Majapahit (c. 1293–1527) was the last major Hindu-Buddhist empire of the Indonesian archipelago, and one of its most powerful — a Javanese sea-power that, at its fourteenth-century height under King Hayam Wuruk and his minister Gajah Mada, claimed influence over ports and islands across maritime Southeast Asia. The entry's purpose is to explain what kind of empire a Javanese thalassocracy was, why its reported extent must be read with care, and how a vanished Hindu kingdom became modern Indonesia's imagined ancestor.
When Indonesia became a nation, it reached back six hundred years for an ancestor. It chose Majapahit: a Hindu-Buddhist sea-empire of fourteenth-century Java whose chief minister, Gajah Mada, is said to have sworn the famous Palapa oath, traditionally understood as a vow to forgo earthly pleasures until he had brought the archipelago under one crown. From a court poem, later traditions about Gajah Mada, and modern nationalist reading, Indonesia drew a powerful image of an earlier unified archipelago. The poem's claims are still debated, and the real empire was looser and stranger than the legend. This is the story of the last great Hindu kingdom of the Indonesian seas, and of how a vanished empire was reborn as a national myth.