Bali Kingdom

The Bali Kingdom was not a single state but a succession of Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms that ruled parts of Bali, in the Lesser Sunda Islands, from the early tenth century until the Dutch conquest at the beginning of the twentieth. Balinese kingship combined local reverence for ancestors and spirits with Hindu ideas absorbed through Java, and the island's courts became famous for their literature, dance, temple architecture and cremation rites. Because Bali lay close to Java, its history was bound up with Javanese powers, first Mataram and later Majapahit. When Majapahit fell to the Muslim Demak Sultanate at the end of the fifteenth century, nobles, priests and artisans of the Javanese court took refuge on Bali, which the historian Ramesh Chandra Majumdar called the last stronghold of Indo-Javanese civilisation. In the following centuries the Balinese kingdoms expanded outward: Gelgel established influence over Blambangan at the eastern tip of Java and western Sumbawa, Karangasem settled western Lombok, and Klungkung conquered Nusa Penida. From the mid-nineteenth century the Dutch East Indies attacked the minor kingdoms one by one, and by the early twentieth century the last of them had fallen, some after puputan, the ritual fight to the death. Dutch colonial rule followed, and later the province of Bali within the Republic of Indonesia.