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Sri Lanka The Portuguese
By the late fifteenth century, Portugal, which had already
established its dominance as a maritime power in the Atlantic,
was exploring new waters. In 1497 Vasco da Gama sailed around the
Cape of Good Hope and discovered an ocean route connecting Europe
with India, thus inaugurating a new era of maritime supremacy for
Portugal. The Portuguese were consumed by two objectives in their
empire-building efforts: to convert followers of non-Christian
religions to Roman Catholicism and to capture the major share of
the spice trade for the European market. To carry out their
goals, the Portuguese did not seek territorial conquest, which
would have been difficult given their small numbers. Instead,
they tried to dominate strategic points through which trade
passed. By virtue of their supremacy on the seas, their knowledge
of firearms, and by what has been called their "desperate
soldiering" on land, the Portuguese gained an influence in South
Asia that was far out of proportion to their numerical strength.
At the onset of the European period in Sri Lanka in the
sixteenth century, there were three native centers of political
power: the two Sinhalese kingdoms of Kotte and Kandy and the
Tamil kingdom at Jaffna. Kotte was the principal seat of
Sinhalese power, and it claimed a largely imaginary overlordship
not only over Kandy but also over the entire island. None of the
three kingdoms, however, had the strength to assert itself over
the other two and reunify the island.
In 1505 Don Lourenço de Almeida, son of the Portuguese
viceroy in India, was sailing off the southwestern coast of Sri
Lanka looking for Moorish ships to attack when stormy weather
forced his fleet to dock at Galle. Word of these strangers who
"eat hunks of white stone and drink blood (presumably wine). . .
and have guns with a noise louder than thunder. . ." spread
quickly and reached King Parakramabahu VIII of Kotte (1484-1508),
who offered gifts of cinnamon and elephants to the Portuguese to
take back to their home port at Cochin on the Malabar Coast of
southwestern India. The king also gave the Portuguese permission
to build a residence in Colombo for trade purposes. Within a
short time, however, Portuguese militaristic and monopolistic
intentions became apparent. Their heavily fortified "trading
post" at Colombo and open hostility toward the island's Muslim
traders aroused Sinhalese suspicions.
Following the decline of the Chola as a maritime power in the
twelfth century, Muslim trading communities in South Asia claimed
a major share of commerce in the Indian Ocean and developed
extensive east-west, as well as Indo-Sri Lankan, commercial trade
routes. As the Portuguese expanded into the region, this
flourishing Muslim trade became an irresistible target for
European interlopers. The sixteenth-century Roman Catholic Church
was intolerant of Islam and encouraged the Portuguese to take
over the profitable shipping trade monopolized by the Moors. In
addition, the Portuguese would later have another strong motive
for hostility toward the Moors because the latter played an
important role in the Kandyan economy, one that enabled the
kingdom successfully to resist the Portuguese.
The Portuguese soon decided that the island, which they
called Cilao, conveyed a strategic advantage that was necessary
for protecting their coastal establishments in India and
increasing Lisbon's potential for dominating Indian Ocean trade.
These incentives proved irresistible, and, the Portuguese, with
only a limited number of personnel, sought to extend their power
over the island. They had not long to wait. Palace intrigue and
then revolution in Kotte threatened the survival of the kingdom.
The Portuguese skillfully exploited these developments. In 1521
Bhuvanekabahu, the ruler of Kotte, requested Portuguese aid
against his brother, Mayadunne, the more able rival king who had
established his independence from the Portuguese at Sitawake, a
domain in the Kotte kingdom. Powerless on his own, King
Bhuvanekabahu became a puppet of the Portuguese. But shortly
before his death in 1551, the king successfully obtained
Portuguese recognition of his grandson, Dharmapala, as his
successor. Portugal pledged to protect Dharmapala from attack in
return for privileges, including a continuous payment in cinnamon
and permission to rebuild the fort at Colombo on a grander scale.
When Bhuvanekabahu died, Dharmapala, still a child, was entrusted
to the Franciscans for his education, and, in 1557, he converted
to Roman Catholicism. His conversion broke the centuries-old
connection between Buddhism and the state, and a great majority
of Sinhalese immediately disqualified the young monarch from any
claim to the throne. The rival king at Sitawake exploited the
issue of the prince's conversion and accused Dharmapala of being
a puppet of a foreign power.
Before long, rival King Mayadunne had annexed much of the
Kotte kingdom and was threatening the security of the capital
city itself. The Portuguese were obliged to defend Dharmapala
(and their own credibility) because the ruler lacked a popular
following. They were subsequently forced to abandon Kotte and
retreat to Colombo, taking the despised puppet king with them.
Mayadunne and, later, his son, Rajasinha, besieged Colombo many
times. The latter was so successful that the Portuguese were once
even forced to eat the flesh of their dead to avoid starvation.
The Portuguese would probably have lost their holdings in Sri
Lanka had they not had maritime superiority and been able to send
reinforcements by sea from their base at Goa on the western coast
of India.
The Kingdom of Sitawake put up the most vigorous opposition
to Western imperialism in the island's history. For the seventy-
three-year period of its existence, Sitawake (1521-94) rose to
become the predominant power on the island, with only the Tamil
kingdom at Jaffna and the Portuguese fort at Colombo beyond its
control. When Rajasinha died in 1593, no effective successors
were left to consolidate his gains, and the kingdom collapsed as
quickly as it had arisen.
Dharmapala, despised by his countrymen and totally
compromised by the Portuguese, was deprived of all his royal
duties and became completely manipulated by the Portuguese
advisers surrounding him. In 1580 the Franciscans persuaded him
to make out a deed donating his dominions to the king of
Portugal. When Dharmapala died in 1597, the Portuguese emissary,
the captain-general, took formal possession of the kingdom.
Portuguese missionaries had also been busily involving
themselves in the affairs of the Tamil kingdom at Jaffna,
converting almost the entire island of Mannar to Roman
Catholicism by 1544. The reaction of Sangily, king of Jaffna,
however, was to lead an expedition to Mannar and decapitate the
resident priest and about 600 of his congregation. The king of
Portugal took this as a personal affront and sent several
expeditions against Jaffna. The Portuguese, having disposed of
the Tamil king who fled south, installed one of the Tamil princes
on the throne, obliging him to pay an annual tribute. In 1619
Lisbon annexed the Kingdom of Jaffna.
After the annexation of Jaffna, only the central highland
Kingdom of Kandy--the last remnant of Buddhist Sinhalese power--
remained independent of Portuguese control. The kingdom acquired
a new significance as custodian of Sinhalese nationalism. The
Portuguese attempted the same strategy they had used successfully
at Kotte and Jaffna and set up a puppet on the throne. They were
able to put a queen on the Kandyan throne and even to have her
baptized. But despite considerable Portuguese help, she was not
able to retain power. The Portuguese spent the next half century
trying in vain to expand their control over the Kingdom of Kandy.
In one expedition in 1630, the Kandyans ambushed and massacred
the whole Portuguese force, including the captain-general. The
Kandyans fomented rebellion and consistently frustrated
Portuguese attempts to expand into the interior.
The areas the Portuguese claimed to control in Sri Lanka were
part of what they majestically called the Estado da India and
were governed in name by the viceroy in Goa, who represented the
king. But in actuality, from headquarters in Colombo, the
captain-general, a subordinate of the viceroy, directly ruled Sri
Lanka with all the affectations of royalty once reserved for the
Sinhalese kings.
The Portuguese did not try to alter the existing basic
structure of native administration. Although Portuguese governors
were put in charge of each province, the customary hierarchy,
determined by caste and land ownership, remained unchanged.
Traditional Sinhalese institutions were maintained and placed at
the service of the new rulers. Portuguese administrators offered
land grants to Europeans and Sinhalese in place of salaries, and
the traditional compulsory labor obligation was used for
construction and military purposes.
The Portuguese tried vigorously, if not fanatically, to force
religious and, to a lesser extent, educational, change in Sri
Lanka. They discriminated against other religions with a
vengeance, destroyed Buddhist and Hindu temples, and gave the
temple lands to Roman Catholic religious orders. Buddhist monks
fled to Kandy, which became a refuge for people disaffected with
colonial rule. One of the most durable legacies of the Portuguese
was the conversion of a large number of Sinhalese and Tamils to
Roman Catholicism. Although small pockets of Nestorian
Christianity had existed in Sri Lanka, the Portuguese were the
first to propagate Christianity on a mass scale.
Sixteenth-century Portuguese Catholicism was intolerant. But
perhaps because it caught Buddhism at its nadir, it nevertheless
became rooted firmly enough on the island to survive the
subsequent persecutions of the Protestant Dutch Reformists. The
Roman Catholic Church was especially effective in fishing
communities--both Sinhalese and Tamil--and contributed to the
upward mobility of the castes associated with this occupation.
Portuguese emphasis on proselytization spurred the development
and standardization of educational institutions. In order to
convert the masses, mission schools were opened, with instruction
in Portuguese and Sinhalese or Tamil. Many Sinhalese converts
assumed Portuguese names. The rise of many families influential
in the twentieth century dates from this period. For a while,
Portuguese became not only the language of the upper classes of
Sri Lanka but also the lingua franca of prominence in the Asian
maritime world.
Data as of October 1988
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