Sumatra, the sixth-largest island in the world, once had a far more confusing name: Java Minor. The man responsible for this long-standing confusion was no ordinary figure. He was Marco Polo, a merchant and explorer from Venice, Italy, who visited the northern coast of the island around the 1290s.
Polo and a Name He Never Questioned
At the time, Polo did not arrive as a conqueror, but as an escort. He was accompanying a princess to Hormuz while waiting for the winter monsoon winds that would carry him across the Indian Ocean.
He recorded this experience in Il Milione, his famous yet controversial travel account, which many Europeans of his time initially found hard to believe. It was in this book that Polo referred to the island as Java Minor, as if this vast landmass were merely a smaller version of neighboring Java.
However, there is no explanation as to why he chose that name.
The British orientalist William Marsden, in The History of Sumatra, even described the name as “arbitrary and unsupported by any authority, either European or Eastern.”
Interestingly, Polo actually used two different names for two different things. He used Java Minor for the island as a whole, while Samara referred to the port city where he anchored.
“Samara” was simply his Venetian way of pronouncing “Samudera,” the name of a city at the northern tip of the island. There, he built defensive fortifications to protect his group from local attacks, and noted the existence of six kingdoms on the island, though he only described four in detail: Perlak, Basman, Samudera, and Pidie.
Even so, the name Java Minor did not last. Instead, the name that continued to spread was that of the small port city where Polo had stayed for five months: Samara.
A Name That Never Stopped Changing
Later explorers carried the name forward, each adapting it to their own tongue.
The Persian geographer Rashid al-Din had already referred to it as Sumutra in the early 13th century. Odoric of Pordenone, who passed through around 1322, called it Sumoltra. Ibn Battuta, who arrived in 1345, recorded it as Samutra and was the first to use it as the name of the island, rather than just the city.
A 14th-century Arabic navigation text referred to it as Shumutra. The Portuguese explorer Tomé Pires called it Comotora. Other variations continued to emerge: Sumotra, Samotra, Zamatra, Shamatrah.
All of these names trace back to the same place: the city of Samudera. In Indonesian, samudera means “ocean,” and as the name of a port city, it carries the meaning of “the edge of the ocean.”
A City That Drew the World’s Attention
The city of Samudera began to attract global attention in the 13th century, when an Indian adventurer, Sultan Malik al-Salih, established the Samudera Pasai Sultanate—the first Islamic kingdom in the Indonesian archipelago.
Its location was highly strategic: positioned at the northern tip of the island, near the entrance to the Strait of Malacca, and surrounded by fertile pepper forests. A مخروط-shaped mountain rising about 1,800 meters—nicknamed the “Mountain of Gold”—shone like a beacon for sailors arriving from the Bay of Bengal.
Arab, Indian, and Chinese merchants who stopped in the city gradually began referring to the entire surrounding region by the name of the port itself.
Interestingly, the name “Sumatra” was not even known to the island’s own inhabitants. They were more familiar with local names such as Pulau Perca and Andalas, the latter even appearing in references to the Strait of Malacca as the “Sea of Indalas.”
But these names never reached the ears of European cartographers.
Even Its First Map Got It Wrong
It was not until 1447 that the Italian explorer Niccolò de' Conti first recorded “Sumatra” in a form close to its modern spelling, and used it to refer to the entire island, not just the city.
Yet the confusion did not end there. When the name first appeared on a map in 1538, it was still attached to the wrong island: not Sumatra, but Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon).
Only in 1540 did the cartographer Sebastian Münster correctly place the name Sumatra on the right island, bringing centuries of confusion to an end.
