By this time the Majapahit capital had grown from a village to a grand city. Some thirty miles up the Brantas from the sea, the kraton—the royal palace—was ringed by a wall of red brick. To the north, on the banks of the river, was the residential and trading city of Bubat, with a pulsing marketplace centred on a great square. There were all manner of foreign communities here, Chinese and Indian amongst them. The high-point of the Majapahit year was the celebration that marked Chaitra, the first month in the Hindu Saka Calendar. Festivities went on for weeks, with parades of princes dressed in cloth-of-gold. There were challenges of combat in the square at Bubat, and elaborate ceremonies in which the king received tribute then dished out lavish largesse in return. According to court chroniclers, towards the end of the festival things usually descended into a glorious tropical bacchanalia, with massed feasting on ‘meats innumerable’, and quaffing of heroic quantities of palm wine and arak until the point at which the entire population was ‘panting, vomiting, or bewildered…’
Hangovers notwithstanding, the realm was remarkably well-run. On the Brantas delta the old and corrupt layers of taxation through local lords were simplified so that payment—in cash or kind—went straight to the kraton. Majapahit also had a thriving spiritual life. Both Buddhist monks and Shaivite priests were given their own quarters in the capital, and the surrounding countryside was studded with temples. Airlangga’s old bathing temples on the slopes of Penanggungan got a new lease of life, and away to the south, in the beautiful countryside where the Brantas valley rumples up towards Gunung Kelud, an old Singhasari Shiva complex was updated and expanded to become the mighty temple of Panataran, a major focus of royal pilgrimages. There were already distinct local versions of the Indian epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, rewritten so that the escapades of the Pandava brothers and the adventures of Rama and Sita were now played out against a recognisably Javanese backdrop. Batik was already being crafted in village workshops, and complex traditions of music and dance were coming to fruition, as a visitor from the north of Sumatra described:
Everywhere one went there were gongs and drums being beaten, people dancing to the strains of all kinds of loud music, entertainments of all kinds like the living theatre, the shadow play, masked plays, step dancing, and musical dramas. These were the commonest sights and went on day and night in the land of Majapahit.
These refined entertainments—the wayang kulit shadow puppetry, the masked topeng dances and more—would remain the cultural mainstays of Java and the lands that came under its influence forever more.
Feasting and frolicking cost money, of course, and the cash came mainly from trade. Majapahit had its own fleet—part merchant navy, part pirate armada—which traded out across the Java Sea and beyond, carrying, according to one account, everything from ‘pig and deer dried and salted’ to ‘camphor and aloes’. The kingdom also consolidated and extended the network of offshore tributaries and vassals that had been stitched to East Java during Singhasari days, and managed a good number of military conquests closer to home for good measure. All this did a great deal for Hayam Wuruk’s reputation as a god-king, and soon his court chroniclers were tripping over themselves to heap superlative epithets upon his head:
He is present in invisible form at the focus of meditation, he is Siwa and Buddha, embodied in both the material and the immaterial;
As King of the Mountain, Protector of the Protectorless, he is lord of the lords of the world …
In fact the real genius behind all this commercial and military glory was not Hayam Wuruk himself, but his mahapatih, his prime minister, a thundering Machiavelli of a man by the name of Gajah Mada, the ‘Elephant General’.
Gajah Mada had first found favour under the debauched Jayanagara. It seems that he was a significant schemer from the start, for rumour has it that it was he who had incited the cuckolded court physician to kill his king. He was given the role of prime minister in 1331 in the regency period before Hayam Wuruk’s coronation. During the lavish ceremony that marked his appointment, Gajah Mada made a vow. He would not, he declared, ‘taste spice’ until Nusantara had been brought under Majapahit sway.
‘Nusantara’ literally means ‘the islands in between’. Gajah Mada probably meant by it something along the lines of ‘the outer islands’, but in time the word would form the key to the concept of the Archipelago as a single entity—if not a single nation. Today it is a synonym for ‘Indonesia’ itself.
By the time Hayam Wuruk was king, Gajah Mada had already made sure that Majapahit had more or less direct control over most of East Java, Madura and Bali, with a solid footing in Lombok and Sumbawa too. The Majapahit fleet had also become the main force in the Straits of Melaka. Over the course of Hayam Wuruk’s reign, more links were forged across Nusantara.
Not everyone was prepared to acknowledge Majapahit suzerainty, however. A particular thorn in the Majapahit side was its West Java counterpart, the Sundanese kingdom of Pajajaran, a realm which had never submitted entirely to East Javanese rule. In 1357, in an effort to forge a bond, Hayam Wuruk contracted a marriage with a princess by the name of Pitaloka, daughter of the Pajajaran king. When the Sundanese wedding party arrived in the capital Gajah Mada informed them that the girl would be less of a queen than a concubine, and that the moment had come for Sunda to submit to its East Javanese overlords. The Sundanese were a proud lot, and despite the fact that they were camped out in Bubat, smack in the middle of Majapahit and surrounded by hostile forces, they refused. It was a brave but suicidal gesture. In response, Gajah Mada had the entire bridal party—including the bride-to-be—massacred. Naturally relations between Majapahit and Pajajaran would never be particularly cordial after that, and even today the ethnic Sundanese country of West Java, centred on Bandung, is the one part of Indonesia where ‘Majapahit’ is something of a dirty word.
In the Negarakertagama, the epic poem written out on strips of lontar leaf to mark the apogee of Hayam Wuruk’s reign, a huge swathe of the Archipelago is claimed for Majapahit. Everywhere from the northern tip of Sumatra to the westernmost promontory of New Guinea gets a mention. It is a rundown that comes remarkably close to encompassing the entire Archipelago, and with the very notable exception of interior New Guinea and southern Maluku, it takes in all modern Indonesian territories and a little more besides. Any places in this vast maritime realm that failed to acknowledge Majapahit supremacy were, according to the Negarakertagama, ‘attacked and wiped out completely’.
Inevitably, later nationalists would latch very firmly onto this aspect of Majapahit and claim it as a pre-colonial precedent for the existence of the Indonesian nation state. Some of the islands and outposts mentioned in the Negarakertagama do seem to have been directly conquered by Majapahit at some point, but for the most part the list of scattered vassals probably amounts to little more than a run-down of all the places with which Majapahit had ever traded.
Rather than a true empire in the European sense, Majapahit, like Srivijaya before it, was a cultural and economic brand. The extent of its direct rule and centralised authority probably stretched little further than East Java, Bali and Madura, but its pervasive presence on the sea routes and its remarkable cultural sophistication gave it incredible kudos throughout the Archipelago. If the Majapahit king could have his chroniclers claim ownership of some isolated dot of land in a lost eastern sea that no one from Java had ever even visited, then the petty chieftain of that same dot might well award himself hand-me-down Javanese airs and graces when he wanted to impress his subjects. Origin myths in remote places like Adonara at the eastern extremity of Nusa Tenggara, or the misty Pasemah Highlands of Sumatra, make a claim of royal Javanese descent, and art-forms, palace