The Shining Tree and her Heirs
A ship sails through the harbor, lateen rigged sails tight against the seasonal wind. It is one of many boats, untold hundreds of ships pulling into the great harbor of Hujung Galuh, the main transit port that feeds the imperial city of Majachaiya. Hujung Galuh has been remade within recent memory as a wonder of monumental architecture. The Majachaiya, like those before them, favor ostentatious temples of red stone carved with intricate figures in a style that is at once distinctively Indian and distinctively Javanese. They have flattened slums and suburbs to make way for the palatial gardens and great universities that mark Hujung Galuh as a great city. And so the city, which once was mostly wooden, a practical but dingy affair, is now a wonder of dizzying opulence, a jewel of the Javanese world.
At the docks, the ship will find the usual array of customs officials and bureaucrats, stern-faced veterans whose rise through the ranks of the civil service is due to military acumen and unquestioned loyalty. Past these faces, a disembarking captain might hasten to the Tamil quarter, where Ainnurruvar and other manigramam company bankers waited. Their wealth bankrolled the trade that flowed through this city - they guaranteed the purchases of spices that these merchant captains made. They kept detailed records of every loan of funds, every shipment. In their offices there were long columns of clerks at desks, scratching away at paper ledgers, recording the constant flow of wealth that raised temples, universities, and palaces across the Indosphere, and sent currents of spices, silks, textiles, silver, incense, and a thousand other commodities around the world.
The Ainnurruvar were not just wealthy. They were trusted, and that trust - their relationship with the Majachaiya - underlined their power. Monarchs across the Indosphere relied upon the great banking houses such as the Ainnurruvar. Vijaya Sena in Magadha relied on them to pay his mercenaries, and the Gurjar kings of Dhar secured their loans to him with the right to collect taxes. The banking houses were indispensable: they handled the riot of foreign currencies, and funded the great trading ventures. They never failed to keep their promises, and over their long history, dating back to the era of the Chola and Maukhani, they had developed the lending of capital into an industry (as had their contemporaries across the Indosphere and Near East).
Where the Christians kept strict prohibitions on usury, holding that any loan which charged interest was sinful[1], there were no such prohibitions within Hinduism. Certainly, there were local laws and customs, edicts and moral philosophy which spoke against unjust usury. Buddhism spoke mostly in vague terms against the charging of interest, and thus the cultural limitations on finance that gripped the western world were nowhere found in the Indosphere. Capital could flow freely and could be used to generate more capital in turn.
However, Hujung Galuh was beginning to be overshadowed. The strait of Malacca was one of the great convergences of trade routes, and the refounded city of Vijayakota [Singapore] was perfectly placed to take advantage of this trade. Rebuilt by the Majachaiya in their distinctive style, Vijayakota was quickly colonized by firms of Sinhalese, Tamil, and Telugu bankers and merchants. These bankers in turn were among those who bankrolled the ascent of Queen Gayatri in 1345, and whose incredibly long reign as royal puppetmaster marked the sole golden age of the Majachaiya.
Under the surface, the religious, cultural, and political makeup of the Majachaiya Empire was in deep turmoil. The Majachaiya had devastated local aristocracies in the process of the ascension to power, and in so doing they had undercut the complex bonds of loyalty and obligation that had long underpinned royal power in the Malay Archipelago. This left a power vacuum into which the trading families of India stepped smoothly. These trading families themselves were heterogeneous. Like the Javanese, they were still generally speaking either Hindu and Buddhist or some mix of the two, and their religious traditions were essentially familiar, even if their cultural heritage was not.
There was no real distinction between trade and banking in the time, and the groups that performed these functions were called vanigrama or manigramam.[2] In Java, the term “banigrama” was primarily used. During the heyday of the Majachaiya, their activities rapidly increased and took on more overtly political implications - no longer were they merely traders of spice and textiles. They were coming more and more to dominate the local artisan and mercantile guilds, for whom they were a ready source of capital and trade goods. And, with the annihilation of the nobles and the division of their estates into state commanderies designed to enrich the soldier class, the banigrama gained an additional role: that of tax farmers and regional administrators. The Majachaiya, lacking a significant administrative apparatus of themselves and unwilling to rely on local aristocrats, the orang kaya, (who they had largely annihilated in their drive to consolidate power), had been forced to rely on these foriegn merchants. The visionary ruler Nararya Jayavardhana had been the first to recognize that the consolidation of wealth within a local aristocracy had led, invariably, to the political disorder and dissolution of the Malay Archipelago. Fearing political domination by outsiders was an inevitable consequence of disunity, he set about forging a unified empire by annihilating any local potentate that stood in his way.
And yet, his successors lacked any real way to administer. They had shown that they could conquer vast swathes of territory, but their armies were not easily turned into a professional administrative body, something with which the Majachaiya had no experience. There were of course local village councils and other such bodies, but the entire “middle rung” of the administrative hierarchy had been put to the sword, and they learned rapidly that simply assigning soldiers to govern territory tended to lead to corruption. So Naraya Jayavardhana’s successors embraced the very thing that had spurred his original campaigns.
The Majachaiya turned wholeheartedly to the joint-stock companies, especially those of Tamil origin, for support. The banigrama had ready-to-order local hierarchies, administrative apparatuses, and their own private armed guards. They already basically ran the coastal entrepots, and despite the disruptive chaos of the Majachaiya wars of conquest, they had proven stubborn and impossible to weed out, as those who control the real wealth and power within a regime often are. In sum, they were the only logical ally of the Majachaiya state.
The Tamil banking houses, for their part, were happy to pump wealth into the Majachaiya in exchange for exclusive access to the vast plantations of Java, which, under Majachaiya rule, were essentially a massive royal demesne, owned by the court and administered by courtier-soldiers. Of course, the Majachaiya were too shrewd to invest sole power in the Tamil, and the Ainnurruvar had many rivals who without royal patronage could not compete at all - the city of Gauda in Vanga, the Utkaladeshan firms, the Sri Lankans. Although the profusion of Chinese goods never slowed, with the collapse of the Kitai, Chinese traders lacked the funds and organization to become involved in this scramble for influence within the Majachaiyan court, and by the time things began to settle down in China once again, the pie had largely been carved, so to speak. And of course, the Tamil-speaking merchants under the Pandya and the Telugu speaking-merchants under the Gajaptai were busy cultivating their own contacts in the ports of this disorganized China.
Under the vanigrama, urban life flourished. Coastal cities swelled with people, recovering rapidly from the violence of the initial conquest period. As for the red stone elegance that merchant captains saw while sailing into Hujung Galuh? That was the patronage of the vanigrama at work, as much as it was the hand of royal beneficence. This urban life was not ephemeral either - the cities that grew to prominence in this era would stay prominent for centuries to come. But the phenomenon that birthed them was rapidly coming to a close. The Majachaiya Empire was Queen Gayatri, and she would pass away in 1394.
Dowager Queen Gayatri, after defeating her brother’s palace coup in 1345, would rule through her son, Adityavarman, her prime minister and husband Kembara, and finally two of her grandsons, Tribuvanaraja and Kratanagara. But the royal family had grown enormous during her long reign, and Majachaiya had become something both deadly and decadent, a city of vipers. Tribuvanaraja had been largely impotent as a monarch, a puppet to be easily manipulated as his father, Adityavarman had been, but he had died childless, and the ascension of his brother Kratanagara posed a more difficult threat.
Kratanagara had been raised for the better part of his adolescence in the port city of Lobo Tuva, in Sumatra, and at a young age had been trained to be a warrior-prince at the instruction of the local commandant. That there was no-one really to fight anymore was immaterial. Adityavarman had sought to isolate and protect his sons from court life, which on one hand had generally made them skilled soldiers, but on the other hand had generally made them ill-equipped for the machinations of Gayatri. Upon his suddenly being thrust into the imperial limelight with the death of his brother, Kratanagara had proven to be equally inept at actual rulership. His vague plans to invade Champa and make a name for himself were continually frustrated by his scheming grandmother, who had no interest in unprofitable wars of conquest.
Additionally, it was little secret that the thousands of disinherited and dispossessed nobles that the Majachaiya had overthrown were not entirely wiped out. A clumsy census would reveal many dozens of aristocratic heirs hiding in various foriegn exiles (the most extravagant of these being the last heir of the Isyana holed up in Aotearoa). Some nobles even remained in the Malay Archipelago - whatever the Majachaiya claimed, their purge was always tempered by pragmatism. More commonly, they had fled to the remaining bastions of the Khmer or Shanadesa, where their status and whatever movable wealth they had managed to take into exile usually afforded them comfortable but not opulent lives. Mostly, these figures resigned themselves to a lifetime in exile, but not all would, and as the weakness of the Majachaiyan court became apparent, rivals would begin to emerge from the old order.
And that weakness was growing constantly. Gayatri, as she aged and became increasingly infirm, was less able to contain her grandson. More of her focus had to be directed towards royal competitors for power - the direct line of succession was always somewhat vague, and the scattering of royal heirs and cousins across the empire meant that many of those heirs had been building up their own independent bases of power. Kratanagara, ever a soldier, had often been tasked with putting down his royal extended family before they could pose too significant of a threat. But the time when central authority and military sovereignty were sufficient was rapidly coming to a close. By the death of Queen Gayatri, no-one remembered a world where Majachaiya had not been preeminent. The dominance of the trading companies was more or less a constant. The old aristocracies had faded from memory - for both better and worse.
In contrast to the revolutionary era that Naraya Jayavardhana brought, the subsequent era of disorder would seem comparatively slight. Materially, there is no evidence that trade was significantly disrupted or that wealth overall declined. Harvests continued, with the agricultural bounty of Java flowing outward and the spice bounty of the great plantations flowing inward. The Ainnurruvar (and to a lesser degree their competitors) - now too powerful to be displaced - were to play the role of kingmakers and mediators this time.
[1] Exchange banking is underdeveloped in Europe due to a long history of a relatively united Europe. So the tricks of the Medici are essentially unknown to current European bankers. Jewish bankers are still vital for commerce because they alone can charge interest to the gentiles.
[2] I have referred to them largely as “joint-stock companies” but it’s time to introduce a local word, I think.
