Latest / What’s the Story: The Sri Lanka Podcast / Sri Lanka’s Moriyan Kings Part 4 | The Infernal Inheritance
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- Sri Lanka’s Moriyan Kings Part 4 | The Infernal Inheritance Family dramas nearly unsettled the first Moriyan kings until King Moggallana took over. Or so it seemed. What was it about the choices he made that so brutally undermined his successors? As Moggallana returned to his capital in Anuradhapura and seemed, on the face of it, to be restoring life to whatever had passed for normal before his brother Kassapa had murdered their father, it might have been hoped that national life would steady. But steadiness was not what lay ahead for either Sri Lanka or the rest of the Moriyan kings still to come. By the end of Moggallana’s reign, it would look as if an infernal inheritance had instead settled across the land. Moggallana’s route to power lay through the implacable, rough power politics of the Indian Ocean Trading Zone. It was not just the turncoat General Migara who had propelled him to power, but a mercenary army, the clutches of which would enfold the entire kingdom to a greater or lesser extent until the very end of the Moriyan dynasty itself. The old story told of these times is of a Tamil mercenary army coming to Moggallana’s aid and then departing again, job done. But remarkable research by a new generation of historians, most notably Ranjan Mendis, has shown that this is far from the truth. The real story begins in Persia, 3800 kilometres away - and with the ambitions of the Persian king of kings, Khosrow I ("the Immortal Soul"), to expand his empire in all directions and drive a cleaver through the Byzantine Roman end of the Maritime Silk Road trading empire, which the Emperors of Constantinople managed through their Ethiopian and Yemeni allies. Shutting the Romans out of any meaningful access to India and Sri Lanka via the Red Sea would hand Khosrow the world's most lucrative commercial monopoly. It was superpower politics, an ancient world version of it, just as life-changing as that witnessed today between America, Russia, China, and India. Khosrow’s first step was to capture Yemen, which had earlier fallen to the Ethiopians on the request of the Constantinople Emperor Justinian to, as Procopius of Caesarea put it, “ sever Persians’ maritime links with India.” But securing the Maritime Indian Ocean trading route even further east than Yemen was an irresistible cherry in Persian ambitions. It would place it well beyond the reach of the Roman emperors once and for all. Plots were hatched. Messages were passed to Moggallana, who was then in long-term exile somewhere in South India, with the help of General Migara, a clandestine network of Persian Christian merchants living in Anuradhapura. By letter, and possibly even by his presence before the Persian king, Moggallana wove his way into the plan to ensure Sri Lanka became a safe house for Persian trade. He, as the new ruler, would be its guarantor – a Trojan horse as much as a replacement king. A fleet of Persian ships carrying an elite Savaran cavalry contingent sailed to Sri Lanka, perhaps even under the direct command of Moggallana himself. They may have even taken with them the terrible new weapon used by the Persians just a few years earlier against Constantinople – petroleum and naphtha. They landed somewhere on the western seaboard of the island – possibly Chilaw- before marching inland to Kurunegala, so smartly circumnavigating both Anuradhapura and Sigiriya and catching both power centres off balance. Mistaking to the last that the presence of General Migara by his side meant that he was covered, Kashyapa opted for suicide rather than capture when the general flipped his forces. Writing a few centuries later, the historian Al-Tabari notes of the moment: “the king sent one of his commanders with a numerous army against Serendib, the land of precious stones, in the land of India. The commander attacked the king, killed him, and seized control of it, sending back from here to Kisa abundant wealth and many jewels.” Clearly, the Persians wasted no time in ransacking the sensational riches of Sigiriya. Later Persian commentators record that the flow of bounty never really ceased. It continued for years to come and, in addition to items such as horses, jewels, and natural resources, elephants, teak, and pearl divers. It was less the gifts of one grateful king to another, and more tribute paid by a vassal to his master. Unlike Kashyapa, who referred to himself as Maharaja or Great King, the inscriptions so far discovered for his brother Moggallana, and even Moggallana’s heir, merely refer to them as Rajas. Raja is most certainly a title used by lesser kings – kings beholden to other kings, not least Persian kings of kings. Studies of ancient texts by Professor Paranavitana suggest that the Anuradhapuran monks welcomed him as an imperial representative of the Persian king, not as a Sri Lankan king in his own right. Little good it did them, for the new king sided with the new money and the newer version of religion in the old city and did nothing to stop his merchants from unleashing so unremittingly barbaric a bout of bloodshed against often quite blameless people that the new king gained another title: “Rakshasa” – monster. Persian imports flooded into the country – there is even evidence of Persian wine jars found in small villages near Dambulla, not known then, or now, for its predilection for fine wines. Excavations dating back to these times have revealed an abundance of Persian coinage and a Persian Nestorian cross, whilst testifying to the presence of scores of Persian ships docking in Sri Lankan ports. But while plenty of Roman artefacts were found before this time, archaeologists today have unearthed nothing dating to this transformative period before the country pivoted towards Persia. Moggallana is also known to have invested in a new navy to patrol the sea coasts, possibly tasked with deterring Roman ships, including those sent by Roman allies. Sri Lankan embassies sent to the Chinese emperor, representative at the time of Dhatusena and Kasyapa, abruptly ended and recommenced only in the 7th century as the Moriyan dynasty neared its end, a time that coincided with the collapse of the Persian empire itself when the king of kings fell to the Arab Caliphate in 654 CE. Little is known of how Moggallana's reign went following the coup that brought him to power. He is presented in the island's history books today as a strong, capable, and respected king who busied himself with improvements to monasteries and temples – and not as a Persian vassal. His monster status is also conveniently overlooked. The reality must have been much more complicated and nuanced. Keeping the Persian paymasters happy would have been a most consuming task – ensuring they reaped the commercial rewards that brought them to him in the first place, and keeping them in check as best he could, despite their random attacks on his subjects. No less all-consuming would have been simply maintaining the balance of power in Anuradhapura among competing versions of Buddhism, insurgent Christians, Theravada Buddhists, and merchants merely out to make lots of money. Moggallana would certainly have welcomed a wonderful piece of serendipity when the Kesha Dhatu, the Hair Relic of Lord Buddha, found its way into his kingdom, brought there by a monk he had befriended whilst in exile in India – Silakala Ambasamanera, a Lambakarna ally. The relic was given the grandest of all receptions, carried in a great procession and enshrined in a crystal box placed in a specially built temple. Silakala was said to have been appointed its guardian, a task he took so seriously that he forsook his monkish status and became the king's sword-bearer (Asiggahasilakala) instead. This career change would haunt the Moriyan kings, for Silakala Ambasamanera proved so adept at warfare that he would later seize the throne for himself. Moggallana was succeeded in 515 by his son Kumara Dhatusena. It was a shockingly aimable succession. The new king described himself in the only inscription ever discovered as but a Raja, not a Maharaja, a modest title that implied he, too, was as much a vassal of the Persian king of kings as his father had been. The new king appeared to be cast in a more traditional Buddhist form. Inspired by the ravages of religious dissent or perhaps eager to press a more conservative view of the faith on his subjects, he convened a scholarly cabal of monks to review all the sacred Buddhist scriptures to weed out what were judged to be suspicious alterations and additions. The new king lasted just nine years, dying in 524, his death the unexpected literary sensation of the ancient world. For it seems the king’s best friend was a poet called Kalidasa. Murdered by a tricky courtesan, Kalidasa was in the process of making his way to heaven on the flames of his funeral pyre when the grieving king flung himself onto the very same timbers, clearly feeling a loss that may have been more than merely literary. This led to a rush of five queens doing the same, the pyre consuming seven bodies in all, each one later remembered by a separate tomb on top of which was planted a Bodhi tree –the "Hath Bodhis” that the Dutch later felled for timber to construct somewhat inappropriate homes for themselves. Look to this day,” the poet Kalidasa had written sometime before his murder, with a prescience that incorporated not just himself but the kings and all his wives: “for it is life, the very life of life. In its brief course Lie all the verities and realities of your existence. The bliss of growth, The glory of action, The splendour of achievement Are but experiences of time.” Kumara Dhatusena’s death in 524 CE left behind the appearance of a stable state with a succession from father to son, astonishingly ordinary compared to what had gone before. But the crown and its government had been hollowed out, and the islands' independence compromised. The religious and intellectual turmoil that preceded his ascension would not have ceased; indeed, the presence of mercenaries and the continental arrival of Persian ships may even have sharpened it. The plentiful supply of money flowing into the kingdom from the Indian Ocean trading routes would have added to the constant state of instability, offering future kingmakers, let alone would-be kings, the manifest and irresistible rewards of seizing power. The path for the Moriyan dynasty was set, and as the decades progressed, regicide became the order of the day under future kings. Through at least 7 bouts of regicide, well over half the kings of the dynasty were to be murdered by the other half. It was an inheritance that Sri Lanka had tasted before, albeit in smaller measure, under previous royal dynasties, but never on such a scale. For historians of the more fatalist schools who believe a country is often set in a predetermined course, its destiny directed more by its past than its future, then the Moriyans can be given every piece of greedy credit for each disaster that the island was to encounter, from Tamil and colonial invasions to modern political inclinations and debacles. Perdition – some say - had become programmed in. That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbirck at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.