Majapahit revisited: external evidence on the geography and ethnology of East Java in the Majapahit period
B.E. Colless (1975) systematically cross-references twelve external travel accounts—Chinese, European, Muslim, and Russian—spanning 1225 to 1510 against Pigeaud’s foundational synthesis of Javanese textual sources to reconstruct the geography and ethnology of East Java during the Majapahit period. The article argues that foreign observers, writing from a position of cultural difference, record precisely those everyday details that native court poets considered too obvious to mention, thereby resolving gaps and correcting errors in Pigeaud’s reliance on the Nagara-Kertagama and other internal Javanese texts.
Summary
Colless organises his analysis under twenty-four categories of geographical and ethnological information, each section juxtaposing Pigeaud’s conclusions against what the external informants actually report. A recurring pattern emerges: Pigeaud, constrained by the silences of the court poet Prapanca, frequently resorts to argument from silence or speculative assumption, whereas the foreign travellers document the very practices Pigeaud had to guess at. The most significant corrections concern the presence of Islam and Christianity within Majapahit itself (not merely the northern ports), the widespread use of the kris across all social classes, the functional use of horses and elephants as mounts rather than mere regalia, and the existence of a functioning slave trade including eunuch production.
The external sources range from Chao Ju-kua (1225) through the fourteenth-century accounts of Odoric of Pordenone, Ibn Battutah, Giovanni de’ Marignolli, and Wang Ta-yuan, to the fifteenth-century reports of Fei Hsin, Ma Huan, Nicolo de Conti, and Athanasius Nikitin, and finally the early sixteenth-century descriptions by Ludovico di Varthema, Tome Pires, and Duarte Barbosa. Colless treats these not as a chronological sequence but as a body of comparative evidence, noting where they agree, where they contradict one another, and where they collectively overturn Pigeaud’s inferences. He is careful to flag the limitations of his study: it is confined to East Java, excludes political history such as the fall of Majapahit, and is intended to supplement rather than supplant Pigeaud’s commentary.
Key Findings
- Ma Huan (1433) records that the kris (transcribed as pu-la-t’ou) was carried by all males from age three to a hundred, made of fine Persian steel with intricate patterns and handles of gold, rhinoceros horn, or elephant ivory—contradicting Pigeaud’s assumption that the kris was confined to aristocratic use in the fourteenth century (pp. 153–154).
- The Tralaya cemetery, located near the Majapahit palace site, contains ten dated Muslim gravestones using the Javanese Saka calendar rather than the Islamic Hijra, with dates ranging from 1376 CE to 1611 CE, demonstrating the presence of native Javanese Muslims in the capital during the Majapahit period (p. 141).
- Ma Huan describes the royal palace walls as brick, more than 30 feet (3 chang) in height, with a circumference of over two hundred paces and double gates; the city was not walled in the Ming Chinese sense but consisted of compounds separated by fields and broad roads (pp. 130–131).
- Tome Pires reports that the Javanese used Chinese copper cash as their currency with no gold or silver coinage of their own; Wang Ta-yuan additionally mentions Javanese alloy coins (silver, tin, lead, copper) used in exchange for Chinese cash (pp. 133–134).
- Ma Huan records that rice ripened twice per year in Java with small kernels; barley and wheat were entirely absent, while principal fruits included banana, coconut, sugar-cane, pomegranate, mangosteen, watermelon, and lansium domesticum (p. 136).
- Marignolli (1348–49) provides first-hand testimony of an elephant ride on the Queen’s own mount and reports the presence of “a few Christians” in Java, implying Nestorian Christian communities existed in Majapahit during the reign of Queen Tribhuwana (pp. 133, 141).
Conclusion
Colless’s definitive historical takeaway is that the external evidence, properly assembled and critically weighed, demonstrates that Pigeaud’s synthesis—while a monumental achievement—systematically underestimates the complexity of Majapahit society by over-relying on the silences of a single court poet. The foreign travellers confirm that Majapahit was a cosmopolitan, multi-religious, commercially vibrant polity in which Islam, Christianity, and indigenous belief coexisted; in which the kris was a universal male accessory; and in which the economy was underpinned by rice surplus, pepper, and a thriving foreign trade drawing merchants from China, India, Persia, and Arabia.
Context
- Primary sources: twelve external travel accounts (Chinese, European, Muslim, Russian) spanning 1225–1510, all available in English translation; the internal Javanese corpus is represented principally by the Nagara-Kertagama as edited by Pigeaud in Java in the Fourteenth Century (1960–63).
- Historiographical contribution: the article functions as a systematic corrective to Pigeaud’s synthesis, demonstrating the methodological value of external evidence for filling gaps in the Javanese textual record and challenging arguments from silence.