Editor’s Note: This essay has been adapted from an article originally published in the Journal of the Sri Lanka Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1973, Vol. 1. Minor editorial adjustments have been made for clarity, formatting, and readability, while preserving the substance and scholarly integrity of the original work.
The appearance in print, nearly half a century ago, of a collection of historical documents relating to Sri Lanka and covering the years 1539–1552 should have stimulated interest in this period. But nearly all the documents in the collection were in Portuguese, while the learned, 78-page introduction prefacing the text of the documents as well as the notes were in German—languages which few historians in the island read. The late Fr. S. G. Perera, S.J., bravely attempted to serialize an English translation of the introductory essay of this study in a local journal, but did not get beyond the first fifteen pages of the original, probably owing to the journal ceasing publication. Recently, Mr. O. M. da Silva used the information in these documents for a study on Vikramabāhu of Kandy. Except for these two efforts, the period covered by these documents is still largely unexplored territory. The present paper seeks to analyse the external relations of the kingdom of Kandy during the period covered by the documents, within the context of the external threats to its security in the sixteenth century.
Under Parākramabāhu VI (1412–1467), the Kandyan territories had been a part of the kingdom of Kotte, and their secession during the turmoil that followed that ruler’s death was an act of rebellion. To reverse its result and to re-establish their authority over Kandyan lands became, therefore, a principal object of the later Kotte rulers, and during the next four decades their forces made two expeditions to the hill country for this purpose. On both occasions, Kotte forces proved overwhelmingly superior to the Kandyans; its ruler was forced to acknowledge the Kotte king’s suzerainty, on one occasion even paying him a war indemnity. Kandy, it was shown, could not match the resources of Kotte. Its only hope of survival, it followed, lay in weakening Kotte, and to this end its subsequent efforts were directed.
An opportunity to encourage divisive tendencies in the Kotte kingdom came to Kandy in 1521. The Kotte ruler at the time, Vijayabāhu (1509–1521), sought to disinherit his three nephews—sons of the polyandrous marriage of his elder brother and himself to the same wife—in favour of a prince who was probably his own son. The three princes thereupon fled from the Kotte lands, and the youngest, Māyādunne, sought the help of the king of Kandy against their uncle. The ruler of Kandy readily agreed to help, ostensibly because the three princes were his wife’s relatives, but really to ensure his own independence by fomenting rebellion within the Kotte kingdom.
On the success of the coup, three kingdoms sprang up where previously there was one. Five years later, a bitter contest between two of the princes, Bhuvanekabāhu and Māyādunne, began. The single-state polity of the Kotte kingdom had been replaced by a multiple-state polity; these states were often in conflict, and in their absorption in these quarrels, the Kandyan kingdom found peace and security.
In the 1540s, dark clouds began to gather on the horizon for Kandy. In the closing years of the previous decade, one of the three Kotte princes had died, and by the incorporation of his kingdom Sitawaka had gained new strength. At the same time, over ten years of close contact with the Portuguese troops had led to the adoption by the Sitawaka armed forces of new techniques of warfare in use among the former, principally the use of artillery.
The usual channel into which such increased resources and improved techniques would have been directed by the Sitawaka ruler was the war against his brother, but certain circumstances made its continuation no longer promising. Chief among these were the recent defeats suffered by the armada and troops of the Samorin, the ruler of Calicut—Māyādunne’s patron and helper—at the hands of the Portuguese at Vedalai and Puttalam in 1538–39, and the estrangement of the Samorin from Māyādunne after the latter gave in to Portuguese demands for the heads of the Samorin’s generals, who had come to Sitawaka’s aid.
With no prospect of aid from Calicut to counterbalance the support that Bhuvanekabāhu was getting from the Portuguese, there was little point in continuing hostilities, and Māyādunne called for a truce. A period of détente, and even limited co-operation between the two brothers for specific purposes, succeeded—destined to last until about 1547. The competing, multi-state system was in abeyance, and this signalled danger for Kandy.
First Bhuvanekabāhu and then Māyādunne harboured expansionist designs on Kandy. In November 1543, the former wrote to the Infante Dom Luís of Portugal arguing that since Kandy had formerly been subject to the Kotte kingdom, he had a legal right to the Kandyan territories and asked for Portuguese assistance to recover what was his. But as no Portuguese assistance was forthcoming, he made no move to annex it by himself, preferring instead to join forces with his brother, and making available to him both men and money. Māyādunne’s preparations for an expedition to Kandy seem to have begun in 1542, though the attack was not launched until about October 1545, under the generalship of Māyādunne’s minister, Arya.
Kandy’s reaction to this threat was twofold. Firstly, its ruler called in the Portuguese at Goa to redress the balance of forces in the island. Secondly, he sought to detach Bhuvanekabāhu from the offensive alliance against him. Both objectives relied heavily on foreign policy to rescue the kingdom.
At its disposal, Kandy had a fighting force estimated at 20,000—stronger than the Sitawaka and Kotte forces combined, according to contemporary reports. But the men were armed only with bows and arrows, in contrast to the invaders who were equipped with firearms. Politically, the Kandyan kingdom appears to have been in turmoil: in March 1543, communications between its capital and Trincomalee were cut off on account of a rebellion; some chiefs were restive, and on one occasion, openly defied the king. To add to the king’s troubles, the crown prince was chafing under his father’s authority, and was discreetly sounding the Portuguese for support. The Kandyan ruler was therefore not in a position to mobilize his total strength for defence.
Though internally weak, Kandy had the means to pay the Portuguese handsomely for any help it might receive. Portuguese travellers to the kingdom in the mid-16th century were impressed with the wealth of its resources. At a time when the Portuguese treasury at Goa was depleted, the prospect of friendly relations with Kandy was very welcome.
There were other factors which made the Portuguese authorities entertain Kandyan overtures favourably. Their relations with Māyādunne had never been good. In the 1540s, their relations with Bhuvanekabāhu also deteriorated, owing to financial exactions, misconduct by officials, and Bhuvanekabāhu’s refusal to embrace the Catholic faith. As relations between Māyādunne and Bhuvanekabāhu improved, the Portuguese felt increasingly isolated and in need of allies. They therefore eagerly grasped the hand that the king of Kandy offered in friendship.
The Kandyan ruler offered to pay the salaries and allowances of Portuguese soldiers coming to reinforce his defences—on a scale more generous than the Portuguese government itself paid. He also offered the Portuguese a factory at Trincomalee, to be garrisoned by them at his expense, and proposed a yearly tribute of 15 tusked elephants and 300 oars for their galleys. As the need for Portuguese aid became more pressing, the king subsequently added other concessions: he would give his daughter in marriage to whomsoever the Portuguese wished, and would embrace the Christian faith with the heir and members of the royal household.
These probably were the thoughts uppermost in his mind when the Kandyan ruler sent an embassy with gifts to the Portuguese authorities at Goa in August 1542. This was followed by others in July 1544, April 1545, and again in November that year. He also wrote to several Portuguese officials and padres in the Kotte kingdom, urging them to use their good offices on his behalf. Some individual Portuguese then living in Kandy also espoused his cause and kept up a barrage of correspondence with Goa.
The embassy of August 1542 bore immediate fruit. A force of 70–80 soldiers, led by Miguel Fernandez and Amaro Mendes, arrived in Trincomalee in March the following year, with instructions, among other things, to set up a factory there. A party of the Kandyan ruler’s officials and men set out to meet them and escort them to the capital but failed to establish contact with the visitors on account of a rebellion in the area. Food supplies for the visiting Portuguese began to run low; some soldiers deserted and there was even a mutiny. The mutineers were defeated in a conflict with the king’s forces towards the end of March 1543. The first Portuguese mission fizzled out, with the factory not set up and liaison between Kandy and the Portuguese not established.
A second mission set out for Kandy from Goa about January 1546 with about forty Portuguese soldiers under Captain André de Souza. This was in response to an urgent message from Kandy, sent when Māyādunne’s forces had launched an offensive about October the previous year. Before these troops could arrive, however, on 9 March 1546, the king of Kandy, in a desperate bid for total Portuguese commitment to defend his realm, had himself baptised. But this set off a chain reaction, eroding internal support for him.
By the time André de Souza reached the Kandyan capital on 25 April 1546, the king had been forced to conclude peace with Māyādunne, agreeing to pay a heavy indemnity in cash, a quantity of precious stones, and several war elephants.
Though the company of Portuguese soldiers had arrived too late to influence the course of the war, yet the rumoured imminence of their arrival and exaggerated reports of their strength had probably been decisive factors in Māyādunne’s decision to call off the attack and conclude peace. Another factor that contributed to the same result was the success with which the Kandyan ruler had driven a wedge into the Kotte–Sitawaka axis.
Earlier, in 1545, the Kandyan ruler had urged the Portuguese to persuade Bhuvanekabāhu to dissociate himself from the war alliance. When the war began to go badly for him, the Kandyan ruler tried another strategy: he offered his daughter in marriage to Bhuvanekabāhu’s grandson and heir, Dharmapāla. The Kotte ruler accepted the offer. As Māyādunne had been planning to get the princess for his son, relations between the brothers became strained, and the alliance cracked.
With the detachment of the Kotte ruler, the danger of Māyādunne extinguishing the independence of Kandy had diminished. Portuguese help was therefore less urgently necessary. This explains the change in Kandyan attitude towards the Portuguese during the next few years—from humble supplicant to one presumptuously laying down conditions.
When Māyādunne again threatened Kandy about June 1547, a force of one hundred Portuguese soldiers reached the capital late August or early September under António Moniz Barreto. Though they were treated well, the king now walked tall and proud. He refused to accept baptism except from the hands of the governor at Goa, Dom João de Castro, or his son, and said that he would not allow his subjects to embrace the new faith until the Portuguese had captured and ceded to him “the kingdom of Māyādunne and all this island up to Jaffnapatnam.”
But the Portuguese did not want to be involved in an escalating conflict. Māyādunne’s projected attack also failed to materialize. Kandy therefore had no further use for Portuguese troops. Its ruler had no use for the Catholic religion either, and a visiting missionary reported that he did not even know how to make the sign of the cross. Meanwhile, his new ally Bhuvanekabāhu—who had had first-hand experience of the Portuguese as allies—urged him to rid himself of them. The Kandyan king’s attitude towards the Portuguese became hostile, and he began to mobilize his forces. Barreto therefore hurriedly decided to retreat, and, burning his baggage and fighting part of the way, retired to Colombo through the Sitawaka lands.
Though the pieces of artillery that Barreto had left behind in Kandy were later returned to the Portuguese, with a handsome financial subvention of 12,000 pardãos to cover expenses, this series of events ended the five-year period during which Kandy had sought friendly relations with, and armed assistance from, the Portuguese as a counterweight to the Sitawaka king’s designs on Kandy, sometimes in association with his brother, the ruler of Kotte. Of the three Portuguese expeditions during these years, one had failed to establish contact with the Kandyan king, another had arrived too late, while the third had arrived when it was no longer needed. The main difficulty with Portuguese aid, Kandy had realized during this period, was that it was never available when wanted, nor in the quantum sufficient for its purposes.
On hearing of the debacle of António Moniz Barreto’s expeditionary force to Kandy, the Portuguese authorities at Goa felt that they had been deceived into embarking on a mission based on insincere promises. They therefore willingly entertained friendly overtures from Māyādunne, who had already won over Barreto when the latter dragged himself and his army to the Sitawaka lands, fatigued and famished after a forced march from Kandy. Māyādunne sought to build an offensive alliance against Kandy on this foundation and sent an embassy to Goa with gifts for the viceroy, offering to be a vassal of the king of Portugal. He also suggested a joint Sitawaka–Portuguese force to take Kandy, to be ruled thereafter by one of his sons in the name of the king of Portugal, and the equal division of the treasures of the king of Kandy. Though the Portuguese authorities at Goa did not act on Māyādunne’s proposals, their willingness to entertain them shows that their role vis-à-vis Kandy was changing—from erstwhile friend to open enemy.
Though the Portuguese were unwilling to act on Māyādunne’s proposal, they felt that some punishment should be meted out to Kandy. But no punitive expedition could be contemplated unless native auxiliary troops and porters were available, and for that, the support of a local ruler was essential. In 1549 that problem was solved, when late that year Māyādunne resumed the struggle against Kotte. On Bhuvanekabāhu’s appeal to Goa, the authorities there decided to send Dom Jorge de Castro with considerable forces to take the field against Māyādunne. Dom Jorge was also instructed to look into the problem of Kandy, where, it was reported, the prince Karalliyadde Bandāra had fallen out with the king his father. More pliant than the king, the Portuguese hoped to espouse the son’s cause and thereby obtain ascendancy over the kingdom.
After defeating Māyādunne, Dom Jorge de Castro asked for Bhuvanekabāhu’s assistance to lead an expedition to the Kandyan kingdom. Bhuvanekabāhu was in a dilemma: he was obliged to the Portuguese for their help but was allied to the Kandyan royal house. He tried to stall the expedition by advising strongly against it. But Castro disregarded the advice and dragged Bhuvanekabāhu into an offensive alliance against Kandy, in which they agreed to make war on Kandy and divide its territories and treasures equally. Setting out in late March 1550, Castro arrived at the head of the joint Portuguese–Kotte forces within a few miles of the Kandyan capital. Here the Kandyan forces attacked, killing nearly two hundred Portuguese, injuring many more, and capturing all arms and baggage. Portuguese enmity, it was shown, could no more hurt Kandy than their friendship could assist in its defence.
Bhuvanekabāhu’s men had joined the invasion, and this should have strained the Kandy–Kotte alliance. But there is no evidence that it permanently damaged the relationship. For one thing, the Kotte ruler had helped the Portuguese under duress; in fact, some Portuguese attributed the failure of the expedition to Bhuvanekabāhu’s lukewarm support, if not machinations. His contribution to the expedition had been minimal. For another, if Kandy were to break off relations with Kotte on this or any other ground, it would be left without a single friend or ally. This knowledge cushioned the alliance against stresses, and friendship with Kotte remained a cornerstone of Kandy’s foreign relations during these years.
The death of Bhuvanekabāhu in 1551, and the period of political uncertainty and instability that followed in Kotte, required a readjustment in Kandyan policy. There was a real chance that Vidiye Bandāra might emerge as Kotte’s strongman, ruling as regent to the king’s grandson and defying both Māyādunne’s claims to the Kotte throne and Portuguese attempts to dominate Kotte’s internal politics. Kandy therefore supported him, offering aid in his struggle against Sitawaka, and at one stage even a base of operations. When support for Vidiye began to erode, and it appeared unlikely that he would fulfil his promises, Kandy withdrew its support and returned to the traditional alliance with Kotte’s legitimate ruler.
Just as the Kotte–Kandy friendship had in the 1540s been sealed by a marriage between the royal houses, it was now renewed with a similar alliance. When Dharmapāla’s queen died in 1573, another Kandyan princess was brought down to take her place. Before that event, however, another link between the two royal houses had been forged. In 1557, Dharmapāla had embraced the Catholic faith. The king of Kandy had also been baptised, though at what date is not known.
In the late 1540s and early years of the next decade, Kandy had been only a little less hostile to the Portuguese than to Sitawaka. Now there was a new tilt in Kandyan foreign relations—to friendship and dependence on the Portuguese, as in the early 1540s.
What brought about this change? Chiefly a change in the relative positions of Sitawaka and Kotte. Bhuvanekabāhu had managed to contain Sitawaka, though with difficulty at times. His successor Dharmapāla was unable to do so. In the 1560s, the Kotte kingdom shrank, and even its capital city of Jayawardhanapura Kotte fell under the Sitawaka ruler. Sitawaka began to dominate the politics of Ceylon south of the Deduru Oya as Kotte became eclipsed, forcing Dharmapāla to become an unwilling guest of the Portuguese at Colombo. Kandy had been able to maintain its anti-Portuguese stance so long as it had been supported by a strong Kotte. But without that support, it was forced to lean on the Portuguese once again. The ruler’s embrace of the Catholic faith had removed a point of friction. The two Catholic rulers—of Kandy and Kotte—formed a natural alliance, with their Portuguese patrons joining in to make it a triple partnership. As with the nineteenth-century system of subsidiary alliances in India, a company of Portuguese soldiers was stationed in Kandy. This guaranteed, among other things, that its external affairs would be conducted on lines acceptable to the Portuguese.
Naturally, the alliance involved obligations. Thus, when Dharmapāla and his Portuguese protectors were hard-pressed by Rājasinha of Sitawaka in 1565, the Kandyan king attacked Sitawaka’s flank, cutting across the Seven Korales and striking at Chilaw, on the outer perimeter of Rājasinha’s domains.
The Sitawaka monarch did not hit back at Kandy immediately. His main concern was the destruction of Portuguese power in the lowlands, and on this he concentrated his energies for the next ten years, leaving Kandy alone. But he made an attempt to secure a Kandyan princess, probably to advance a claim to the throne of Kandy based on her right. The Kandyan ruler refused the marriage offer, preferring to give the princess to the Kotte ruler. To him, Sitawaka’s embrace was as unwelcome as its open hostility.
In 1574, Rājasinha attacked Kandy, with inconclusive results. Four years later, another attack was launched, the Sitawaka forces taking the gateway to the kingdom, Balana. The king of Kandy called upon his Portuguese allies for help, and a force of 150 soldiers went to Kandy. The kingdom saved itself on this occasion too, but not, it appears, due to the exertions of the Portuguese troops.
In none of these attacks were Rājasinha’s full resources mobilized. Such an expedition, throwing into the fray a massive force estimated at 30,000 men, was undertaken only in 1581 or 1582, after Sitawaka had recuperated from the long-drawn siege it had laid to Colombo in 1579–80. Karalliyadde faced Rājasinha with a bigger force at Balana, but was routed. The Sitawaka monarchy finally consummated its forty-year-old ambition and occupied the hill country. The Kandyan royal family fled to Trincomalee, and after a brief sojourn in the Vanni—during which it tried unsuccessfully to enlist the support of the Vanni chiefs—finally took refuge with the Portuguese at Mannar.
In retrospect, it is seen that the essential condition for the survival of the Kandyan kingdom as an independent entity in the sixteenth century was the division of the manpower and resources of the south and south-western sector of the island among a number of competing states. Whenever this sector was wholly—or almost wholly—under one political authority, Kandyan independence was in danger. Kotte’s attacks on it prior to 1521, and Sitawaka’s attacks in 1580–81, both bore this out.
A multiple-state polity in the area, however, did not automatically confer immunity on Kandy. The states had, within limits, to be evenly balanced in their military and other resources. Where one state could dominate the other, as Sitawaka did in the mid-1540s, it still could present a serious threat to the hill country and exact tribute. But Kandy could ward off the danger to its independence by allying with the Kotte kingdom, Sitawaka’s enemy.
In its external relations, Kandy had no permanent enemies or friends. Kotte, Sitawaka, and the Portuguese were in turn its enemy or friend. In Kandy’s ever-shifting, ever-changing relations with external powers, the only permanent element was its unchanging object—the quest for survival.
