A number of years ago the books Banjaran Singhasari and Banjaran Majapahit crossed my desk as part of my work in the library. Their account of the Mongol army in Java in 1293 was very different from that which I had read in the passing remarks of historians of the Mongols, and I looked around a bit to see what else I could find. At the time, I could not get very far because of my lack of knowledge of old Javanese. The topic has remained in the back of my mind for eight years as I worked on Polish and Czech-Slovak bibliographies of Mongolian studies. I left the wonderful Southeast Asian collection at Northern Illinois University where I had access to everything I needed for studying Java, but very little for studying Mongolia, and moved on to the University of Chicago in 1995. When Professor Bira invited me to read a paper at the 8th International Congress of Mongolists in 2002, I pulled out the paper of 1994, my notes, photocopies and all that I could remember of the topic, and decided there should be enough material to make a decent short paper for the congress.

The most important text — the Pararaton — is now available in English, the translation having appeared in 1996, while the Desawarnana in English, and English and Dutch summaries of the kidungs have been around for many years. The interest in this incident among Indonesian and Javanese historians has been limited to just those aspects of the story and the texts written about it which are relevant to issues of Javanese medieval history, society and culture; very little has been written on the Java campaign by Mongolists, and apart from Rossabi's brief comments in his Khubilai Khan, the Javanese version of that campaign has never appeared in publications on the Mongols.