Raden Wijaya

In 1292 Kublai Khan sent a fleet to Java to punish Kertanagara, king of Singhasari, who had maimed his envoy. By the time the fleet arrived Kertanagara was dead, killed by Jayakatwang of Kadiri. Raden Wijaya, his son-in-law, submitted to the Mongol force, used it to attack Kadiri, and once Kadiri had fallen turned on the Mongol force itself and drove it from Java in the same year.

The episode is recorded from two sides. The Yuan dynastic records note the expedition and its failure, and the Pararaton and Nagarakretagama record the founding of Majapahit. The two sides agree on the main sequence, which is rare for thirteenth-century events in the archipelago — and it is this that makes 1293 one of the firmest dates in Javanese history.

Majapahit was founded in the forest of Tarik on the bank of the Brantas, and its name is said to come from the bitter maja fruit. An origin story of that kind should be treated as others are: it may be true and cannot be checked.

Short accounts often place 1293 as the year a great kingdom was founded. What was founded that year was a small polity whose territory did not extend far beyond the lower Brantas valley, and Raden Wijaya's reign to 1309 was filled with successive revolts by the men who had helped him — Ranggalawe, Sora, and then Nambi under his successor.

The reach later called Majapahit took shape only in the middle of the fourteenth century, under Hayam Wuruk and Gajah Mada, and the nature of that reach is itself the subject of the argument recorded in the Nagarakretagama entry. The sixty years between founding and height are seldom mentioned, and mentioning them matters because without it the founding of Majapahit reads as a single event rather than a process that could have failed.

Raden Wijaya ruled under the title Kertarajasa Jayawardhana and married four daughters of Kertanagara, an arrangement placing his new line as successor to the old through the female line. That arrangement is the usual Javanese means of stating continuity where male continuity has broken, and it recurs several times in later history.