Malacca (Melaka)

city · earth

A port on the strait that carries traffic between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, founded around 1400 and rapidly dominant in regional trade. Its ruling house adopted Islam in the fifteenth century, and Malacca then functioned as a distribution point for Islam across the archipelago through the ports that traded with it. The case is a well-documented example of top-down adoption: the ruler converts, the court follows, and the commercial advantage of sharing a legal and credit framework with Muslim merchants propagates the change outward. Historians disagree about how far conversion at the level of the general population followed, and how quickly.