The Bubat affair (1357)
Event Jawa Timur
Contested
Other and rejected name forms
A rejected form remains searchable so that older sources stay findable, but it is never used in the prose of an entry.
The death of the Sundanese king and his party on the field of Bubat in the Majapahit capital, when the party came for the marriage of the king's daughter to Hayam Wuruk and Gajah Mada demanded that she be handed over as a token of submission — an event with few sources, a long telling, and consequences in memory that are still felt.
The sources, and how far each reaches
The Nagarakretagama, written eight years after the date of this event by an official of the Majapahit court, does not mention it at all. That absence can mean several things and cannot be read on its own.
The Pararaton mentions it in a few lines, without elaboration. The Carita Parahyangan, from the Sundanese side, records the king's death at Majapahit briefly. The Kidung Sunda, copied in Bali and much later in date, carries the whole telling as it is known today — the name Dyah Pitaloka, Gajah Mada's demand, resistance to the last man, and the princess's death. Nearly every circulating detail comes from the last and most distant of these.
What is disputed
What is disputed is not whether something happened but what happened, why, and how much of the long telling can be sustained. The positions registered in claim CLM-0009 run from readings that accept the broad outline of the Kidung Sunda to readings that treat it as a Balinese literary work of a later century, describing Javanese–Sundanese relations in its author's time rather than in 1357.
This encyclopedia does not decide. What it states is that one event with three short sources and one long and much later one cannot carry a narrative as detailed as the one in circulation, and that this holds for both sides of the dispute.
Memory and prohibition
Several prohibitions are derived from this event: that Sundanese and Javanese may not marry, and that Gajah Mada's name is not used for streets in Sundanese cities. Both need examining separately from the event itself.
The marriage prohibition is cited far more often than it is observed. No Sundanese customary body enforces it, it appears in none of the manuscripts examined, and marriage between the two is ordinary across West Java. What genuinely persists is not a rule but an awareness: that the relation between the two regions carries one dated wound, and that naming it is not a trivial matter. The tertiary source SRC-0604 is carried in this corpus as a marker of a claim in circulation and is not used as the ground of any statement.
Full entry 3 / 3
3 sections, 7 sources, one of them primary.
Full does not mean finished. It means this record clears the bar this encyclopedia sets before it will speak at length.
Corrections to this entry
Correction
Naming and source correction. The title “Battle of Bubat” has been replaced by “The Bubat affair”, because no source describes an engagement between two armies. In addition, the statement that the Nagarakretagama mentions this event has been removed: the manuscript does not, and that absence is now stated as information in its own right.