Majapahit

Majapahit was a Javanese Hindu-Buddhist thalassocracy that became the most powerful and expansive of the pre-Islamic empires of the Indonesian archipelago, and it occupies a central place in Indonesian national memory as a precursor to the modern state.

It was founded in 1293 by Raden Wijaya, who exploited the arrival of a Mongol Yuan punitive expedition sent against the preceding kingdom of Singhasari: he allied with the Mongol forces to defeat a usurper, then turned on his allies and expelled them, establishing his capital at Trowulan in eastern Java. The empire combined the agrarian wealth of Java's rice lands with control over the inter-island maritime trade in spices and other goods, giving it both economic depth and naval reach. Majapahit reached its golden age in the mid-fourteenth century under King Hayam Wuruk and his formidable prime minister Gajah Mada, who is traditionally said to have sworn the Palapa Oath, vowing to bring the archipelago under Majapahit's sway. The court chronicle Nagarakretagama, composed in 1365, records an extensive network of tributaries and dependencies stretching from Sumatra in the west to New Guinea in the east, encompassing much of present-day Indonesia along with parts of Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, southern Thailand, and the southern Philippines, though much of this was a loose sphere of influence rather than direct rule. The period was culturally rich, marked by sophisticated literature, art, and architecture blending Hindu, Buddhist, and indigenous Javanese traditions. After Hayam Wuruk's death the empire was weakened by a destructive war of succession, the Paregreg civil war, and by the rise of regional and increasingly Islamic powers along the trade routes. Through the fifteenth century its authority eroded, and the Hindu-Javanese core was eventually overcome by the rising Islamic Sultanate of Demak, with the final collapse conventionally dated to around 1527.

Key figures