The Mongol Invasion of Java: Background
I’m starting a series of short pieces on the 1292/1293 Mongol invasion of Java. In this post I outline roughly what happened and give some background. Later pieces will look at primary sources in the original Javanese/Chinese/Old French/Latin etc. with English translation.
In 1292, towards the end of his reign, the Mongol ruler of China, Khubilai Khan, sent a fleet of ships from Quanzhou in southern China to invade East Java, then ruled over by a king named Kertanagara. Kertanagara, whose kingdom was known as Singhasari (or Singosari, Singasari), had imperial ambitions, seeking to control not only the entirety of Java but also the Melaka Strait and the spice trade from eastern Indonesia. According to the Javanese sources, in 1275 he had ordered an invasion of Malayu, a Malay state on the east of coast of Sumatra and a sort-of Mongol vassal. This didn’t make the Mongols very happy.
In 1289 Khubilai sent ambassadors to request tribute from Kertanagara. Kertanagara considered himself a grand ruler, and he did indeed exercise more control over Java and probably other Indonesian islands than any previous East Javanese monarch. He took the request for tribute as an insult, and to demonstrate his displeasure he had the ambassadors’ faces disfigured by branding before sending them back to the Khan. The Mongols responded predictably.
En route to Java the Mongol force attacked some cities on the coast of Champa (Austronesian-speaking southern Vietnam) whose inhabitants refused to bend the knee to Khubilai, delaying the troops’ arrival in Java. They got to Java in late 1292 to find the east of the island in disarray.
To simplify what seems to have been a complex situation, King Kertanagara had been killed by Jayakatwang, a member of the royal family of Kadiri. Kadiri was an East Javanese state that had previously been defeated and made a vassal by Ken Angrok, founder of Singhasari, earlier in the thirteenth century, and its rulers felt some resentment towards the growing power of Singhasari. The king whose offence had led the Mongols to invade was dead and a usurper for a rival/vassal kingdom was attempting to take the throne; the Mongols didn’t know whom to attack or support. Also entering the fray was a nobleman commonly known as Raden Wijaya (Old Javanese: ‘victorious lord’), a Singhasari prince whose relationship to Kertanagara is not entirely clear.
Raden Wijaya duped the Mongols into siding with him and killing his enemies before he turned on them. He forced them to leave Java in advance of the changing monsoon winds, and in their wake he established a new kingdom, Majapahit, that ruled over East Java from 1293 until the early sixteenth century, claiming descent and authority from the kings of Singhasari. Raden Wijaya’s reign lasted about thirteen years and Majapahit remained a serious political entity for at least a century after his death. The Javanese sources claim that in the middle of the fourteenth century Majapahit also governed far-flung parts of Indo-Malaysia, including — so they say — parts of Seram, Timor, and the west coast of New Guinea. This makes the Mongol invasion consequential indeed.
The main sources for the invasion are Javanese and Chinese. We learn most of our Majapahit history from the Deśawarṇana (1365) and Pararaton (finished early sixteenth century), both composed in Old Javanese, although the invasion left traces in later sources as well (complete English translations of these texts can be found in David Bade’s 2013 book on the invasion). There are also some inscriptions giving limited insight into the events preceding the invasion.
The Pararaton, written in a much later and less conservative form of Javanese than the Deśawarṇana, gives the most detailed information about Raden Wijaya and the founding of Majapahit during the Mongol invasion, although some scholars — notably the botanist C. C. Berg — have dismissed both of these Javanese sources as myths and fantasy (which generally speaking they are not). The official History of Yuan ( 元史), the dynastic history of the Yuan (i.e. Mongol) period, also describes the invasion, emphasizing rather different aspects of the invasion but giving fundamentally the same story. The Chinese and Javanese sources corroborate one another on the basics and the basic outline of the invasion is uncontested. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t interesting historiographical problems in grappling with these accounts, however.
Medieval Europeans were also dimly aware of Java, and the Mongol invasion seems to be reflected in some comments made in the European sources about the wealth and power of Java and its king. These references aren’t explicit about the nature of the conflict, its resolution, or the aftermath of Raden Wijaya’s victory, but they do show that Europeans had some limited awareness of Java’s position in the late-medieval world. Marco Polo, who never visited Java and who left Southeast Asia in the early 1290s as the invasion was underway, does not mention the outcome, but Odoric of Pordenone and even the fake traveller John Mandeville refer to the Javanese king’s wars with the Chinese. So while the Chinese and Javanese sources are by far the most informative about the invasion, it would be wrong to ignore the European sources. They tell us something about how medieval Java was perceived by other groups in Afro-Eurasia and how the island and its eastern polities slotted into the Indian Ocean world system.
In the next few posts I will examine some of these sources so that this seemingly obscure bit of Afro-Eurasian history reaches a wider audience. I’m going to begin by looking at the European sources because the references are brief and easy to interpret, but after that I’ll look in more detail at the Javanese and Chinese sources. As I’m working with Marco Polo at the moment, I’ll look at his brief discussion of Java’s wealth and the power of its king in the next post.
If you have any questions about this or any other topic in medieval Indonesian history, don’t hesitate to comment.
