CHAPTER IX

Summary

Peligion

It has already been stated, that the established religion of the country is that of Mahomet. The earliest allusion to this faith made in the Javan annals is in the twelfth century of the Javan era (A. D. 1250), when an unsuccessful attempt appears to have been made to convert some of the Súnda princes. Towards the close of the fourteenth century, several missionaries established themselves in the eastern provinces; and according to the Javan annals, and the universal tradition of the country, it was in the firstyear of the fifteenth century of the Javan era, or about the year of our Lord 1475, that the Hindu empire of Majapáhit, then supreme on the island, was overthrown, and the Mahometan religion became the established faith of the country. When the Portuguese first visited Java in 1511, they found a Hindu king in Bantam; and subsequently, they are said to have lost their footing in that province, in consequence of the arrival and establishment of a Mahometan prince there; but with the exception of an inconsiderable number in some of the interior and mountainous tracts, the whole island appears to have been converted to Mahometanism in the course of the sixteenth century, or at least at the period of the establishment of the Dutch at Batavia in 1620.