But settlements of Arabs had been established in Nubia for several centuries earlier and the Arabs on the Blue Nile had so increased in number and wealth in the tenth century that they were able to ask permission to build a mosque in Soba, [300] the capital of the Christian kingdom. [301] In the thirteenth and especially from the beginning of the fourteenth century there began a general process of interpenetration through the migration into Nubia of Arabs, especially of the Juhaynah tribe, who intermarried with the women of the land and gradually succeeded in breaking up the power of the Nubian princes. [302] In the latter half of the fourteenth century Ibn Baṭūṭah [303] tells us that the Nubians were still Christians, though the king of their chief city, Dongola, [304] had embraced Islam in the reign of Nāṣir (probably Nāṣir b. Qulāūn, one of the Mamlūk sultans of Egypt, who died A.D. 1340); the repeated expeditions of the Muslims so late as the fifteenth century had not succeeded in pushing their conquests south of the first cataract, near which was their last fortified place, [305] while Christianity seems to have extended as far up the Nile as Sennaar. The Christian Nubian kingdom appears to have come to an end partly through internal dissensions and partly through the attacks of Arab and Negro tribes on its borders, and finally by the establishment of the powerful Fūnj empire in the fifteenth century. [306] But it is probable that the progress of Islam in the country was all this time being promoted by the Muhammadan merchants and others that frequented it. Maqrīzī (writing in the early part of the fifteenth century) quotes one of those missionary anecdotes which occur so rarely in the works of Arabic authors; it is told by Ibn Salīm al-Aswāni, and is of interest as giving us a living picture of the Muslim propagandist at work. Though the convert referred to is neither a Christian nor a Nubian, still the story shows that there was such a thing as conversion to Islam in Nubia in the fifteenth century. Ibn Salīm says that he once met a man at the court of the Nubian chief of Muqurrah, who told him that he came from a city that lay three months’ journey from the Nile. When asked about his religion, he replied, “My Creator and thy Creator is God; the Creator of the universe and of all men is One, and his dwelling-place is in Heaven.” When there was a dearth of rain, or when pestilence attacked them or their cattle, his fellow-countrymen would climb up a high mountain and there pray to God, who accepted their prayers and supplied their needs before even they came down again. When he acknowledged that God had never sent them a prophet, Ibn Salīm recounted to him the story of the prophets Moses and Jesus and Muḥammad, and how by the help of God they had been enabled to perform many miracles. And he answered, “The truth must indeed have been with them, when they did these things; and if they performed these deeds, I believe in them.” [307]