The area under the direct authority of the Kotte ruler varied from time to time, but at the beginning of the sixteenth century that kingdom was still the largest and most powerful of the island’s political entities. Within its boundaries, which extended from the Malvatu Oya in the north to beyond the Valave River in the south and from the mountainous core of the island in the east to the sea on the west, lived the major portion of the island’s population. It was there that trade and agriculture were most developed.
We need to reiterate, at this stage, a point which is often missed, namely that the principal source of royal income in Kotte was land revenue and not trade.1 The Kotte kings were the biggest ‘landowners’ in the country, and the gabad•gam—the king’s villages—were also quite often the richest of them all. The annual income from the gabad•gam alone exceeded three million fanams at a time when the total income of the Kotte ruler was just over four million fanams. Indeed, customs duties yielded less than one-tenth of the annual income derived from the gabad•gam.
It was an economy in which barter was the principal mode of exchange. Yet there was, significantly, an annual payment of over 600,000 fanams to the king, in cash, from the gabad•gam, striking evidence that the monetization of the economy of the littoral region was not an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century phenomenon, but had its roots going back at least as far as the fifteenth century.
The main source of cash income for the peasant was areca nut. The areca palm grew in almost every village in the Kotte kingdom save in the dry zone. There was, moreover, a flourishing export trade in this commodity with supplies obtained from within Kotte as well as from the Udarata—the Kandyan kingdom—and with the profits channelled largely to the royal treasury. Coconut too was a cash crop of some significance, but neither as a medium of barter nor as a source of cash income was it by any means a rival to areca. Nor for that matter, at least not yet, did the cinnamon trade seriously compete with areca as a source of cash income. In terms of the revenue it yielded to the royal treasury, the cinnamon trade at this stage was still relatively insignificant compared with traditional agriculture. Cinnamon had two other limitations. Its benefits, such as they were, went largely to the Sal•gamas, the cinnamon peelers as a caste group; the emergence of this new caste occupation was a gradual process stretching over a few centuries and in response to the increasing demand for cinnamon as an item of export trade. The business was strictly limited to the excess they delivered over their obligatory free supply in return for the lands they held. The surplus was sold in the open market. The profits derived from these sales could hardly be described as considerable, but they were apparently a sufficient inducement to produce a surplus. In any case, these profits gave the peelers a coveted cash income.
The traditional land tenure system of the Sinhalese described in earlier chapters—with the king as the main source of land grants and service tenure a key feature—was like some vast natural phenomenon seemingly impervious to change. In fact, while its structure remained without fundamental variation in form, it had a remarkable capacity to accommodate itself to social and economic pressures and stresses.
While the successors of Par•kramab•hu VI continued to regard themselves as chakravartis or emperors of the whole island, in practice their effective power was limited to Kotte proper. Not that the Kotte ruler’s authority was unchallenged within his own kingdom—there were occasional revolts such as the one that erupted in Pitigal and Alutkuru Kōralēs during the reign of Vīra Par•kramab•hu VIII (1477–89). This long-drawn-out rebellion was brought under control by his successor Dharma Par•kramab•hu IX.
The most persistent cause of fissiparous tendencies in Kotte was neither popular revolt nor foreign pressure but succession disputes. Brothers of the king ruled portions of the kingdom and each of them had the title raja or king, though all were subordinate to the emperor of Kotte. It is possible that this practice originated from a desire to keep princes who had some claim to the throne in good humour by giving them positions of responsibility. There was perhaps the belief as well that the presence of loyal relatives of the monarch in these outlying districts afforded some security. In the long run, however, it led inevitably to the weakening of Kotte’s political structure, for those princes who could do so transformed the areas they administered into virtually autonomous principalities.
The most eventful of the succession disputes of this period was the Vijayab•-Kollaya, or the assassination of Vijayab•hu in 1521. Vijayab•hu VI married twice, and had three sons by his first queen and one by the second. When the king sought to secure the succession for his youngest son, the three elder princes obtained the assistance of the Udarata ruler, killed their father and shared the kingdom among themselves. With this partition of Kotte, the Sri Lankan polity appeared to have reached a state of fragmentation which seemed well beyond the capacity of any statesmanship to repair. Kotte’s aspirations to overlordship over the rest of the island had never really been capable of fulfilment. With the death of Par•kramab•hu VI those aspirations seemed no more than a cruel joke.
The role of the ruler of Udarata in the Vijayab•-Kollaya is significant. It was a cynical and shrewd move to aggravate the political instability in Kotte and thus ensure full scope for the separatist ambitions of the Udarata—the future Kandyan kingdom. By the 1470s, Sēn•saṃṃata Vikramab•hu (1469–1511) seems to have made use of the disturbed political conditions in the lowlands to make himself the autonomous ruler of the highlands. He endeavoured to increase his own authority whenever Kotte was facing internal problems. Vikramab•hu’s son and successor, Jayavīra (1511–52) readily aided the three princes of Kotte when they appealed for assistance against their father in 1521. The Kandyans saw in this turmoil the opportunity to assert their independence from the control of Kotte. Thus the decline of Kotte proved to be a necessary condition for the rise of the Kandyan kingdom.2
The northern kingdom of Jaffna, with its capital at Nallur, had successfully reasserted its independence soon after the death of Par•kramab•hu VI. The new ruler, Parar•ja•ekaram (1478–1519), content with control over the Jaffna Peninsula and the neighbouring coastlands, was not inclined to challenge the authority of Kotte south of M•tota. For their part, the kings of Kotte, who were preoccupied with their own problems, made no attempt to regain the north, although they continued to assert claims to overlordship over Jaffna. The Jaffna kingdom was by now small and weak, although it received the allegiance of a few chieftains who ruled the Vanni.
The Vanni principalities extended from the borders of the Jaffna kingdom and along the eastern coast to Yala and Panama in the south. The term vanniy•r—a Vanni chief—appears at this time to have embraced a wide category of persons ranging from appointees of the kings of Kotte, who administered outlying districts, to autonomous rulers of large though somewhat undeveloped and sparsely populated areas. Apart from a few principalities near Jaffna, the vanniy•rs in general seem to have paid tribute to the kingdom of Kotte.
It is against this background that one needs to review the entry of the Portuguese upon the Sri Lanka scene. The first contact of the Portuguese with the Kotte kingdom in 1505–06 was largely accidental, and it was not until twelve years later that the Portuguese sought to establish a fortified trading settlement. The building of the first fort near Colombo aroused popular hostility, fanned no doubt by the Moorish traders established on the island who largely controlled its external trade, and the fort had to be given up. But the Portuguese attempt to establish control over the island’s cinnamon trade continued. Their trade in Sri Lanka was conducted from an unfortified factory at Colombo.
One striking feature of Portuguese activities in Asia and Africa was that they did not aim at territorial conquest so much as the control of commerce by subduing and dominating, by means of naval power, the strategic points through which it passed. At no stage did they establish a dominance over the politics of south Asia. What they did was to use their sea power and superior technology at points of weakness or where there were sharp divisions and thus they attained an influence out of proportion to their real strength.3 They were drawn into the politics of Sri Lanka, and particularly of the Kotte kingdom, in their anxiety to establish a bridgehead for control over the island’s cinnamon trade. Part of Vijayab•hu VI’s unpopularity among his subjects stemmed from his seeming subservience to the Portuguese. But it was after the partition of Kotte into three distinct political entities that Portuguese intervention became a permanent feature of the island’s politics.
While the ruler of Kotte, Bhuvanekab•hu, lost a considerable amount of territory when that kingdom was partitioned in 1521, the region left to him was by far the richest and largest of the three with resources adequate to maintain his position as the most important if not the most powerful monarch on the island. But Bhuvanekab•hu was no match for his more daring and ambitious younger brother M•y•dunnē, the ruler of Sīt•vaka, who aimed at control over the whole of the Kotte kingdom as it stood before the partition. The Kotte ruler hoped that Portuguese protection would preserve his kingdom against M•y•dunnē and willingly accepted the status of a Portuguese satellite. Over the rest of the century, the major trend in the history of the truncated kingdom of Kotte was its increasing dependence on and subservience to the Portuguese.
Portuguese involvement in the affairs of Sri Lanka was not limited to the south-west littoral; it stretched to the Udarata (the Kandyan kingdom) and to the Tamil kingdom. The circumstances in which Portuguese interference in the politics of these kingdoms developed varied markedly and so for that matter did the success they achieved.
Although the Kandyan ruler regarded himself as one of the principal beneficiaries of the partition of Kotte in 1521, his relief at what seemed to be the weakening of the main source of danger to the Udarata was shortlived, for out of the chaos of the partition emerged the vigorous and aggressive Sīt•vaka kingdom, a much more serious threat to Kandy than Kotte had ever been. Faced with this disturbing prospect, the Kandyan ruler did in the early 1540s what Bhuvanekab•hu had done in similar circumstances: he turned to the Portuguese and willingly accepted the status of a satellite state. The symbols of this voluntary subordination were the presence of a small Portuguese force in Kandy and the entry there of Roman Catholic priests. The two parties—the Kandyan ruler and the Portuguese—failed to gain the objectives they had set out to attain and their association led instead to misunderstandings, mutual suspicions and complications. The Kandyan ruler adopted another line of approach, a marriage alliance with the ruling family of Kotte—the Kotte connection—which, like that with the Portuguese, was later to cause immense difficulties for the Kandyan kingdom. But neither singly nor in combination could these connections ensure the security of the Udarata against Sīt•vaka.
Portuguese interest in the Tamil areas in the north of the island stemmed from two considerations. First, the Jaffna Peninsula was strategically important in securing control of the seaborne traffic from the Malabar coast to Sri Lanka; and second, there was the pearl fishery. The Portuguese intrusion in the affairs of the Jaffna kingdom began in the 1540s, as part of the process of extending Roman Catholic missionary activity on the island. The missionaries had crossed over from south India and by 1544 had made heavy inroads, especially among the fisherfolk of Mannar and Jaffna. The Hindu ruler of the kingdom reacted angrily and violently and killed a large number of Roman Catholic converts. The Portuguese, especially the missionaries, were anxious to avenge these killings, but it was only in 1560 that a retaliatory expedition was despatched. Although at first this achieved some success, the Portuguese were forced to retreat to Mannar in the following year. But this setback was merely temporary and very soon Portuguese influence over the affairs of the Jaffna kingdom was so well established that they were even able to levy tribute from the ruler. The fact that another Portuguese attack on the Jaffna kingdom was launched in 1591 is evidence, however, that there was still some resistance to them. On this occasion the king of Jaffna was killed and a Portuguese protégé was placed on the throne.
In the period 1521–39 Kotte and Bhuvanekab•hu could not escape the consequences of the Portuguese connection which had developed under Vijayab•hu and had contributed greatly to the latter’s unpopularity at the time of his assassination. Portuguese pressure at this stage was economic rather than political, an attempt to gain a monopoly of the cinnamon trade of the country and to establish a fort in the vicinity of Colombo for trading purposes. This second objective was regarded as being much less important than the first.4 Nevertheless, they were both viewed with unconcealed distaste in Kotte and Bhuvanekab•hu himself was not inclined to cooperate in them. But he was powerless to sever the Portuguese connection which circumstances were to drive him into strengthening.
The initiative in concerting action against the Portuguese in these matters was taken by the Muslim traders resident in Kotte and their co-religionists in Malabar, who resented the loss to the Portuguese of their trade on the island. Although they were primarily interested in defending their own trading interests, their initiatives evoked a sympathetic response from among the people against the Portuguese. Bhuvanekab•hu himself was drawn into this conflict, but he was unwilling to risk an open confrontation with the Portuguese and as a result he responded eventually in a manner which only served to underline his increasing subservience to them. He would not lend his aid to the Muslims; worse still, in 1526 he was compelled under Portuguese pressure to expel them from Kotte. This proved to be an unpopular measure and M•y•dunnē and the ruler of Rayigama stepped in to champion the cause of the Muslims. The ruler of Sīt•vaka was the principal beneficiary of the hostility which was building up in Kotte against the Portuguese connection. He secured a formidable ally in the zamorin of Calicut, whose navy, though not the equal of the Portuguese, was to be of great assistance to him over the next decade.
In the late 1530s, M•y•dunnē stepped up the pressure on Kotte. Bhuvanekab•hu had no sons by his chief queen, and M•y•dunnē and the ruler of Rayigana—his two brothers—had reason, therefore, to regard themselves as heirs apparent to the Kotte throne. In 1538, when the ruler of Rayigana died, M•y•dunnē seized his territories. Bhuvanekab•hu acquiesced in this and even gave it his formal approval in the hope, no doubt, that this would mitigate M•y•dunnē’s hostility to him. However, M•y•dunnē had set his sights on control over Kotte and would not be distracted from this aim by his brother’s calculated gestures of appeasement. Where Bhuvanekab•hu was conciliatory M•y•dunnē was bellicose and awkward. Repeated provocations eventually precipitated an armed conflict between them in which the Portuguese backed the Kotte ruler and M•y•dunnē secured the support of the zamorin of Calicut.
Although in the early stages of the conflict the advantage was with M•y•dunnē—indeed, a decisive victory lay within his grasp—the superior military technology of the Portuguese saved the day for Kotte. M•y•dunnē was forced to sue for peace. The terms imposed on him were utterly humiliating and none more so than the requirement that he execute the leaders of the Malabari forces who had come to the island to assist him and send their severed heads to the Portuguese. M•y•dunnē complied with this demand to the disgust of the zamorin and as a result the Sīt•vaka–Calicut entente was never to be revived.
The first war of Kotte succession thus ended in a humiliating setback for M•y•dunnē, but no sooner had the Portuguese expeditionary forces departed than he began winning over many of the provincial chiefs of Kotte. His success was remarkably rapid and by 1541 large areas of the Kotte kingdom were under the de facto control of Sīt•vaka,5 although there was still a nominal allegiance to Bhuvanekab•hu. Nothing contributed more to the rapid erosion of Bhuvanekab•hu’s hold over large parts of his kingdom than the conduct of his Portuguese allies: contumacious Portuguese factors and overbearing Portuguese settlers undermined his authority and alienated him from his subjects.
By this time, Bhuvanekab•hu, intent on excluding M•y•dunnē from the Kotte throne, had taken a fateful decision. He had two sons by a junior queen, but they were not entitled to the throne while his only child by the chief queen was a daughter named Samudra Devi who had married Vīdiy• Band•ra and had a son Dharmapala by him. In 1540, an envoy was sent to Lisbon to secure a guarantee of Portuguese support for a move to have this grandson—Dharmapala—declared Bhuvanekab•hu’s rightful heir and successor. By solemnly Crowning a golden statue of the young prince in 1543, Joao III of Portugal pledged support for this unusual enterprise. By doing so he ensured that the struggle for the Kotte succession would embroil his country in a bitter conflict with M•y•dunnē. The succession from grandfather to grandson was atypical. The fact that it was to be effected under the auspices of the Portuguese made it even more unpalatable to M•y•dunnē and to the people of Kotte.
Bhuvanekab•hu’s problems increased with the arrival in Kotte of a group of Franciscan missionaries. They came at his invitation as part of the price exacted for Portuguese recognition of the right of succession of Dharmapala to the Kotte throne. The Sinhalese envoys had exceeded their brief in giving the impression that Bhuvanekab•hu himself would be a willing convert to Roman Catholicism. But while the king readily welcomed the missionaries and gave them permission to build churches and preach in Kotte, he categorically repudiated his envoys’ promise of his own conversion. The Franciscans were not put off: they aimed at converting the king himself in the certain knowledge that if they succeeded they would pave the way for the conversion of a large number of his subjects. Bhuvanekab•hu, for his part, realized that there was no more certain way of alienating the affection of his people than by changing his religion. But despite his obvious opposition to the attempt to convert him, Franciscan pressure continued. In time Bhuvanekab•hu became less favourable to Christian missionary activity and there was a marked deterioration in relations between the Portuguese and the king of Kotte as a result. Nevertheless, much of the resentment against the Portuguese settlers and missionaries rubbed off on the king and from this nobody benefited more than M•y•dunnē.
However, the relationship between the Kotte and Sīt•vaka rulers was not always a straightforward one of sworn enmity and consistent hostility. In the early 1540s, they forgot their differences for long enough to pursue a common policy of opposition to the pretensions of the Udarata ruler, Jayavīra (their erstwhile ally against their father in 1521), to the status of an independent ruler. M•y•dunnē was the driving force in this campaign against the Udarata. An independent Kandyan kingdom in alliance with the Portuguese would pose a formidable threat to the Sīt•vaka kingdom, for it would mean that two frontiers, the western as well as eastern, would be under pressure. A joint Sīt•vaka-Kotte attack on the Udarata came in 1545 and the Kandyans were compelled to accept the terms of peace imposed by the victors. Portuguese assistance for the Kandyans came too late, and once it did arrive the Kandyans had reason to regret it for their would-be rescuers annoyed and irritated the people by their insolence and offended the ruler by their incessant demands for rewards despite the fact that they were too few in number to assure him and his kingdom any security against its enemies. Thus the first attempt at an alliance between the Portuguese and the Udarata ended unhappily.
This was a period of shifting loyalties and rapidly changing alliances, with an attempt first of all at restoring friendly relations between Kotte and the Udarata. More surprising still, M•y•dunnē, fearing the isolation of his kingdom as a result of such a move, sought an accommodation if not alliance with the Portuguese, directed against Kotte. But before these could develop further, the old Portuguese-Kotte axis was revived—primarily against Sīt•vaka but, on the insistence of the Portuguese and despite the obvious reluctance of Kotte, against the Udarata as well.
The Portuguese-Kotte invasion of Kandy in 1546 which followed ended in disaster and led to great bitterness between the two defeated parties. Although M•y•dunnē’s attempt to benefit from this by allying himself with the Portuguese did not succeed, Portuguese relations with Kotte were severely strained. Nevertheless, when towards the end of 1550 fighting between Kotte and Sīt•vaka erupted again, the Portuguese stepped in to support Kotte once more. In the course of this campaign Bhuvanekab•hu died under very strange circumstances: he was killed by a shot fired by a Portuguese soldier. Although the Portuguese claimed that this was an unfortunate accident, it is impossible to exclude the suspicion that it was an assassination of which the Portuguese viceroy, de Noronha, who had led the Portuguese expeditionary force to Sri Lanka, had prior knowledge.6
With the death of Bhuvanekab•hu, the second war of the Kotte succession began, infinitely more complicated than the first because of Bhuvanekab•hu’s son-in-law Vīdiy• Band•ra. When M•y•dunnē proclaimed himself king of Kotte and advanced down the Kelani River, the Portuguese, supported by a section of the Kotte nobility, proclaimed Dharmapala king, with his father Vīdiy• Band•ra as regent. Evidently there were reserves of popular support for Dharmapala within Kotte, but this would have been of little avail had Vīdiy• Band•ra not proved to be the energetic and dynamic man he was. The credit for organizing a successful resistance to M•y•dunnē must go to him. The Sīt•vaka forces were driven back from the Kotte kingdom. The Portuguese intervened at this stage—1551—with the largest army they were ever to land on the island, and joined in the attack on Sītiv•ka. M•y•dunnē had hardly regrouped his forces after the initial setback at the hands of Vīdiy• Band•ra when the joint Portuguese–Kotte army moved into Sīt•vaka itself. May•dunnē was forced to flee to Deraniyagala in the interior, leaving Sīt•vaka at the mercy of its enemies. Surprisingly, his adversaries returned to Kotte without administering the coup de grâce. This was partly because de Noronha realized that it would have involved a hard campaign in mountainous territory. There were more sordid considerations as well—the Portuguese seemed more intent on plundering the Kotte treasury in the aftermath of Bhuvanekab•hu’s death than in pursuing M•y•dunnē in the wilds of Sabaragamuva.7
Though M•y•dunnē lived to fight another day, he had little reason to believe that the balance of political forces on the island would shift in his favour as quickly or as comprehensively as it did. In the beginning the odds seemed to favour his rivals in Kotte and the Udarata. In the Udarata, Karaliyaddē Band•ra, elder son of the ageing Jayavīra, raised a revolt once more, executed his step-brother and rival, and expelled his father from Kandy. Jayavīra now sought refuge in Sīt•vaka. The clash between Sīt•vaka and the Udarata that followed was indecisive, but Sīt•vaka now had a hostile Udarata in its flank. The main problem, however, was still Kotte and the redoubtable Vīdiy• Band•ra.
From the beginning of 1552 to the end of 1555, Vīdiy• Band•ra was a volatile and wholly unpredictable factor in the island’s politics. For the Portuguese, intent on a swift transformation of Kotte into a Roman Catholic client state, he was a singularly inconvenient barrier between them and their undisputed control over the youthful king. Moreover, his success against M•y•dunnē encouraged him to cherish the hope of a less restricted role in Kotte’s affairs than that contrived for him by the Portuguese, a stop-gap regent with little independent power. The Portuguese treated him with considerable suspicion even though he embraced Roman Catholicism in late 1552. The suspicion soon matured into hostility and the Portuguese proceeded to imprison him. Yet the resourceful Vīdiy• Band•ra escaped from prison in 1553 and raised a revolt against the Portuguese. M•y•dunnē, sensing the prospect of advantage in this situation, came to Vīdiy• Band•ra’s assistance and between them they launched a vigorous onslaught against the Portuguese in Kotte and pushed them back to the coast, confining them to the area in the immediate vicinity of Kotte and Colombo. The extent and speed of their success in this campaign owed much to a shrewd exploitation of the powerful undercurrent of anti-Portuguese feeling among the people, exasperated by a reaction against Roman Catholicism.
Vīdiy• Band•ra’s daring escapades and military skill alarmed M•y•dunnē no less than the Portuguese. As a result, by 1555 there was a cynical realignment of forces with the two inveterate enemies, M•y•dunnē and the Portuguese, coming together in a temporary alliance against an unusually gifted adversary. Each needed the other’s help against Vīdiy• Band•ra; each no doubt gambled on winning the larger share of the spoils with the elimination of their common enemy; but on any dispassionate assessment the odds clearly favoured M•y•dunnē rather than the Portuguese. When Vīdiy• Bandera was defeated, Sīt•vaka emerged as the largest and strongest kingdom on the island.
With Vīdiy• Band•ra out of the way, the momentum of events pushed Sīt•vaka to the threshold of a new era of dominance in the south-west. The Portuguese contributed greatly to this by their single-minded pursuit of saving souls, a policy that was intrinsically detrimental to their political interests. Their most memorable success—the conversion of Dharmapala in early 1557—was politically a disaster. With all the enthusiasm of the recent convert, he proceeded to the unprecedented and gravely provocative step of confiscating all the lands owned by the sangha and the dev•l•s (Hindu temples) in his kingdom and gifting them to the Franciscans. From then on, Dharmapala was nothing more than the creature of the Portuguese and his main, if not his only, indigenous support came from the Roman Catholics in Kotte. And almost immediately M•y•dunnē marched against Kotte, confident that the king’s subjects, antagonized by his conversion to Roman Catholicism and embittered by the confiscation of temple properties, would rally to the side of the invading Sīt•vaka armies. In the prolonged fighting that now ensued, stretching into the early 1560s, Dharmapala and his Portuguese mentors were saved from complete defeat because the Sīt•vaka forces lacked cannon sufficiently powerful to demolish the fortifications of Kotte and Colombo; and in the first few years the presence of strong Portuguese forces in Colombo was a deterrent against any attempt to storm the fort. Nevertheless, the Portuguese themselves took the decision, in 1565, to abandon Kotte and concentrate their forces in Colombo. Dharmapala and his Sinhalese followers deplored this decision, but the Portuguese were intent on cutting their losses. Though damaging to Portuguese prestige, it was a tactically wise move, for they were no longer burdened with the defence of Kotte. Dharmapala was now a ruler without a kingdom, for Colombo was, in fact, a Portuguese fort, no more, no less.
Over the next twenty-five years, Sīt•vaka came into its own. In M•y•dunnē’s son R•jasimha I the Portuguese confronted a more implacable enemy and one whose opposition to them was more consistent. When barely sixteen years of age he had been the nominal head of the army that defeated Vīdiy• Band•ra at Palanda and had been known since then by the name R•jasimha. His reputation as a soldier had been greatly enhanced in the campaigns of 1557–65. Although R•jasimha did not succeed to the Sīt•vaka throne till 1581—on M•y•dunnē’s death—he more often than not led the Sīt•vaka forces in battle during this interlude.
A determination to complete their mastery of the old kingdom of Kotte by expelling the Portuguese from their stronghold of Colombo dominated the strategy and tactics of the Sīt•vaka rulers over the next two decades. The Portuguese, for their part, were not content to accept their reduced position without a struggle. They resorted to the tactics—successfully used against them earlier by Sīt•vaka—of harrying villages in the vicinity of Colombo which now owed allegiance to Sīt•vaka. Above all else they spurned any suggestion of a truce with Sīt•vaka and used their naval power with great effect over the next decade against the more vulnerable coastal regions under the control of Sīt•vaka. In 1574, on the death of Dharmapala’s queen, the Portuguese took the initiative in obtaining a bride for him from the Udarata. For R•jasimha this was doubly provocative: it held out the prospect of a political link between Dharmapala and his Portuguese mentors, on the one hand, and the Udarata, which could threaten Sīt•vaka’s eastern frontier; on a personal level, there was an element of humiliation because R•jasimha himself had unsuccessfully sought the hand of this very same Kandyan princess. In 1574, Sīt•vaka launched an attack on Kandy, upon which the Portuguese moved into the offensive with destructive forays into the coastal regions of the south-west in which, apart from the usual incendiarism, harassment of the civil population and destruction of crops and livestock, they engaged in a calculated policy of vandalism and iconoclasm directed against the traditional religions: they destroyed the R•jamaha Vihara at Kelaniya near Colombo, the Hindu temple at Munneswaram, as well as viharas elsewhere on the north-west coast and in the interior.
The key to Portuguese survival in the age of Sīt•vaka’s dominance in the affairs of Sri Lanka was naval power. It enabled them to establish new centres of influence in the littoral region, in Jaffna primarily but in other areas as well. Thus they constructed a fort at Galle in the south of the island between 1571 and 1582 and in this same period obtained tribute from some of the Vanni chiefs—those of Trincomalee and Batticaloa in the east and of Puttalam in the north-west. But for Sīt•vaka the most ominous feature of this clever use by the Portuguese of their one element of strength was the prospect of an Udarata-Portuguese entente which the events of 1574–76 had foreshadowed.
R•jasimha’s attack on the Udarata in 1574 had been more a punitive raid than a concerted bid to bring that kingdom under Sīt•vaka rule. In 1578, R•jasimha decided to take the offensive against the Kandyans to bring them securely under Sīt•vaka’s control if not its rule. Although he captured the strategically important Balana Pass, which secured access to the capital of the Udarata, his expedition failed insofar as its main objective was concerned. Once again the Udarata was saved by Portuguese intervention in the form of naval forays on the south-west and north-west coasts, which compelled the Sīt•vaka forces to abandon their Kandyan venture and to concentrate their attention on the Portuguese.
This R•jasimha did with redoubled energy and for over two years from 1579 the city of Colombo was under siege. The Portuguese were driven to desperate straits in contriving to survive this relentless pressure, but endure it they did, and naval power—R•jasimha was unable to prevent the arrival of reinforcements from Goa—was once more the key to their survival. When the siege was raised in 1581 there was no Portuguese counter-offensive. Because of a severe shortage of Portuguese manpower in the east, they could not afford to concentrate large forces in Colombo. As for Sīt•vaka, they kept up the pressure by establishing their military headquarters at Biyagama, less than ten miles from Colombo. The Portuguese were confined to the city and its environs.
In 1580, at a time when his fortunes and that of the Portuguese in Sri Lanka could scarcely have been at a lower ebb, Dharmapala took the decision to bequeath his kingdom on his death to the Portuguese monarch Dom Manuel. This was the final phase in the subservience of the Kotte monarchy to the Portuguese. Dharmapala’s grandfather had been a protégé of the Portuguese, a pliant ruler of a satellite state; he himself ended as a roi fainéant.
M•y•dunnē died in 1581 and R•jasimha succeeded to the throne though not without opposition. For nearly two decades Sīt•vaka had been engaged in almost continuous warfare and there was naturally a longing for a respite and for a reduction in the high taxation which had been the inevitable result of these wars. If these campaigns had brought glory to R•jasimha and Sīt•vaka, inevitably he was identified also with the burdens they imposed on the people. Significantly, there was considerable opposition from the sangha as well. Whether this was the cause or the result of his conversion to Hinduism we are in no position to say. But R•jasimha easily crushed this opposition.
Once he had consolidated his position—which he did quite swiftly—he turned almost at once to another—and this time, successful—Kandyan campaign. The Udarata was absorbed in the Sīt•vaka kingdom. Sīt•vaka was now relieved of anxieties about its eastern frontier and R•jasimha was in direct control of a larger extent of territory in Sri Lanka than any ruler had been since the days of Par•kramab•hu VI. More important, R•jasimha I gained valuable additional resources in men and material for use against the Portuguese.
It was obvious to the Portuguese that this successful Kandyan campaign would be the prelude to another attack on Colombo. They expected this attack in 1582 and in anticipation of it rebuilt the walls of the Colombo fort. It was five years before the attack was launched R•jasimha was making careful preparations for what was to be the coup de grâce against the Portuguese. But he also had to cope with disturbances within his kingdom, in Sīt•vaka itself, and a movement against him in the Udarata in favour of Weerasundera Band•ra. R•jasimha crushed the latter. Weerasundera was killed and with it any prospect, for the time being, of a prolonged uprising against Sīt•vaka. But Weerasundera’s son Konnappu Band•ra escaped to the Portuguese and was later known as Dom Joao of Austria.
R•jasimha’s last siege of Colombo, in 1587–88, was also the best known. Once again he came close to victory and was only thwarted by his inability to prevent Portuguese reinforcements from coming in from India. In 1587–88, Sīt•vaka’s power had reached its zenith: few could have predicted that within five years Sīt•vaka itself would be destroyed beyond any hope of recovery.
The train of events which was to culminate in Sīt•vaka’s uprooting was precipitated by a rebellion in the Udarata, triggered by the seizure of men and the capture of material for the siege of Colombo. But the crucial factor that led to the loss of support for R•jasimha in the Udarata was clearly the execution of Weerasundera. The success of the Kandyan revolt in 1590 encouraged R•jasimha’s enemies within Sīt•vaka. The Seven Koral•s rose in rebellion and when R•jasimha withdrew his men from the Udarata to meet this threat the Portuguese moved in and destroyed the Sīt•vaka stockades at Biyagama and Kaduwela. His immediate reaction of beheading the commanders of these two stockades only aggravated the discontent in Sīt•vaka.
R•jasimha regarded the tumult in the Seven Kōralēs as a minor irritant compared to the Kandyan ‘rebellion’. He led his army to the Kandyan Hills determined to crush this revolt. But his campaign failed and on his way back to Sīt•vaka he died of a septic wound caused by a bamboo splinter piercing his foot.
His death in 1593 left a power vacuum in Sīt•vaka. There were too many contenders for power, none capable of bending the bow of Ulysses. Within two years Sīt•vaka had caved in, destroyed by a combination of self-inflicted wounds and Portuguese arms and almost the whole of the old kingdom of Kotte, as it existed in 1521 prior to its partition, acknowledged the sovereignty of Dharmapala and the authority of the Portuguese.
Sīt•vaka’s achievement was considerable. Within two generations, despite a continued struggle against the superior manpower resources of Kotte and the military technology of the Portuguese, to say nothing of the Udarata, it was one of the most powerful kingdoms on the island. Portuguese forces,many times the size of those that freely devastated the Kandyan kingdom in the seventeenth century, were successfully confined by R•jasimha I within the fort of Colombo. More than once Sīt•vaka nearly succeeded in driving the Portuguese out of Sri Lanka and only the lack of a navy or naval support to match that of the Portuguese prevented a complete success. Indeed, during the brief period of its existence of about seventy years, the Sīt•vaka kingdom established a record of resistance to foreign rule which has never been matched in the history of Western rule in Sri Lanka.
Sīt•vaka’s greatest legacy to Sri Lanka, then, was this tradition of resistance, to which the Kandyan kingdom became the legatee. But a comparison between Sīt•vaka and the Kandyan kingdom as defenders of Sinhalese independence would show that Sīt•vaka’s achievement was the more creditable of the two. For one thing Sīt•vaka did not have the advantage of easily defensible frontiers; no mountain chains protected it, and the Kelani River—unlike the Mahaveli in the Kandyan area—was navigable almost up to the capital city of Sīt•vaka by river crafts which could transport men and arms for the Portuguese. What the two kingdoms had in common were the forests, and the men of Sīt•vaka were as skilled in guerrilla warfare as the people of Kandy were to be. But the rulers of Sīt•vaka were also adept in the arts of conventional warfare, the open confrontation between armies on a battlefield. Very early, they had mastered the techniques of modern warfare and military technology, and in conventional warfare they proved to be a match, and often more than a match, for the Portuguese. In this sense no Sinhalese rulers of the future bore comparison as warriors with M•y•dunnē and R•jasimha, nor did they confront the same heavy odds as those which the rulers of Sīt•vaka faced.
The rapidity with which the area controlled by Sīt•vaka expanded from the late 1550s created formidable problems of administration, especially in regard to the consolidation of control over the new acquisitions. They were, of course, assessed for revenue purposes and efforts were made to develop areas depopulated as a result of the prolonged warfare of this period; but these wars left little time for innovation in government machinery.
R•jasimha of Sīt•vaka was remarkably attuned to the changes that had occurred in the sixteenth century, especially with regard to the economy and most especially with regard to the cinnamon trade. Most, if not all, of the cinnamon lands of the littoral region were under the control of Sīt•vaka after 1565. The processed cinnamon was collected and stored in royal warehouses and sold to traders, at the market price, on the king’s authority. Cinnamon was a key source of state revenue under the Sīt•vaka kings, particularly during the rule of R•jasimha when some of the measures he adopted showed a radical departure from the traditional practice of the Sinhalese kings. Thus, to keep prices high he emulated the Portuguese in burning excess stocks of cinnamon and as a result the rise in price was spectacular. It would be true to say, however, that M•y•dunnē and R•jasimha were more adept in the martial arts than in the prosaic business of peacetime administration. Prolonged warfare exacted a fearful price from the people and the military prowess of the Sīt•vaka kings was in the end a crushing burden on the economy.
The collapse of Sīt•vaka was even more dramatic and precipitate than its rise and expansion had been. R•jasimha, on whom it can largely be blamed, was only about fifty years old at the time of his death in 1593. He had eliminated almost every potential rival so that there was no successor capable of consolidating his achievements or holding the kingdom together against its enemies. His intolerance of opposition in the last years of his rule served to elevate a number of self-seeking adventurers to key positions in the armed forces. When he died he left his army almost intact, but there was no one to take his place in inspiring its loyalty and without his leadership its morale was easily undermined.8
Within a few years of R•jasimha’s death, Portuguese control over the south-west littoral region was extended, consolidated and stabilized. The crisis of the sixteenth century, which began with the decline of Kotte, culminated in the collapse of Sīt•vaka and with Portuguese dominance, if not control, over two of the three kingdoms that had existed when the century began. In Kotte, Dharmapala was a mere figurehead and in Jaffna a protégé of the Portuguese was on the throne. Only the Kandyan kingdom survived, the last of the independent Sinhalese kingdoms. The dramatic collapse of Sīt•vaka with R•jasimha’s death enabled it to assert its independence once more. But with the release from Sīt•vaka’s domination came renewed danger from an old enemy—the Portuguese.