The Anuradhapura Kingdom - II

The Anuradhapura Kingdom - II

Contiued with part one   here to go previous one

It took nearly six decades of devastating civil war for the Lambakannas to reestablish their supremacy, but having done so they

According to tradition the Lambakannas had come to the island in the time of Devanampiya Tissa with the sacred bo tree. The Tarachchas and Kalingas, two less important clans, apparently came to the island at much the same time as the Lambakannas.
During much of this period, their rivals the Moriyas were on the retreat, quite often scattered over various parts of the island and occasionally for instance during the rule of Sabha (1207 AD) as refugees from Lambakanna persecution.maintained their pre-eminence once again over a very great length of time. Indeed the second Lambakanna dynasty established by Manavamma gave the island two centuries of comparatively stable government. In the last phase of the dynasty’s spell of power the severest tests that confronted it came from South Indian invaders and not local rivals.

Political instability

Viewed in historical perspective, political instability was the rule rather than the exception in this phase of the history of the Anuradhapura kingdom. How does one account for it? At first glance, the age-long rivalry between Lambakanna and Moriya would appear to offer much if not all of the explanation. The Moriya challenge to the Lambakannas fizzled out by the end of the seventh century AD and the competition between them was replaced by a Lambakanna monopoly of power. But the comparative political stability of the period of the second Lambakanna dynasty owed less to the disappearance of the Moriya threat to their power than to other factors. Of this latter, the most important had to do with the law of succession to the throne.

In the early centuries of the Anuradhapura kingdom there appears to have been no clearly recognized the law of succession to the throne. What mattered were the wishes of the ruling monarch who generally chose a favored member of the royal family, a son or a brother whose title, however, was seldom unchallenged by others who felt they had as good a claim to the throne. With the establishment of the second Lambakanna dynasty, succession to the throne came to depend more on custom and well-established practice, and kings followed each other in the succession from brother to brother and on to the next generation. In combination with a stable and accepted mode of succession to the throne, the sanctity that now surrounded the king due to the spread of Mahayanist ideas, in particular the belief that kingship was akin to divinity made it much more difficult for pretenders to the throne and rivals in general to command a politically viable following even when weak kings ascended the throne. Disputed successions rather than dynastic conflicts were thus the root cause of political instability in the Anuradhapura kingdom before the accession of the second Lambakanna dynasty.

The most celebrated of these succession disputes was that between Moggallana and Kassapa, an important feature of which is linked with one other contributory cause of political instability at this time. The reliance of Moggallana (491-508) on an army of Indian (largely South Indian) mercenaries to dislodge Kassapa proved, in the long run, to be more significant than his victory over the latter. These auxiliaries became in time a vitally important, if not the most powerful, element in the armies of Sinhalese rulers some of whom, notably Aggabodhi III (628, 629-39) and Dathopatissa I (c. 639-50), showed them great indulgence and favor because they owed their position largely to their support. From serving the strictly limited purposes for which they had been hired fighting on behalf of aspirants to the throne, or sustaining a ruler in power they became in time kingmakers, a volatile and unpredictable group and a turbulent element who were in themselves, quite often, the greatest threat to the stability of the realm. They were also the nucleus of a powerful Tamil influence in the court.

When Manavamma seized the throne, he curbed the powers of the Tamil army commanders and courtiers, removed many of them from the high positions they held, and in general established a stricter supervision over their activities. He achieved considerable success in his avowed policy of reducing Tamil influence in the affairs of state. His successors sought to continue this policy but were less effective in this for they could never do without these mercenaries. Indeed a reduction of Tamil pressures on the Sri Lanka polity was impossible in view of the political situation in South India.