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NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF BALI However, in the more picturesque but less reliable historic records (babad) 5 it is stated that Madjapahit fell in 1478 under the reign of Bra Widjaya V (Krtabhumi, according to Stutterheim) . Bra Widjaya was told by his chief priest that after forty days the title of Radja of Madjapahit would cease to exist. The king had such implicit faith in the prediction that at the expiration of that time he had himself burned alive. His son, unable to withstand the mohammedan invasion and not daring to disobey the sentence of the priest, escaped to his last remaining colony; followed by his court, his priests, and his artists, he crossed over into Bali, settling on the south coast of Gelgel, at the foot of the Gunung Agung. There he proclaimed himself the king of Bali, the Dewa Agung, the hereditary title of the Radjas of Klungkuug. The Dewa Agung divided the island into principalities which he gave to his relatives and generals to govern. By degrees these local chiefs grew independent of the Dewa Agung and became the Radjas of the smaller kingdoms into which Bali was later divided. It was of extreme significance for the cultural development of Bali that in the exodus of the rulers, the priests, and the Intellectuals of what was the most civilized race of the Eastern islands, the cream of Javanese culture was transplanted as a unit into Bali. There the art, the religion and philosophy of the Hindu Javanese were preserved and have flourished practically undisturbed until today.
When the fury of intolerant Islamism drove the intellectuals of Java
into Bali, they brought with them their classics and continued to cultivate
their poetry and art, so that when Sir Stamford Raffles wanted to write
the history of Java, he had to turn to Bali for what remains of the
once great literature of Java.
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