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He stopped the annual payment to Majapahit of one jar of pinang juice, a useless commodity though troublesome to collect. During his reign the Muruts were brought under Bruni rule by peaceful measures, and the Chinese colony was kept in good humour by the marriage of the Bruni king's brother and successor to the daughter of one of the principal Chinamen.
Antiquarian research further tells us that this series of Hindu states commenced in the centre of the island, and that it was closed by the western kingdom of Pajajaran, which existed as early as the first half of the eleventh century, and the eastern kingdom of Majapahit, which was itself succeeded by the first Mohammedan empire of Demak.
The two powers therefore stood for two faiths and two cultures: Majapahit for Brahminism and Hindu influence, Malacca for Islam and the more practical civilisation of Arabia. In the earliest years of the fourteenth century Bruni was a dependency of Majapahit, but seems to have recovered its independence during the minority of the Javan king.
From the latter part of the twelfth century to the overthrow of Majapahit , "a number of independent states existed in Java, and the religion of the people was a modified Hinduism."
Majapahit was the last Javanese kingdom professing Hinduism, and from its overthrow dates the triumph of Mahomedanism in Java. This occurred in A.D. 1478, which, if the chronicle can be trusted, must have been about the period of the commencement of the Mahomedan period in Brunai.
Inclusive of this Sultan MAHOMET and of the late Sultan MUMIM, who died in May, 1885, twenty-three Mahomedan Sultans have reigned in Brunai and, allowing eighteen years for an average reign, this brings us within a few years of the date assigned to the overthrow of the kingdom of Majapahit, and bears testimony to the reliability of the chronicle.
The earliest European visitors tell us nothing of the two Hindu kingdoms, Pajajaran and Majapahit, so celebrated in the chronicles. They speak only of Sunda and its port Bantam; and they mention a certain prince, Fateléhan, as completing the Mohammedan conquest in 1524.
It is to this time that the tradition of the Kapuas Malays ascribes the arrival of the Kayans in Borneo. Then Angka Wijaya extended the power of Majapahit over Palembang in Sumatra, Timor, Ternate, Luzon, and the coasts of Borneo. Over Banjermasin he set his natural son. In 1368 Javanese soldiers drove from Bruni the Sulu marauders who had sacked the town.
Majapahit, originally only one of several Javan kingdoms, rapidly acquired strength and subjugated her neighbours and the nearest portions of the islands around. Malacca, formed when the Malay colony of Singapore was overwhelmed by Javanese, became the great commercial depot of the Straits and the chief centre of Mohammedanism in the Archipelago.
In the thirteenth and the early part of the fourteenth centuries Bruni owed allegiance alternately to two powers much younger than herself, Majapahit in Java, and Malacca on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula. Both these states were founded in the thirteenth century.