The Paregreg war (1404–1406)

Paregreg — a word meaning to move slowly, to shift little by little — was the Majapahit civil war between the western court under Wikramawardhana and the eastern court under Bhre Wirabhumi, both descendants of Hayam Wuruk. It ran from about 1404 to 1406 and ended in Bhre Wirabhumi's defeat and death.

Its cause was a division of power made in the preceding reign: Hayam Wuruk placed his son by a secondary wife at the eastern court and his daughter by the queen in the west, and the arrangement held while he lived. War broke out when each line claimed the whole.

Majapahit did not collapse because of this war, and accounts placing the Paregreg as the direct cause of its fall compress the following seventy years. What changed was its standing toward the coastal ports: Chinese records from the years after the war show envoys from Javanese ports beginning to come in their own name rather than Majapahit's.

That change runs together with the growth of Muslim port cities along the north coast in the fifteenth century. What moved the centre was not one defeat but the passage of control over trade from the interior to the coast, and the civil war hastened that passage by keeping the interior occupied.