Islam Supplants Hinduism In Java

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

After Hayam Wuruk's death in 1389, Majapahit weakened through decades of succession conflict, including the Regreg civil war of 1405 to 1406, the same empire that had reached its widest religious and political influence under his own reign now turning against itself. Islam spread gradually across the Javanese coast through trade contact over these same decades, a change that owed nothing to conquest at this stage and everything to merchants and the communities that formed around them.

The empire finally collapsed in 1527, when the Islamic Sultanate of Demak overran what remained of Majapahit's territory, ending the last major Hindu Buddhist state in the Indonesian archipelago and marking Islam's establishment as Java's dominant religion in the place of the tradition Majapahit itself had carried.

Hinduism did not disappear from the archipelago outright when Majapahit fell. Refugees and courtiers fleeing Demak's conquest carried the religion to Bali, where, alone among the major Indonesian islands, it has remained the majority faith to the present day, a single island preserving what the mainland Javanese state that had once carried Hindu Buddhist rule across the whole archipelago could not.