rumbled their approval.

2:47:08At his birth in the Shaka year, seasons, arrow, suns, the prince was already destined to be king. The signs of his miraculous and extraordinary nature were that the earth quaked and rumbled. There was a rain of ash. Thunder and lightning zigzagged through the sky. Mount Kampood erupted and the wretched evil doers around it were annihilated and died without a gasp. Such is the nature of his reign that the whole of the land of Java has been humbled and bows down

2:47:38in submission.

2:47:42Like her mother before her, Tribulvana did not completely vanish from political life when she stepped away from her throne. Throughout the rest of her life, she would act as a counsellor and advisor for her son and together they would usher in what is widely regarded as the golden age of the empire of Majapahit.

2:48:07When Hayam Wuruk came to the throne, he inherited a capital city of no little magnificence. Over the preceding decades, it had been the site of constant construction and now bloomed with palaces and temples, complete with pillared audience halls and pavilions. In this era, all roads led to Majapahit and its status as a crossroads of Java wasn't just a metaphor.

2:48:39The epic poem Deshavanana describes the royal palace.

2:48:47Let us describe the layout of the awe-inspiring royal palace. Its wall is of red brick. It goes right around and is thick and high. On the western side, the palace mouth faces onto the great square in the midst of deep encircling with buddhi trees in rows and neatly shaped, all thick with festoons. On the north is the ceremonial gate, splendid and extraordinary. Its doors of iron adorned with countless designs. To the south of this is the crossroads, otherworldly in its elegance.

2:49:22From these crossroads, great highways snaked off into the country in all directions. It was part of the usual ceremony of kingship that the king of Majapahit would routinely make journeys around the whole of Java. meeting his citizens and seeing the sights of the land, visiting villages, holy shrines, and reminding vassal kingdoms about who

2:49:52was in charge. It was on one of these journeys that King Hayam Wuruk brought his court poet, a man named Prapankar, who would go on to be the author of the poem Deshavanana.

2:50:11Prapankar speaks of the honour in his poem, describing himself in the third person. In the Shakayir moon-snake sun in the month of Bajrapada, at the fullness of the moon, King Hayam Wuruk went on a journey to Lama Jan to take note of all there was to see. All the princes of Java, with their wives again, went with the king, with servants and vehicles, officials and officers from the whole of Majapahit, and in particular the king's priests

2:50:41and court poets accompanied him. So this man by the pen name of Prapankar joined in the pursuit of beauty, attending at the feet of the king.

2:50:53According to his own account, Prapankar seems to have embarked on writing the Deshavanana because he felt unable to write the kind of poetry that the more senior court poets were producing, usually heroic epics about the Hindu gods. As he describes, in the following extract.

2:51:16His motive was, after all, to follow the king wherever he went in the hope of being favoured. But he still does not know how to achieve poetic effects and is most unlikely to succeed in composing a song on the writing tablet. And this is the reason why he describes all the places passed through and sets out their names in order along the road.

2:51:39Ironically, the Deshavanana is today one of the most famous pieces of literature to survive from the Javanese golden era and it is by far the most useful to historians.

2:51:53Today, the poem is a remarkable source that captures a snapshot of life on Java during the reign of Hayam Wuruk. And for all of this, we have the poet Propankha's apparent inferiority complex to thank.

2:52:11Along their journey, Propankha watched the king carefully and noted down the beauty of the land they passed through.

2:52:21At Dampa and at Patanjungan, the king relaxed and made his way along the beach. To the east, his path followed the level sands, which were so firm that the carriages could drive over them. He made a halt on the banks of a lake thick with white and red lotuses in flower and was absorbed in watching the giant shrimps moving about in the limpid water, clearly visible in the depths.

2:52:44But the royal journey wasn't always an easy one.

2:52:52In his text, we get a sense for the challenges of moving over land during the rainy season.

2:53:01The road, just at the point where it runs northward from the sea, over its whole length, was rough and narrow. On top of this, it rained, so that the steep places became slippery and some of the carriages came loose and collided with each other.

2:53:17Due to these challenges, travel by road was largely only possible during the dry season. For the rest of the year, goods were transported by river, taking rice and other export crops downstream to the great port cities on barges.

2:53:37These boats would then sail back up the rivers with luxury goods imported from China, India, and elsewhere. These port cities were the beating heart of the Majapahit Empire, and the large numbers of Chinese coins found in their archaeological sites testify to the booming trade that went on.

2:54:04At each of these ports, the sales of hundreds of ships would be visible, coming and going with countless trade goods. And among these, the most lucrative were the spices grown on the islands of the archipelago that were prized all around the world, such as pepper, cardamom, and ginger. But the rarest of all were cloves and nutmeg.

2:54:41Cloves and nutmeg were brought to Majapahit on large ships that sailed from a small group of islands, which are called the Islands of Maluku, and would come to be known as the Spice Islands.

2:55:00While cloves were grown all over these islands, nutmeg was extremely limited in cultivation, occurring only on ten islands in the tiny archipelago of Banda.

2:55:14Wild nutmeg had long been harvested by the peoples native to the Banda Islands, but it was a particularly difficult plant to cultivate.

2:55:26Nutmeg seeds will fail to germinate if they aren't planted in soil within a week, making them difficult to transport by sea. And the particular environment of volcanic soil that they evolved in means that they are fragile and difficult to nurture to full size. As a result of these difficulties, the Banda Islanders claimed that nutmeg was simply a gift of the gods and could not be cultivated by human

2:55:56hands. Instead, they would travel to the parts of the forest where it grew wild to collect its prized seeds, and they kept the location of these groves a carefully guarded secret. But despite its extreme rarity, the fragrant nutmeg seeds that these islanders harvested traveled all around the world. The spice would reach Constantinople in the 6th century and instantly

2:56:27became a sought-after commodity and mark of luxury. Nutmeg would even be mentioned as a spice to flavor English ale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which was written during the time of the Majapahit Empire. At times, nutmeg would sell on the other side of the world for more than an equivalent weight of gold.

2:56:58As a result of this global trade, the rulers of the Banda Islands would come to be known around the region as the Orang Kaya, or rich men. And the entirety of this trade passed through the major ports of Majapahit.

2:57:17To transport these goods across the seas and oceans, the sailors of Majapahit voyaged in large vessels known as jongs.

2:57:30These were the descendants of the Borobudur ships that had sailed to Madagascar and eastern Africa in the preceding centuries. And by this time, some of these ships had reportedly grown to phenomenal proportions.

2:57:48Reports on the true size of these vessels vary, but some sources record jongs that reached a size of 80 metres long. They were built with layered hulls that made them exceptionally strong, and were able to transport a thousand soldiers and more than a thousand tons of cargo. The sight of these massive jongs astonished European explorers when they arrived in the archipelago in the

2:58:1916th century.

2:58:22One Portuguese admiral and explorer, Afonso de Albuquerque, wrote about encountering one of these enormous vessels in 1511.

2:58:34The whole fleet went back along the coast in the same order as they had first come, and when they were in the latitude of the Powder Island, they sighted two very large junks and gave chase to them. One of these, which was from India, surrendered immediately, but the other junk would not do so.

2:58:59The Portuguese gave chase to the massive Javanese ship and made several attempts to board it, but these were all unsuccessful. The Europeans even opened fire on the jong with their cannons, but found that the three or four layers of wood with which the Javanese built their ships simply absorbed the cannon fire and the vast vessel sailed on.

2:59:29In a letter written some time later, one of the Portuguese captains, Fernau Pires de Andrada, describes the massive Javanese ship.

2:59:44The junk was the largest seen by men of these parts so far. It carried a thousand fighting men on board, and your lordship can believe me that it was an amazing thing to see, because beside it, our own vessel, the Anunciada, did not look like a ship at all. We attacked it with bombards, but even the shots of the largest cannon did not pierce it below the waterline. It was so monstrous that no man had ever seen the like.

3:00:17Eventually, the smaller and more maneuverable Portuguese ships were able to disable the larger jong by breaking its two massive rudders. This finally brought the men on board to surrender. The Europeans were so impressed with the size of these Javanese jongs that they sailed one of them all the way back home, where it was used for a time as a warship in the fleet guarding the Gibraltar Strait.

3:00:48Although we have little reliable data on when the ships of the Javanese reached such a massive scale, it is reasonable to assume that they were at least approaching that size during the reign of Hayam Wuduk, when the power of Majapahit was at its peak. These enormous ships would have been the crucial backbone of the Majapahit Empire,

3:01:19with their enormous capacity for cargo and their ability to transport thousands of men, horses, and even elephants from island to island, wherever they were needed.

3:01:33And of course, they would have made a powerful statement about the power and prestige of the empire of Majapahit.

3:01:44By now, the Majapahit sphere of influence stretched over the sea for thousands of kilometers, and they had monopolized the lucrative spice routes from the Malacu islands so that their wealth would have swelled to previously unimagined heights.

3:02:05Over this period, Majapahit began to take on the form of what has been called a Mandala empire.

3:02:21In Sanskrit, the word Mandala means circle, and it has come to describe a style of traditional geometric pattern used to represent a kind of map of the universe. reflected in the shapes of the Buddhist temples at Segu and Borobudur, these are designed to help an adherent achieve a state of meditation. Although the forms of these mandalas differ,

3:02:52many show the sacred mountain Meru at the center of the world, sometimes surrounded by the world ocean. around this is a square palace with four gates and then a circle representing the continents outside it, the heavens and the world of the gods forming the outside of the pattern. The mandala presents the vision of a world ordered in a strict hierarchy radiating out

3:03:22from the center, and so it's no surprise it has long been used as a way of visualizing royal power. As early as the 4th century BC, the Indian writer Kautilya, in his work the Arth Shastra, described what he called the Raja Mandala or Mandala of Kings, in which a powerful ruler will bring other less powerful ones under his control. This idea

3:03:52has become popular among modern historians seeking to understand how Southeast Asian states of this time were organized, and there's some evidence that this is also how the Javanese of the time would have thought of their world.

3:04:08The epic poem, the Desha Vanana, describes the structure of the Majapahit Empire like the solar system, with power radiating out from the center like the rays of the sun.

3:04:23The royal compound at Majapahit the incomparable is as sun and the moon, and the courtyards of the many quarters, each with its own particular charm, are rays of light in relation to it. Like the stars and planets are the various remaining cities, Daha the foremost, and the other islands and all the surrounding countries which seek refuge and in numbers come into the presence.

3:05:00It's still an open question exactly how much power Majapahit exerted over its vassal states. Some empires like the Roman Empire ruled with direct control. When they conquered a new area, they erased previous forms of government and social structures and imposed their own on absorbed territories. But we don't see much evidence of that in the case of Majapahit.

3:05:34Subordinate kings and rulers on the outer islands certainly paid symbolic homage to the king in Majapahit. They likely provided an agreed-upon tribute each year and a certain number of soldiers and ships for any military action undertaken by the empire. But beyond that, it's likely that the lords of each island and tributary kingdom continued to exert more or less total control over their own affairs.

3:06:06This arrangement suited everyone well.

3:06:11Cultural identities on each individual island were relatively distinct and deeply entrenched. Local languages and customs were different on each island and few people around the region wanted to be directly ruled by a Javanese governor or to have Javanese troops stationed in their hometowns. And for the Majapahit, appointing governors and stationing troops to put down rebellions and uprisings would have been

3:06:41an unwelcome expense. The mandala structure was cheap and efficient. While times were good and the empire was strong, it ensured a maximum level of compliance and cooperation from subjects with the lightest possible touch and allowed everyone to profit from the great traffic of trade that flowed along the great arteries of the sea.

3:07:10From the center of the mandala in Majapahit, fleets of Jong ships sailed back and forth among the islands, bringing trade and tribute back to its booming ports.

3:07:26But as with any empire, sometimes its subjects had to be kept in line, as the Deshavanana describes.

3:07:40The other countries, all that were under the care of Java, obeyed the king's commands, and each was true in what it did. Furthermore, any that transgressed his commands was attacked and wiped out completely by the squadrons of the various valiant naval officers. One such

3:08:17example occurred in the year 1375, when one of the subject kings of the empire seemed to get ideas above his station. The troublesome king in question was a man named Adityavarman, who had been put in power by Majapahit on the large

3:08:47island of Sumatra, a short hop over the sea from Java.

3:08:54Adityavarman was something of a narcissist. He was fond of commissioning massive statues of himself, larger than any that have been uncovered of other kings in the region, and over the preceding years, he had begun to act in an insubordinate manner.

3:09:13At one point, he had a stone tablet inscribed that showed a list of kings, and he had the insolence to place to place his own name above King Hayam Wuruks.

3:09:28This all would have caused rumbles of consternation at the court of Majapahit.

3:09:36But Adityavarman would go too far when he sent his own envoys to the court of the emperor of China, bypassing his king completely. One Javanese epic poem, the Bratayuda, describes the rage of the demon king Ravana upon getting news of the death of his sons. But we might imagine it a fitting description of Hayam Wuruks' reaction when he heard that Adityavarman had been

3:10:07going over his head and making overtures to China without consulting him.

3:10:15The monarch was furiously enraged. He gnawed his moustaches, his countenance was inflamed and his bosom red as the warawari flower. Sweat exuded from every paw. The angles of his mouth trembled. His eyelashes stuck together. He vaunted. He called aloud. He challenged all his enemies to meet him at once.

3:10:43Hayam Wuruks summoned the Chinese ambassador to Sumatra and after lambasting him apparently had the man beheaded and his head sent back to China in a bag.

3:10:58In perhaps a sign of the power of Majapahit at this time, the Chinese didn't respond in kind. Instead, they bashfully apologized for their mistake and would eventually send a gift of fine fabrics and a batch of paper money to the Javanese court to make amends. But from the vain king Adityovaman, no apology would suffice.

3:11:27King Hayam Wuruks amassed his army, as many as 300 warships, and according to the chronicles, 200,000 soldiers to crush this upstart king. And although we don't hear what happened to him, Adityovaman never appears in any other written records or inscriptions again.

3:11:53Now, Hayam Wuruks was on the war path. After crushing Adityovaman, the Majapahit fleet rounded on another problematic vassal. This man ruled the walled settlement of Singapura, now the modern city of Singapore, and his name was Parameswara.

3:12:17After a month-long siege, the Majapahit forces broke through the walls and slaughtered the inhabitants.

3:12:27To this day, legend has it that the iron-rich reddish clay soil of Singapore was stained that color by the blood spilled during this massacre.

3:12:40Parameswara, the king of Singapura, fled north to the area of the Malacca Strait, but he would remain a thorn in the side of Majapahit for some time to come.

3:13:09The Adityavaman incident shows that the empire of Majapahit was held together by trade and diplomacy, and the promise of mutual peace and prosperity, but it was also very much backed by the threat of force.

3:13:29Over this period, the royal capital would flourish, but this golden age of Majapahit could not last forever, and its end would come about after the death of its last great King Hayam-Wuruk.

3:14:00King Hayam-Wuruk died likely in the year 1389, and with him, the light began to leave the court of Majapahit.

3:14:13The great statesman and general Gajamada had died 25 years earlier, and Hayam-Wuruk's mother, Queen Tribhuvana Vijayatungadevi, had also died a decade or so after that.

3:14:30There now seems to have been something of a vacuum of talent in the Majapahit court.

3:14:39Exacerbating the problem was the complexity of Javanese succession laws, which had developed to deal with the fact that kings of this time always had multiple wives. In ideal circumstances, the law would unambiguously favor one successor over another, and there would be no confusion about who would take the throne. But fate had dealt Hayam-Wuruk a bad hand when it came to his succession.

3:15:12He had failed to have a son by his principal wife, and so his closest legal heir was therefore a woman named Kusumavadhani, his daughter by a lower ranking wife. She had married a man named Vikramavodhana, and so it seemed likely that he would become king, despite having only married into the royal family.

3:15:42The Deshavanana describes this couple in glowing terms.

3:15:49They have as daughter Princess Kusumavadhani, a blameless young princess who's paid homage in the royal compound of Kabbalan, and is of the utmost charm. Prince Vikramavadhana will be her proper match, as everyone says they will be like a god and goddess when they marry later, bringing happiness to people's hearts. But Hayamwuruk did also have a son by a secondary, less senior wife. In the histories,

3:16:19he is known only by the title Brei Virabhumi, or the lord of a place called Virabhumi.

3:16:27Being a man and the direct descendant of Hayamwuruk also gave him a strong claim to the throne, despite his mother being of a lower rank than Kusuma Vodani's. And this situation, of two people having a comparable claim, was a recipe for disaster.

3:16:51Hayamwuruk seems to have sensed the danger while he was still alive. In an attempt to remedy the situation and cool off the rivalry between these two men, he divided the empire into the western court, the capital of Majapahit, and the eastern court, where the lord of Virabhumi held sway.

3:17:15The exact details of this arrangement are unknown, but it was a clear and obvious rift, now splitting the kingdom's Javanese heartlands in two.

3:17:27The situation seems to have gotten so bad that at one point the Chinese chronicle, the Ming Xilu, notes that the two different courts were each sending their envoys to meet independently with the emperor's ambassadors.

3:17:44Like the rumblings and earthquakes before a great eruption, the signs of trouble must have been obvious to anyone who was paying attention, and in the years that followed, the rift would tear apart the land of Java and the empire it ruled.

3:18:16The name for the conflicts that follows is found in the chronicle of the Pararaton. There, it is called the regreg, a word that in Javanese means bit by bit and can be used to describe something falling apart piece by piece. As we will see, this was a fitting name as the conflict would bring about the steady coming apart

3:18:46of the Mandala empire of Majapahit that had held together over the last century.

3:18:55The Pararaton describes the conflict that unfolded.

3:19:06They came to blows. There was division, and men died in the division.

3:19:14After three years, there then arose again the regreg war. Both sides prepared themselves. All the lords asked themselves, whom shall I follow? Then the fighting began.

3:19:35The regreg war would rage for two years, and over this time, neither side could gain the upper hand. The Pararaton describes the back-and-forth nature of the fighting.

3:19:55First, the western palace was defeated. Their lords were hard-pressed. In distress, they wished to flee. Then they said, do not flee yet, let us fight them. Then the eastern palace was defeated. The strength of the Mandala empire system was in how light a hold it exerted on its vassals. It was a cheap and

3:20:25efficient way to run an imperial system, but this strength in times of stability became a weakness when times got hard. For the kings who swore allegiance to Majapahit, it was all too easy when the empire was distracted to simply turn away and quietly stop paying its fees or sending it troops.

3:20:55With the power of Majapahit's fleet and army now focused entirely on the war between its western and eastern courts, many of its formerly most loyal subjects simply slipped out of its grasp.

3:21:13One of these subjects was in the region of Malayu, which during the Reg Reg War drifted under the sovereignty of the powerful kingdom of Ayutthaya in what is now Thailand.

3:21:31On the island of Sumatra, a Chinese pirate named Chen Tsui from Guangdong even took advantage of the chaos caused by the Reg Reg War to seize control of the wealthy port city of Palembang. This man would run Palembang as a pirate fortress for the better part of a decade, using it as a base to raid the wealthy shipping that passed through the Malacca Strait,

3:22:01and using forged bronze seals to create counterfeit licenses and aid smuggling into and out of China. The Chinese Muslim writer Ma Huan wrote about the situation in his work, A Survey of the Ocean Shores.

3:22:22Chen Tzu-yi plundered ships and preyed on both native and foreign merchants for several years.

3:22:33On the northern coast of Borneo, the Brunei kingdom had also begun to ignore the overlordship of Majapahit, and by 1405, western Borneo had also drifted away. These small kingdoms would instead seek protection under the influence of another power that was now flexing its muscles with increasing confidence on the waves. That was the rising Ming

3:23:04dynasty of China.

3:23:16By this time, the Mongol Yuan dynasty had collapsed, and the Mongols had been forcibly thrown out of China. Now, a new dynasty known as the Ming had taken its place.

3:23:40The Ming ruled over a devastated land that had suffered immensely over the years of Mongol conquest and misrule by the Yuan emperors, exacerbated by the ravages of the Black Death. But now, China was rebuilding.

3:24:02Ultimately, the Ming dynasty has been remembered as a paranoid and inward-looking state, which virtually bankrupted itself with the construction of its vast great wall wall in the north, sealing itself off from the world. But at the start of the 15th century, Ming China looked quite different. This was partly due to the reign of an ambitious and outward-looking ruler known as

3:24:33the Yongle emperor. emperor.

3:24:53The Yongle emperor was a patron of learning and sponsored the writing of a great encyclopedia made up of 23,000 written scrolls in an attempt to record all the world's knowledge. He was fascinated by everything, and especially the world outside of China, as he recorded in his work Ming Tai Zong Baoshun, or The Valuable Teachings of

3:25:23Emperor Yongle.

3:25:27Whenever I can find the time, I read history books and the classics so as to avoid idle living. I constantly remind myself that the world is so vast and state affairs so important that I cannot succumb to laziness and complacency for even a moment. Once one has succumbed to laziness and complacency, everything will become stagnant.

3:25:58As a result of this fascination with the outer world, throughout his reign, he sent out a flurry of diplomatic missions to all corners of Asia, letting everyone know that China was once again open for business. And as part of this effort, he ordered the construction of a grand fleet designed to sail around the region and remind the people of every land of the might of China.

3:26:37To build his fleet, the Yongle Emperor ordered the construction of a vast shipyard at a place called Longjiang, or Dragon River.

3:26:50This sprawling industrial complex was built at the point where the Yangtze River is met by the smaller Qin Wai in the main capital of Nanjing, and it would be the largest shipyard anywhere in the world. On its seven long, large docks, at least a hundred ships could be built at any one time. To help in his mammoth effort,

3:27:20the Yongle Emperor invited more than twenty thousand craftsmen to work here on his ships, and timbers of elm, cedar, and camphor were brought in enormous quantities to the city of Nanjing, transported from inland ports down the rivers on flat-bottomed barges. The noise of the shipwrights shouting and calling, the thump of the massive beams being lifted into place, the beating of chisels and hammers on nails,

3:27:51all of this would have sounded over the rooftops of Nanjing in the early years of the 15th century. For China, it was the sound of industry and progress. But for the power of Majapahit, far across the sea in the south, it might as well have been the sound of nails being driven into its coffin. By the year 1405, as the

3:28:22reg-reg civil war dragged on in Majapahit, the Yongle emperor had completed his grand fleet, and now all he needed was an admiral to lead it. The man he chose was a eunuch, a giant named Zhonghe.

3:28:46In some ways, Zhonghe was an unlikely candidate to become China's most famous sailor and admiral. For one thing, he had barely any sailing experience, but he had spent much of his life serving the Yongle emperor as a military commander, and had proved himself a capable and loyal general.

3:29:12Zhonghe was a Muslim, born into a devout family in the southwest of China, but he had been captured during the wars of the preceding decades and had been castrated and brought up a eunuch as a kind of military slave. One writer named Yuan Zhonghe describes his towering stature with perhaps some exaggeration.

3:29:43He was seven feet tall and had a waist about five feet in circumference. His cheeks and forehead were high, but his nose was small. He had glaring eyes, teeth as white and well-shaped as shells, and a voice as loud as a huge bell. He knew a great deal about warfare and was well-accustomed to battle.

3:30:13On the 11th of July, 1405, under the command of Admiral Zhonghe, this vast fleet set sail.

3:30:24And it would have made an awe-inspiring sight. It comprised a total of 317 vessels of the latest design, including at least 60 vast treasure ships that were among the largest in the world.

3:30:44By some sources, these could have measured more than 120 metres in length and 50 in breadth, making them still among the largest wooden sailing ships built anywhere in the world. These vessels were each fitted with 24 cast bronze cannons and were beautifully decorated too, with their prows carved with animal heads, dragons, phoenixes, and eagles,

3:31:14all painted in bright colours. Like the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Romans, the Chinese painted eyes on the fronts of their vessels so that the ships seemed to take on a life of their own and see their way through mists and stormy seas. On board these hundreds of ships were a total of

3:31:4428,000 men, including sailors and soldiers, but also diplomats, astronomers, linguists, interpreters, and doctors, as well as carpenters and shipbuilders, for if the vessels needed repairing while at sea. On one stone tablet that the admiral later erected in Fujian, he describes this great voyage. We have

3:32:15traversed more than 100,000 lee of immense water spaces and have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising sky high, and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away, hidden in a blue transparency of light vapors, while our sails, loftily, unfurled like clouds, day and night continued their course as rapidly as a star traversing

3:32:45those savage waves.

3:32:52Although outfitted with cannons, the treasure ships were not primarily warships. They were in fact vast cargo vessels, their holds filled to the brim with Chinese silks, cotton, tea, wine, oil, iron and candles, along with other luxuries, all intended for trade with the strange lands they would encounter along the way. From these lands they

3:33:22brought back spices, gemstones, and even in the year 1414, a live giraffe, which had been brought to Bengal by some African delegates from Malindi. Impressed at the sight of the treasure fleet, these men had gifted one of these animals to the Chinese, who brought it home to no little amazement.

3:33:47The Yongle emperor was no stranger to receiving exotic animals as gifts, and there was even a part of his palace devoted to keeping and caring for them. Elephants and rhinoceroses from Champa, bears from Siam, parrots and peacocks from Java, and ostriches from Aden. But of all these, it was the giraffe that he asked his court artists to paint.

3:34:22Alongside the vast treasure ships sailed a countless array of different support vessels, some carrying horses and troops, others warships for defence. Other boats were floating water tankers, ensuring the thousands of personnel wouldn't go thirsty on long voyages between ports.

3:34:46The ships communicated between one another using large flags, signal bells, a drum and gongs, along with ten lanterns that could signal at night. They even carried carrier pigeons to communicate over longer distances. The ultimate destination of the treasure fleet was the city of Kolikode in the modern Indian state of Kerala, but the fleet was ordered to

3:35:17stop at every large port and kingdom on the way to demonstrate the might of the Ming emperor. It was in 1406 that the Ming fleet arrived in Java, while the Reg Reg Civil War was reaching its bloody height. When the

3:35:52Chinese treasure fleet arrived in Java, they might have expected to encounter the scenes of wealth and prosperity that had been recorded by previous visitors, but they would find instead a troubled land devastated by civil war. The treasure ships anchored off the coast, and a group of Chinese soldiers and merchants came ashore in western Java, hoping to trade.

3:36:23But the western king Vikram of Vodhana, the husband of Hayam Wuruk's daughter, believed that his rival in the east had brought the Chinese to intervene in the civil war. While the Chinese visitors were trading in the marketplace, King Vikram of Vodhana's soldiers swept down on them from all sides. The cries of the Javanese warriors and the screams of the dying would have joined the pops and bangs of

3:36:53cannons that would have sounded all around the marketplace. The acrid smell of gunpowder and blood would have lingered on the air. When the smoke cleared, 170 Chinese merchants and sailors were dead, and the rest had fled back to their ships.

3:37:16Admiral Zheng He had enough soldiers with him that he could have invaded Java in response, and perhaps like the Mongols more than a hundred years earlier, he could have decisively tipped the balance in this civil war. But he was a pragmatic man, and he decided to tread a more considered path. He treated his wounded on board the ships, and sent envoys back to the Yonglu emperor, asking

3:37:47him what to do. In the time of Hayam Wuruk, 30 years earlier, China had steered clear of conflict with the powerful Majapahit empire, sending money and goods in order to avoid a war. But now, Majapahit was weakened and divided. This time, it was King Vikramavodhana who would send a groveling apology to the Chinese court. And the

3:38:17Ming Xilu, or Records of the Ming Dynasty, records what the emperor said in reply. There is no doubt as to your guilt. You acted on the basis of greed and anger, and you have acted against heaven. Is there anything more serious than this? Just as I was about to raise an army to punish you, I have seen that you are capable of repenting your mistakes.

3:38:47And I have thus leniently stopped the dispatch of troops. But what of the 170 people who died innocently? You must immediately pay 60,000 liang of gold as compensation for their lives and to atone for your crime.

3:39:12A year later, a Javanese ship arrived in China with only a sixth of the sum of gold that the Chinese emperor had demanded, along with a letter explaining that the bankrupt kingdom could not afford to pay any more. The Chinese emperor responded magnanimously.

3:39:36What I want from those people who live far away is that they acknowledge their guilt, but I do not want to enrich myself with their gold. The point had been made and the humiliation of Majapahet was total. Everyone in the region took notice.

3:40:00In 1424, Chinese records show that when one king in Sumatra died, his son sent out a letter asking permission to succeed him as king. and he sent it not to the kings of Majapahet in Java, but to the Chinese emperor in the Ming court. This shows just how far the star of Majapahet had fallen and how

3:40:31the might of China was on the rise.

3:40:54Although Admiral Zheng He had declined to fight on this occasion, the treasure fleet was more than capable of doing battle on the seas, and alongside their main diplomatic and mercantile mission, its admiral had been given some less peaceful tasks to complete on their voyage.

3:41:16Chief among these was a mission to destroy the pirate fortress that still held out at the Sumatran port of Palambang, which had risen up due to the weakness of the Majapahet empire. The Ming Shi, or History of Ming, describes how the pirate chief, Chen Zhu Yi, had been playing a clever double game, attempting to mollify the Ming emperor. In the

3:41:47fourth year of the Yongle reign, the pirate chieftain of the old port, Chen Zhu Yi, sent his son to the Ming court. However, although he sent tributes to the court, he was plundering the seas, and thus obstructing the comings and goings of the tributes' envoys.

3:42:07On its way home through the straits of Malacca, the enormous treasure fleet took its chance. They sailed along the mangrove-crusted coast of Sumatra towards Palambang, which the Chinese called the Old Port.

3:42:27We can only imagine the sight that greeted the pirates of Palambang, as the hundreds of colourful ships bore down on them on the horizon.

3:42:39When they arrived at the port city, they demanded the surrender of the pirate chief Chen Zhu Yi. According to the Ming Xilu, or records of the Ming dynasty, the pirate chief attempted to use deception to gain the upper hand. When he arrived at the Old Port of Palambang, he came across Zhu Yi and others, and sent people to bring them to negotiate their pacification. Zhu Yi and the others

3:43:10feigned surrender, but secretly plotted to attack the Imperial Army. Zheng He and the others found out about this, and marshalling the troops prepared their defences.

3:43:25The ensuing battle would be the first test of the power of the Yongle Emperor's fleet. The Ming ships would have rammed into the pirate vessels, hurled gunpowder bombs from catapults, and fired special kinds of fireworks filled with scraps of paper, designed to spread fire and terror, and ignite enemy's sails. They would have also sent volleys of

3:43:55flaming arrows flying towards the pirate ships. The result was a resounding victory for the Ming treasure fleet. The pirate Zhu Yi suffered a great defeat. Over 5,000 of the bandit gang were killed, while 10 of the bandit ships were burned, and seven were captured. Further, two counterfeit bronze seals were seized,

3:44:26and three prisoners, including Zhu Yi, were taken alive. When they arrived at the capital in chains, it was ordered that all of the prisoners were to be beheaded.

3:44:41With this pirate threat crushed, the Ming Chinese quickly moved to establish a governor of the area to prevent a resurgence of any piracy. The man they chose, a Muslim named Xi Jinqing, had once been an official of the Majapahit Empire.

3:45:04The old port pacification superintendency was established, and it was ordered that Xi Jinqing be appointed as the pacification superintendent. A seal, a title patterned, headwear, and a belt, patterned fine silks and silk gauzes were conferred upon him.

3:45:26While the rulers of Majapahit had their backs turned, fighting amongst themselves, the Ming Chinese had swept in and stamped their seal of authority on the Malacca Strait.

3:45:50To strengthen this grip over the narrow and crucial waterway, the Chinese would also bring under their wing, the young city of Malacca, which had recently been growing in wealth and importance. Malacca was a hub for another tide of change that was now sweeping through the archipelago.

3:46:14That was the steady spread of the religion of Islam. Islam had long had a presence in the Indonesian archipelago and had arrived with traders who traveled back and forth across the Indian ocean, bringing

3:46:45nutmeg and cloves to the markets of Egypt and Arabia. But now, this young religion began to make advances in all directions. the European traveler Marco Polo remarked on the change already underway on the island of Sumatra when he passed through the town of Perlac in 1292.

3:47:13The people of Perlac used to be idolaters, but owing to contact with Saracen merchants, who continually resort here in their ships, they have all been converted to the law of Mohammed.

3:47:34Part of the reason for the spread of Islam on the archipelago was the prestige and protection that the religion brought.

3:47:44One example of this in action is the king Paramesfara, the ruler of Singapura, who had been besieged by Majapahit under the reign of Hayamwuruk, and had fled north to the coast of the Malacca Strait.

3:48:02There he had founded the city of Malacca, and in order to add an air of legitimacy to his new rule, Paramesfara seems to have ditched his original Hindu-Buddhist name and adopted a new Persian one, calling himself Sultan Iskander Shah instead.

3:48:24Muslim traders preferred where possible to trade with other Muslims, who were more likely to share their languages of Arabic or Persian, keep the same trading and prayer hours, and shared a common moral code. And so this connection helped Malacca to rapidly expand. The new city's strategic location, right on the narrow sea corridor, meant the Ming Chinese were also very interested to

3:48:55bring its rulers under their patronage and protection. When Admiral Zheng He arrived at the port town of Malacca, he left a stone tablet inscribed with a poem that officially declared it under the protection of China.

3:49:17The vast southwestern sea reaches unto the Middle Kingdom, its waves cresting high as the heavens, watering the earth the same way for countless eons. Washed by sunlight, bathed in the moonlight, rain-swept crags, and dewy rocks in its midst luxuriate with vegetation. and in such a place, people live in harmony. Its righteous king, paying his respects to imperial power,

3:49:48wishes his country to be treated as one of our imperial domains, and to follow the Chinese way. So, here, writ large on everlasting stone, we do proclaim your loyalty. Posterity will smile upon your deed as time passes, and your sons and grandsons will have limitless good fortune.

3:50:15In this, the Chinese were right. The port town of Malacca would grow under Ming protection to become the largest and most important in the whole region. When Zheng He returned a few years later, he would build a fort at Malacca to protect it, and in return, the people of the city would ensure that this crucial waterway would be controlled by China and China alone.

3:50:45Wealth and trade that would have once flowed through the ports of Java now passed through the new trading hub of Malacca instead. From this hub of commerce, the influence of Islam would spread all across the islands. For the kings of Java, who ruled according to legitimacy derived from their connection to the Buddha and the god Shiva, each new convert reduced

3:51:16their overall power. subsequent voyages by Zheng He's treasure fleets would sail as far west as the Strait of Hormuz, the city of Mecca, and Mogadishu and Mombasa on the East African coast. But eventually, the Ming would turn away from ocean-going exploration. When the

3:51:54adventurous Yongle emperor died, he was replaced by more inward-looking rulers, who focused instead on the construction of the Great Wall in the North. At one point, the Ming even outlawed the construction of large ships, dismantling some and perhaps even burning some vessels in harbour. But the decades when the vast treasure fleets had sailed the seas left a

3:52:24lasting impression on every culture that they touched. And the damage done to the image of Javanese power was immense.

3:52:39Eventually, the regreg civil war would come to an end in Java and the western king Vikram Avodhana, Hayam Wuruk's son-in-law, would be victorious. Despite his humiliating and bankrupting experience of angering the Chinese emperor, he managed to close in on his enemies in the eastern court and in the final bloody confrontation, the western forces broke through the walls of the

3:53:10eastern palace. The lord of Virabhumi fled in the night and escaped by boat. He was hunted down and beheaded, and his severed head was brought back to the capital of Majapahit.

3:53:28The civil war was over, and the kingdom was united once more. But the conflict had exacted a terrible cost.

3:53:39In only two years of fighting, the manpower of Majapahit had been severely depleted. Its treasury was on the verge of bankruptcy, and its influence had been drastically curtailed, right at the point when powerful rivals were rising in the north, and the religion of Islam was spreading from port to port. The center of the mandala of power had now shifted irrevocably away from Java,

3:54:11and the age of Majapahit's empire of the islands would slowly but surely come to an end.

3:54:28While Majapahit lost much of its overseas empire through the beginning of the 15th century, it still remained the preeminent power on the island of Java. But steadily, its loss of regional status began to erode its power even in its heartlands.

3:54:52When King Vikramavodhana died in 1429, his daughter Suhita took to the throne. She was prepared to rule in the tradition of the great Javanese queens who had preceded her a century earlier, Diyagayatri and Tribhuvana Vijayatungadevi, but for a number of reasons, her rule would be beset by problems.

3:55:21Chief among these was a terrible famine that descended on Java around the year 1426, caused by a drought.

3:55:33But the only source for this is the chronicle of the Pararaton, and by this point its reports are becoming sparse and scarce, and contain little detail. people.

3:55:54Next, there was a period of food shortage that was very long, in the year of the serpents biting people.

3:56:03Unfortunately for historians, the decline of royal power in Java also resulted in a disruption of the major sources that we have relied on up to this point. Narrative texts like the Pararaton or Book of Kings were crucial sources during the Golden Age of Majapahit, but as we enter the 15th century, the text becomes increasingly obscure and difficult to understand.

3:56:35The chronicle's notes get shorter, concerning only earthquakes and eruptions and the deaths of kings, and they come further and further apart. The final three pages of the Javanese Book of Kings are just a few scraps of seemingly unrelated information, separated by decades, with its final note coming in 1481.

3:57:09Then a volcanic eruption occurred in the week of Watu Gunung in the Sakayir, action of the sky-sea echo.

3:57:20Perhaps in an attempt to alleviate the effects of the drought, Suhita had constructed a vast reservoir named Kolam Segaran, just to the north of the city of Majapahit. This great pool was 800 metres by 500, and ringed all around by banks of red brick. Whether or not this alleviated the famine, we will never know, but it shows the drastic situation

3:57:50that the empire was facing around this time, under pressure from the environment, from internal divisions, and increasingly from powerful rivals. When Suhita died in 1447, her brother, Krita Vijaya, ruled for only four years. He was followed by a further four kings, all of whom ruled for only a short time, and the relationships between

3:58:21them are unclear.

3:58:25The kingdom erupted in civil war again in the 1470s, and in 1478, one pretender broke through the defences of Majapahit and killed his brother who sat on the throne.

3:58:41That year in Java would be given a name that seems to convey the mood in the kingdom at the time, which has been translated as Vanished and Lost is the Order of the World. Upon his victory, this new king had inscribed a series of stone inscriptions that made dire warnings of the fate that would befall any who failed to

3:59:11support his rule.

3:59:16They will end up in the realm of Yama, the king of the dead. They will be beaten by Yama's army for years innumerable. They will fall in the cauldron of hell. They will not be reborn. So not only will they end up in hell, but they will stay there. And even if they are reborn, they will be reborn under miserable circumstances.

3:59:46It seems clear from these inscriptions that the new king didn't feel at all secure on the throne. throughout this period of political instability, the situation for Majapahit would be made increasingly worse by the rise of a new kind of power on the coasts of Java. That is, the ever-increasing influence of Muslim traders. years.

4:00:35With the powerful rival of Malacca now exerting its influence, Muslim merchants had become wealthier and more influential in Java than ever before. And in the vacuum left by royal power, these wealthy merchants became politically powerful too. Now more and more people on the coasts all around the archipelago began to flirt

4:01:06with the idea of this new religion. The Portuguese traveller Tomei Pires describes the steady advance of Islamic power in Java at the expense of the Hindu Buddhists who he calls heathens. At the time when there were heathens along the sea coast of Java, many merchants used to come. Parsis, Arabs, Gujaratis, Bengalis,

4:01:37Malays and other nationalities, there being many Moors among them. They began to trade in the country and to grow rich. They succeeded in way of making mosques and Mullahs came from outside. In some places the heathen Javanese lords themselves turned Mohammedan and these merchant Moors took possession of these places.

4:02:05The growing influence of these coastal traders would culminate in 1475 with the foundation of a true Muslim kingdom on the island of Java, a power that would call itself the Sultanate of Demak.

4:02:30A port town looking north into the Java Sea, Demak had been founded in the late 15th century, possibly by Chinese merchants, and its people had built a grand mosque there, combining elements of Muslim and Javanese architecture. The ruler of Demak was a man named Raden Pata, who was a vassal swearing allegiance to Majapahit.

4:03:00But he soon declared independence and claimed the title of Sultan.

4:03:08As Majapahit declined, the Sultanate of Demak would expand. It conquered the coastal region of Tuban by 1527 and was spreading inland as far as Malang by 1546. For the dwindling power of Majapahit, this was the final death knell. due to

4:03:47the slow petering out of royal chronicles in Java, we have few details about what exactly happened to lead to the eventual destruction of Majapahit. But at this point, we are able to turn to the writings of some outside visitors to the island of Java.

4:04:13Around 1513, about a hundred years after the end of the Reg Reg War, the Portuguese traveler Tome Pires visited Java.

4:04:26He wrote in glowing terms about the beauty of the landscape and the abundance of the island. But he found the power of Majapahit already a shadow of its former glory, as he recounts in his memoirs.

4:04:45They say that the island of Java used to rule as far as the Spice Islands on the eastern side and over a great part of the west and that it had almost all the islands of Sumatra under its dominion and all the islands known to the Javanese and that it had all this for a long time past until about a hundred years ago when its power began to diminish and it came to its present state. Pires

4:05:19also alludes to some degree of political instability in Java. According to his account the power of its kings had diminished so that they were now little more than a figure head with the Mahapati or prime minister appearing to wield greater power.

4:05:40Because the Javanese have lost a great part of their lands the kings do not command nor are they taken into account but only the viceroy and chief captain. This man is known and honored like the real king. All the lords of Java obey him. Him they honor. This governor commands in everything. He holds the king of Java in his hands. He orders him to be given food. The king has no voice in anything

4:06:11nor is he of any importance.

4:06:17Alongside this weakening of royal authority came the fragmentation of the kingdom. Local lords became steadily more powerful with some even breaking away and now the Muslim sultanates began to taste blood in the water.

4:06:49The sultan of the city of Demac Raden Pata knew that only one thing stood between him and ultimate power on the island of Java. That was the lingering remnants of Majapahit.

4:07:08After only a few years he gathered his forces and marched on the now isolated city. The later Muslim epic verse chronicle the Babad Tanajawi recounts what happened next in heroic terms as the Muslim forces bore down on the once great capital city. Then they agreed to gather together all Muslims with their arms.

4:07:39Then they set out to Majapahit. The number of troops was immeasurable. The city of Majapahit was encircled. Many inhabitants submitted to Raden Pata. Nobody dared to meet him in battle.

4:07:56Marching under blue and yellow banners they soon arrived at the walls of Majapahit.

4:08:04The later Muslim chronicles imitated elements of previous Javanese legends and claimed that the last king of Majapahit was so awed at the sight of the army approaching the city that he simply ascended to heaven right there on the spot and the city was captured peacefully. At the moment Prabhu Bra Vijaya ascended to heaven something like a fireball was seen

4:08:36coming out of the palace of Majapahit. It flashed like a bolt of lightning and sounded like a terrifying thunderclap. It fell down in Bintara. Radhan Pata entered the palace. He was astonished that he did not encounter a single person. He wept in his heart then left the palace and returned to Bintara with his troops.

4:09:05But we can assume that the end of Majapahit was not as peaceful as these later chroniclers make out.

4:09:14The historian Herald van der Linde imagines an extreme version of the scenes that unfolded.

4:09:23The soldiers met almost no resistance and within an hour they had taken control of the royal palace. It was a massacre. Priests were drowned in lotus ponds. Stable boys were stabbed as they tried to protect the king's horses. Everything was burned to the ground. The royal residences, the watch tower, the pavilion with its intricate wood carvings, the army barracks, the elephant stalls, and the library.

4:09:56By noon, all that was left of Madjya Pahit was a heap of rubble.

4:10:05However, there is little evidence of widespread burning at the site of the city, and no heaps of bodies or mass graves have ever been found. But what's clear is that at this point human habitation at the city of Majapahit largely came to an end. It's people fled and all of its houses and workshops,

4:10:37its temples and palaces were left to fade and crumble.

4:10:44For many ordinary people, life simply went on. But it must have been a time of great upheaval and confusion. The Javanese text, the Niti Shastra, records one vision of the end of the world that must have captured the mood of many on the island of Java as their world came to an end and another began.

4:11:15The signs of the approaching end of this world will be all kinds of depravity among mankind. That is to say, the wise will turn foolish. The holy men will become worldly. Children will abandon their parents. Princes will lose their empires. The little will become great and commit depredations. In short, everything will be in confusion.

4:11:50from this moment on, the sultanate of Demak would be the most powerful force on the island of Java and the age of the Hindu Buddhist kingdoms on the island would come to an end.

4:12:16Most remaining Hindus and Buddhists would flee east and took refuge on the small island of Bali, which became a sanctuary for their ancient culture.

4:12:31Epic Hindu poems like the Boman Thaka were largely forgotten on the mainland of Java, but in Bali they were preserved.

4:12:43One verse in this poem describes the destruction wrought by a demon king on the religious sanctuaries of a kingdom and we might find it a fitting description for the final days of Java's last Hindu Buddhist sanctuaries.

4:13:04Heaven is being destroyed and the hermitage is swept away because of the swarming demons. The hermits have left, have abandoned all and fled far away constantly pursued. The miserable wretches, their bodies are lying about in the monasteries with their bargue clothing and woven bags flung away.

4:13:31With its people gone, the city of Majapahit would have been swiftly reclaimed by the fast-growing forest around it. The sophisticated drainage system that its engineers had spent generations perfecting, the channels, the sluices and great reservoirs, would have begun to silt up within a decade without maintenance. The water, with nowhere left to

4:14:02go, would have pooled and spread, turning streets into marshland and marshland into swamp. The red bricks that gave the ruins of Majapahit its distinctive character were fired from the volcanic clay of the Brantas river plain, and in the wet heat of Java they didn't last long.

4:14:28Mosses would take hold first, then lichens and ferns. The mortar softened and dissolved. The strangler figs and banyan trees would move in next, clambering over the red brick courtyards and ceremonial gateways of the Majapahit capital, their roots clenching the walls in their grasp and steadily but surely pulverizing the brick.

4:14:58Slower growing teak and mahogany trees would arrive next, shading the crumbling walls of Majapahit beneath their canopies. As all this went on, the great rumblings of Java's volcanoes would have conspired to hide the ruins even further.

4:15:20More than ten major eruptions of the nearby Arjuna Velarang and Angesmordo volcanoes took place in the centuries that followed, each one burying the site of Majapahit in ever more ash until some of its structures lay as much as four meters beneath the surface of the earth. In the year 1849, a Dutch traveler called Walter Robert Van Hovel passed through the site of the

4:15:51old city and described the overgrown ruins that still remained. The entire ruins were shrouded in a dark forest and covered with shrubs and trees. Majestic Banyan trees have rooted their roots between the stones and pushed walls apart, raising their crowns high above the ruins. That is why nowadays the Javanese also call the place Waningin Lawan or Banyan Gate.

4:16:27The Muslim sultanates that destroyed Majapahit would not remain the most powerful force in Java for long. The next century would see the arrival of other seaborne powers that would soon form their own thalassocracies or empires of the sea. These were the powers of European colonialism.

4:16:59In 1511, the port town of Malacca was seized by the Portuguese and from there, their influence would spread all over the archipelago.

4:17:14Soon, other European powers would arrive and they would all begin to influence the fractious political life of the island of Java and introduce the beginnings of an ideology more seductive and powerful than any religion, the force of capitalism. The sultanates of Java would soon come under the sway of a massive international conglomerate and one of the first

4:17:44joint stock companies in the world, the Dutch East India Company. In 1598, a Dutch fleet of eight ships under Jacob van Neck became the first from the Netherlands to reach the Spice Islands of Maluku.

4:18:03In doing so, they bypassed the Javanese merchants who had long dominated the trade. When these Dutch ships returned to Europe in the year 1599, laden with cloves, nutmeg, and mace, the expedition yielded an enormous profit of around 400%. One Dutch observer would reportedly make the following remark upon

4:18:34seeing the arrival of this fleet.

4:18:38As long as Holland has been Holland, there have never arrived ships as richly laden as these.

4:18:47The age of European colonialism in Southeast Asia had now begun.

4:18:56Between 1602 and 1796, the Dutch East India Company dispatched almost a million Europeans to Asia aboard nearly 5,000 ships, dwarfing the traffic of its nearest rival, the British East India Company, returning with more than 2.5 million tons of Asian goods and enslaved people.

4:19:24Throughout this colonial period, which would ultimately see Java become a European colony, the legacy of the ancient Javanese kingdoms was largely ignored or intentionally obscured. The Dutch in particular had no desire to see the people of their new colonies rally around the memory of any ancient kingdoms and mostly declined to investigate the ruins that could be found

4:19:54dotted around Java.

4:19:57The erasure was so extensive that in his History of the Indian Archipelago published in 1820, the British writer John Crawford was able to write the following.

4:20:13The theory of a great monarchy and of an antecedent state of high civilisation and improvement has been forged by the national vanity of the Javanese, unsupported by a shadow of proof, and contradicted by unquestionable internal evidence.

4:20:31But some memory of Majapahit's glory lived on in the minds of Java's people, in their songs, their poetry, their shadow puppet plays, and in the manuscripts they kept in their libraries.

4:20:53In 1894, in a typical expansion of European power in East Asia, the Dutch colonialist government intervened on the island of Lombok. to the west of Bali to depose its king, a man named Agung Ketut Karangasem, who was a renowned collector of ancient texts. After a protracted war in which the local people resisted fiercely,

4:21:23the Maharaja's palace was finally stormed by Dutch marines on the 19th of November, 1894. war. The Dutch poured into the palace and began a slaughter in which 2,000 were massacred.

4:21:41The Maharaja was captured and died a few months later in a colonial prison. During the fighting, Dutch artillery set fire to the Maharaja's palace, and while its towers burned and its roofs fell in, the colonial troops looted the king's treasury and carried away more than 130 kilograms of gold, 3,000 of silver, and countless works of art.

4:22:12This would become known as the Lombok treasure. But among the looters, there was also a Dutchman named Jan Lawrence Andris Brandes, an expert in Sanskrit and Old Javanese. This man had heard that the Maharaja Karangasem was an avid scholar and a collector of rare manuscripts.

4:22:39As the Maharaja's palace burned, this man ran to the ruler's library and saved what he could.

4:22:51While others ran with gold heaped in their arms, Brandes frantically gathered all of the ancient books he could carry and fled before the roof of the palace could collapse.

4:23:06Much of the Maharaja's collection went up in flames and we will never be able to read what was contained within it. But what Brandes was able to save was packed into a box and sent back to the colonial capital.

4:23:25inside he would later find the only existing copy of the poem the Desha Vanana written by the self-effacing scribe Propanka some 500 years earlier. In the pages of that work the voice of the poet could once more bring to life the description of its great king on his journey around the island, the lives and concerns of the people of medieval Java

4:23:55and at least in words the kingdom of Majapahit could live once more.

4:24:20I'd like to end this episode with an extract from an old Javanese poem called the Shiva Ratri Kalpa or the Night Ritual of Shiva written during the years of the decline of the Majapahit kingdom. In this passage a hunter named Lubdaka

4:24:51stumbles upon the ruins of an ancient temple and like Thomas Stamford Raffles centuries later would be struck by the strange melancholy of these places where once so many lives passed now overgrown with jungle.

4:25:15As you listen imagine how it would feel to watch the palaces and temples of the kingdom of Majapahit crumbling into the earth as its people left and its reservoirs ran dry.

4:25:32Imagine wandering beneath the shade of that teak forest and watching the roots of banyans and silk cotton trees slowly bind their way over the ruins. As the layers of ash fell from the sky season after season and covered the works of man. Imagine turning away and setting off into the forest as the sun finally set on Java's golden age.

4:26:03a great temple complex from ancient times rose near a mountain stream and the path there was lonely. The curved trunks of the water elephants had fallen and crumbled and for lack of care its wall had almost tumbled down. The monster heads seemed to be weeping as their covered faces were overgrown

4:26:33with creepers and as though sad and weary the temple guardians lay rolled over on the ground. The pavilions in its courtyard were in ruins. Some of the buildings were now only wreckage while others were rotting away. Their roofs were broken and had fallen in and beyond repair their pillars stood askew swaying back and forth. Heart rending was the spectacle of the reliefs. Young maidens in

4:27:04stone stood gazing skywards full of sorrow because now no wandering poets ever came to visit them. The tower temple soared on high and its pinnacles served as a gathering place for weeds. The sides were cracked overgrown by a shady fig tree which spread luxuriantly. All the statues were cracked by a fearsome tangle of vines and only the main deity within was

4:27:34immovably in place, standing firm in the center of its pedestal. Pandan trees hung down over the rocks with an air of sadness quite wrapped in the mist. How they longed to be visited by the thunder which would bring with it the rushing of the rain. as if in sorrow they let their petals droop, petals on which someone had jotted down some words in a moment of inspiration. For is this not an admirable

4:28:05place for a wandering poet to weave his verses? Thank you once again for listening to the Fall of Civilization's podcast. I'd like to thank my voice actors for this

4:28:36episode, Henry Stenhouse, Michael Hadjiantonis, Alexandra Bolton, Simon Jackson, Catherine James, Tom Marshall-Lee, Chris Harvey, Jack Jacobs, Nick Denton, Amrit Sandhu, Paul Cassell, Tim Stevenson, and Amin Tahere.

4:28:58Readings in Old and Middle Javanese were performed by Ferry Senjaya and Kada Aditya. I'd also like to thank my historical advisor for this episode, Dr. Alex West. Major sources used in the writing of this episode were Majapahit by Harold van der Linde, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia edited by Walter F. Veller and translated by Sue Brown-Cohen, When China Ruled the

4:29:29Seas by Louise Levats, and New Insights on Majapahit, edited by Henry Yogasvara and others. A full public list of sources will be available on Patreon, linked in the description below. I love to hear your thoughts and responses on social media, so please come and tell me what you thought. You can follow me on bluesky at paulmmcooper.com And if you'd like

4:30:01updates about the podcast, announcements about new episodes, as well as images, maps and reading suggestions, you can follow the podcast on bluesky at fallofcivilizations.com This podcast can only keep going with the support of our generous subscribers on Patreon. You keep me running, you help me cover my costs, and let me dedicate more time to researching, writing, recording, and editing, to get the episodes out to you

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4:31:01For now, all the best, and thanks for listening.

4:31:19I'll see you next time.