1309
After a 17-year reign,
Raden Vijaya,
the man that founded the Kingdom of Majapahit,
dies
His kingdom passes to his son
along with his troubles.
[Extra History Theme]
Before his death,
Raden Vijaya had devoted most of his reign to diplomacy
attempting to sustain his father-in-law's network of vassal states.
But instead of relying on military force like his father-in-law,
Vijaya's primary tool was marriage.
Unlike the Christian kings of Europe,
Hindu-Buddhist monarchs like Vijaya
could marry many times to reinforce their web of alliances,
but that actually made things
more complicated
if you can believe that.
Having many wives meant keeping a delicate balance of which wife had the highest status
lest he offend one of his many, many family members/political allies.
Marriage is already hard
and it gets even harder when you have half a dozen wives
and your in-laws all have armies.
And unfortunately, Vijaya broke the cardinal rule of polygamous marriage alliances.
He promoted a consort to the position of primary wife
over the heads of other higher status wives and named their youngest son,
Jayanegara, as his successor.
Worse than that, it was a Sumatran princess,
meaning their heir would not be fully Javanese.
In the Indonesian archipelago,
where water separated Majapahit from its vassal states
and mountains naturally divided islands into fiefdoms,
it was always tempting for local lords to declare independence,
and now with Vijaya’s insult,
they had a reason.
Vijaya spent the rest of his reign putting down rebellions
and left his son a kingdom that was
essentially primed to revolt against this partially foreign heir.
So when Jayanegara ascended the throne,
he tried to emphasize Majapahit’s strength and his lineage.
He took a royal name—
We're ignoring those for simplicity by the way—
that emphasized Majapahit’s spiritual ties to India.
He buried his father and grandfather in imposing funerary temples dedicated to Shiva,
and five years into his reign, he crushed his first rebellion.
But here's the thing about Jayanegara,
he was really good at some aspects of kingship.
He was handsome, charming, and had a talent for throwing big drunken parties.
He was good at building monuments,
and most of all, he was good at bringing the prettiest women in Majapahit
to marry him and serve as attendants.
And you know, all that stuff is part of Javanese kingship.
It was important to overall people with splendor and wealth
and he had that part of the job on lockdown.
It was all the other stuff he wasn’t so great at.
You know, stuff like ruling, politics, diplomacy, war.
We don’t have a lot of stories where he excels here
or really any stories about him doing much of anything.
Sure, he put down his first rebellion,
but we don’t even know whether he was personally involved or not.
So 10 years into his reign,
when yet another rebellion forced him to flee from the capital,
it looked like Majapahit’s time was up.
The king was on the run with only 25 royal bodyguards, his power broken.
At camp that night, he saw whispers passing between the guards.
“Why should we continue to protect this weak King?"
"Are we to die for him?"
"Could we not just turn him over?”
Their loyalty was beginning to curdle.
Just then, the captain of the guards stepped in.
This was a man who inspired tremendous respect and confidence among his men,
something Jayanegara never managed.
In fact, this man was so mighty that his name literally meant,
“Elephant General.”
With a few words, the captain crushed the mutterings,
and the next morning, he brought the king to a remote village to hide in exile.
This was the first action of a man who defined the kingdom of Majapahit,
a man who will become so associated with Javanese power politics
that even in the 20th century, politicians would model themselves after him.
Gajah Mada, the Elephant General,
and Gajah Mada refused to let the dynasty fall.
Leaving the king with trusted officers, he returned to the capital.
He filtered through the market gauging the mood of the populace.
Afterward, he entered the palace and mixed with the would-be revolutionaries.
He spread rumors that the king was dead,
the lineage of Vijaya snuffed out,
and each time he told the story, he gauged the reaction from his audience.
He remembered who grieved and who celebrated.
Those that celebrated were the first ones Mada executed
when his counter revolutionaries regained the capital.
With just 25 men at his command and no resources to speak of,
Gajah Mada had rallied the people and reinstalled a monarch,
and that’s when Jayanegara discovered something else he was good at—delegating.
In thanks for his service, he promoted Mada to a high office in court
and things started evening out.
Mada dealt with the periodic rebellions and took on more and more of the duties of state.
Under his leadership, Majapahit negotiated two new trade agreements with China,
the biggest accomplishment of Jayanegara’s reign.
But delegating away responsibilities gave Jayanegara something that wasn’t good for him:
free time.
Released from most duties, he could indulge his taste for leisure and vice.
He soon gained an evil reputation.
Part of it stemmed from how he treated his family.
He reportedly locked his half-sisters in a palace
refusing to let them wed lest their husbands become usurpers.
An act that became increasingly unseemly once they reached marriageable age.
And then, there was the king’s private life.
Now in Java, kings were frequently mobile.
The court would travel the countryside extracting taxes and tributes from villages they passed through
and if on one of those journeys the king saw a beautiful woman,
he might order her to become one of his attendants or wives.
As horrifying as this appears to us today,
after all, this meant kings were literally extracting human beings as tribute
in the same way they extracted rice or Chinese coin,
it was an accepted part of rule in Java.
What the king wanted; the king received.
But Jayanegara took this power to an unprecedented extreme.
He was uninterested in village girls.
He was interested however in his step-sisters,
in the wives of his court officials,
in their daughters
and in a decision that almost without a doubt will go down as the single
worst idea we’ve covered in this entire show—
the wife of his surgeon,
not his former surgeon mind you, his current surgeon.
Right before he was supposed to have an operation,
that operation, suffice to say, did not go as planned.
Luckily, Gajah Mada was standing nearby supervising the proceedings
and the moment he saw the knife plunged into the king’s body,
he drew his kris and slew the affronted surgeon.
But the deed had been done.
His king, the king he had saved, the man he put back on the throne, was dead.
Jayanegara had no legitimate heir
so the kingdom passed to the daughter of the last king of Singhasari
but because she had taken holy orders,
her daughter, Princess Gitarja, was crowned queen.
It was a fortunate thing for Gajah Mada since he had mentored the princess all her life
and when she took the throne, she named Mada,
Majapahit’s most loyal servant and the king’s defender,
Prime Minister.
They erected a tall gate to settle the dead king’s spirit and moved on.
And if that sounds too convenient, well, there’s the rub.
See, it wasn’t just the surgeon’s family that Jayanegara had violated,
he’d also dishonored Gajah Mada’s wife,
and one story has it that Gajah Mada was actually the one
that put the surgeon up to the assassination,
meaning his timely intervention may have actually been a cover-up.
And interestingly one of the only records of that period
is a hagiography that was written right after Gajah Mada held power,
meaning that the whole story about Jayanegara’s lechery
may have been, after the fact, justification
for what was essentially a coup.
Either way, this incident was pure Gajah Mada:
cunning, ruthless, manipulative, and ferociously pragmatic,
a Jago of the first order.
Trust me, keep your eye on this guy.
Gajah Mada is what you get if Machiavelli wrote fanfiction
and that kind of political maneuvering would typify Gajah Mada’s reign
because while monarchs came and went,
for the next 30 years,
this prime minister would steer the ship of state towards empire.
Not long after his ascension to prime minister,
Mada made a vow.
He would not taste spice until all of Nusantara—
the Indonesian Islands (Or the whole Island Southeast Asia)—
were under Majapahit’s control.
Exactly what he meant by tasting spice is unclear.
It probably meant engaging in religious rituals but he meant it.
Over the next several decades, Gajah Mada would go on the offensive,
expanding Majapahit power to the Spice Islands in the east
and up through Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula.
And exactly what form this expansion took
and exactly how much these kingdoms were really vassals
is up for debate,
but most of them
probably came to Majapahit’s orbit
via diplomacy, bribes, and tributary relationships rather than outright military conflicts.
In other places though like Bali,
Mada would prosecute a decade-long war
trying to bring the island under Majapahit’s control.
And as the regency passed and the new king came of age,
Gajah Mada’s project neared completion.
Majapahit was poised for a golden age—
the age of a new king, Hayam Wuruk,
whose reign would change Indonesian culture forever.