The fall of Majapahit

The date of Majapahit's end is not single. The chronogram sirna ilang kertaning bumi — read as 1400 Saka, that is 1478 CE — circulates widely and is often given as the year of its fall. But inscriptions and other sources show a Majapahit government still operating after that year, and conquest by Demak is usually placed in 1527.

The discrepancy can be explained. The event of 1478 appears to be the fall of the capital to Girindrawardhana of Kadiri — a change of dynasty and not the end of the kingdom — while 1527 is conquest by a power of a different religion. The chronogram itself says “the prosperity of the earth vanished and was gone”, a phrase fitting either, and the ease with which it serves two events is part of why it survived.

The end of Majapahit did not mean the end of what it produced. The copying of Old Javanese literature moved to Bali and Lombok and continued there unbroken, and nearly every kakawin known today reaches us by that route. Some noble families moved east, and the account of that movement became part of origin narratives in Bali and in Tengger.

Those narratives should be treated as narratives. That the literature moved is supported by manuscripts; that a particular group of people moved to a particular place at a particular time generally is not, and the use of such accounts to state a society's origins is recorded in the entries of the societies concerned.