Majapahit

Majapahit emerged from the wreckage of Singhasari, the East Javanese kingdom destroyed in 1292 when Jayakatwang of Kediri killed King Kertanegara. Kertanegara had earlier humiliated an envoy of Kublai Khan, and in 1293 a Mongol-Yuan punitive fleet arrived off Java to find its intended target already dead. Raden Wijaya, Kertanegara's son-in-law, who had founded a settlement at Tarik named for the bitter maja fruit, allied with the expedition to crush Jayakatwang, then turned on the Mongols and drove them back to their ships. Crowned as Kertarajasa Jayawardhana, he transformed an act of opportunism into the foundation of Java's most celebrated kingdom.

The first decades were precarious, marked by revolts of former companions-in-arms under Kertarajasa and his son Jayanegara, whose murder in 1328 ended the direct male line. Under the queen Tribhuwana Wijayatunggadewi the kingdom found its great minister: Gajah Mada, raised to mahapatih after suppressing the Sadeng revolt. The Pararaton credits him with the Palapa oath, a vow to renounce comfort until the archipelago — Gurun, Seran, Tanjungpura, Haru, Pahang, Dompo, Bali, Sunda, Palembang, Tumasik — was subdued. Bali was conquered in 1343, and the machinery of an expansive maritime polity took shape.

The apogee came under Hayam Wuruk (1350–1389). The court poem Nagarakretagama, completed by Mpu Prapanca in 1365, lists some hundred dependencies from Sumatra to the Moluccas. Modern scholarship reads this catalogue critically: rather than administered territory, it describes a mandala of ports and polities acknowledging Majapahit's ritual precedence in widely varying degrees, with direct rule confined largely to East Java, Madura, and Bali. The era also produced its darkest episode, the Bubat incident of 1357, in which a Sundanese king and his daughter, come to seal a marriage alliance, died after Gajah Mada demanded the princess as tribute — a story the Nagarakretagama pointedly omits.

Decline set in after Hayam Wuruk's death. The Paregreg civil war (1404–1406) between Wikramawardhana and the eastern court of Wirabhumi drained the kingdom just as Malacca rose to capture the straits trade. The fifteenth century is poorly documented; the Pararaton dissolves into terse obituaries, and rulers after Kertawijaya are little more than names. By 1486 a claimant, Girindrawardhana Dyah Ranawijaya, ruled from the Kediri region rather than the old capital. Javanese tradition dates Majapahit's fall to 1478, but a remnant Hindu-Buddhist court persisted, described by Portuguese observers around 1515, until the Muslim sultanate of Demak extinguished it around 1527. Majapahit's memory long outlived the state, furnishing Javanese kingship with its model of legitimacy and modern Indonesia with an image of archipelagic unity.