Origin from 1293
Raden Wijaya was crowned on 10 November 1293, founding Majapahit, a Hindu-Buddhist empire based on Java that became the last and largest such state in Southeast Asian history. Under Queen Tribhuwana Wijayatunggadewi, her son Hayam Wuruk and Prime Minister Gajah Mada, the empire reached its territorial peak in the mid fourteenth century; the 1365 court chronicle Nagarakretagama records roughly 98 tributary states under its influence, stretching from Sumatra to New Guinea, the widest reach Hindu-Buddhist political authority ever achieved in the Indonesian archipelago.
Facts
Dates
Start YearSourced to the subject's own account10 November 1293, Raden Wijaya's coronation, the date the source itself uses as Majapahit's birth. End YearSourced to the subject's own account1389, the death of Hayam Wuruk, after which succession conflicts began the empire's long decline; the peak itself is dated by the 1365 Nagarakretagama, within this span. StatusSourced to the subject's own account Learn More
How the Hindu Buddhist Majapahit Empire Dominated Indonesia
This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Raden Wijaya was crowned on 10 November 1293, founding Majapahit, a Hindu Buddhist empire based on Java that would become the last and largest state of its kind in Southeast Asian history. Its founding gave the archipelago's mixed Hindu and Buddhist religious tradition a political centre it had not had on this scale before.
Under Queen Tribhuwana Wijayatunggadewi, her son Hayam Wuruk and Prime Minister Gajah Mada, the empire reached its territorial peak in the mid fourteenth century. The 1365 court chronicle Nagarakretagama records roughly 98 tributary states under Majapahit's influence, stretching from Sumatra to New Guinea, the widest reach Hindu Buddhist political authority ever achieved anywhere in the Indonesian archipelago.
What this changed for Hinduism and Buddhism's spread in the region was the creation of a single dominant power that carried both traditions, fused together in one court's own religious life, across a distance spanning nearly the length of the archipelago. Majapahit's reach under Hayam Wuruk and Gajah Mada marked the furthest extent Hindu Buddhist authority would ever hold in Indonesia, a peak the empire itself would not sustain much beyond their own generation.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Guinea directly: "stretching from Sumatra to New Guinea, the widest reach Hindu-Buddhist political authority ever achieved in the Indonesian archipelago."
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