his as it may, the country of Menangkabau is regarded as the
supreme seat of civil and religious authority in this part of the East,
and next to a voyage to Mecca to have visited its metropolis stamps a man
learned, and confers the character of superior sanctity. Accordingly the
most eminent of those who bear the titles of imam, mulana, khatib, and
pandita either proceed from thence or repair thither for their degree,
and bring away with them a certificate or diploma from the sultan or his
minister.

In attempting to ascertain the period of this conversion much accuracy is
not to be expected; the natives are either ignorant on the subject or
have not communicated their knowledge, and we can only approximate the
truth by comparing the authorities of different old writers. Marco Polo,
the Venetian traveller who visited Sumatra under the name of Java minor
(see above) says that the inhabitants of the seashore were addicted to
the Mahometan law, which they had learned from Saracon merchants. This
must have been about the year 1290, when, in his voyage from China, he
was detained for several months at a port in the Straits, waiting the
change of the monsoon; and though I am scrupulous of insisting upon his
authority (questioned as it is), yet in a fact of this nature he could
scarcely be mistaken, and the assertion corresponds with the annals of
the princes of Malacca, which state, as we have seen above, that sultan
Muhammed Shah, who reigned from 1276 to 1333, was the first royal
convert. Juan De Barros, a Portuguese historian of great industry, says
that, according to the tradition of the inhabitants, the city of Malacca
was founded about the year 1260, and that about 1400 the Mahometan faith
had spread considerably there and extended itself to the neighbouring
islands. Diogo do Couto, another celebrated historian, who prosecuted his
inquiries in India, mentions the arrival at Malacca of an Arabian priest
who converted its monarch to the faith of the khalifs, and gave him the
name of Shah Muhammed in the year 1384. This date however is evidently
incorrect, as that king's reign was earlier by fifty years. Corneille le
Brun was informed by the king of Bantam in 1706 that the people of Java
were made converts to that sect about three hundred years before.
Valentyn states that Sheik Mulana, by whom this conversion was effected
in 1406, had already disseminated his doctrine at Ache, Pase (places in
Sumatra), and Johor. From thes