The History of the Renaissance World (46 page)

In 1236, when Vijaya Bahu III died, his son took the name of his great predecessor and ruled as Parakrama Bahu II. In his hands, the rebel kingdom of Dambadeniya became a settled place of learning, a refuge for Pali speakers and writers, a center for Sri Lankan Buddhism. Vijaya Bahu III had ordered all of his subjects who had “good memory” and who were “skilled in quick and fair writing” to record everything they could remember of the destroyed Buddhist scriptures, rebuilding a massive library; Parakrama Bahu II had immersed himself in it, earning a reputation for learning. Like the first Parakrama, he weeded out unworthy monks and “purified the Order of the perfectly Enlightened One.” The great religious festivals were resurrected, the rituals performed, temples and monasteries built. The
Culavamsa
spends chapter after chapter after chapter listing his perfections, his accomplishments, his virtues. Dambadeniya was rising to the heights of the old Polonnaruwa kingdom.
⁴

In 1255, Magha died in Polonnaruwa. He had stayed on the throne for four decades, which suggests that his rule had moved beyond mere military domination; but the Buddhist chronicles have nothing but scorn and hatred for him and his Hindu regime, so that his accomplishments are hard to trace. Nor is it known whether he had an heir. But no one replaced him on the throne at Polonnaruwa, and the north separated into patches of private power, ruled by chieftains called
vanniya
.
⁵

The northern lands thus were easy grounds for adventurers, who crossed over to Sri Lanka in increasing numbers, driving its native peoples farther and farther south.

One of these, Chandrabhanu, seems to have come from southeast Asia; he was, according to the
Culavamsa
, “a king of the Javakas,” who landed “with a terrible Javaka army under the treacherous pretext that they also were followers of the Buddha.” But most of the newcomers were from the south of India, where the Pandyan kingdom had managed to free itself from the overlordship of the Chola.
⁶

Under the splendid Jatavarman Sundara, the renaissance of Pandyan power stretched from the central coastal city of Nellore, all the way down to the Indian Ocean. Now Jatavarman pushed the Pandyan kingdom into the north of the island as well. In 1263, he removed the “king of the Javakas,” Chandrabhanu, from his brand-new Sri Lankan throne and put the northern part of the island entirely under Pandyan domination. “Emperor of the three worlds,” Jatavarman’s inscriptions name him; his lands encompassed the north of the island, his own Pandyan realm, and had swallowed the west of the Chola as well.
⁷

38.1 The Pandya Renaissance

The Chola, reduced to a strip of land around the capital city of Thanjavur, soon disappeared. After 1279, there are no more records of Chola kings; the Pandya had taken their place as lords of south India.

But neither the Pandyan kingdom nor their Tamil tongue completely claimed Sri Lanka. In the southern half of the island, both the Dambadeniya kingdom and the Pali language survived.

In 1283, an embassy from Dambadeniya arrived in Egypt, hoping to arrange a trade treaty with the sultan in Cairo. “They arrived at the port of Ormus,” says a contemporary Arabic account, “proceeding up the Euphrates to Baghdad, and thence to Cairo.”

A letter from the king was presented to the Sultan, enclosed in a golden box, enveloped in a stuff resembling the bark of a tree. The letter was also written in indigenous characters upon the bark of a tree. As no person in Cairo could read the writing, the ambassador explained its contents verbally, saying that his master possessed a prodigious quantity of pearls, for the fishery formed part of his dominions, also precious stones of all sorts, ships, elephants, muslins and other stuffs, bakam wood, cinnamon, and all the commodities of trade. . . .
⁸

Parakrama Bahu’s successors still ruled in Dambadeniya; and from underneath the shadow of south India, they were reaching out to the rest of the world.

*
See Chapter 16, p. 111.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

The Fifth Crusade

Between 1217 and 1221,
another crusade to Egypt fails

W
HILE THE
A
LBIGENSIAN
C
RUSADE
was languishing towards its slow end in France, the Crusade authorized by the Fourth Lateran Council was limping towards Egypt.

The conquest of Egypt had been a Crusader goal for over half a century. Now governed by Saladin’s brother al-Adil (who had ended the squabble between Saladin’s sons by taking the Ayyubid throne himself), Egypt still controlled the city of Jerusalem. Al-Adil was seventy-two and in poor health, but still capable of mounting a sharp resistance.

“The army of the Lord assembled in great force at Acre,” writes Roger of Wendover, “under the three kings of Jerusalem,
*
Hungary, and Cyprus. There were also present the dukes of Austria and Bohemia, with a large knightly array from the kingdom of Germany, and several counts and men of rank.” Missing were all of the greater powers of Europe: the kings of England and France; the king of Germany and hopeful emperor, young Frederick II (although he had promised to arrive just as soon as his German crown was secure); any of the Spanish rulers.
¹

Andrew II of Hungary, the most powerful sovereign to take the cross, did so reluctantly, and only because he had promised twenty years to go on crusade and had still not fulfilled his vows. Nor did he stay long. He arrived at Acre in the late summer of 1217, realized that there weren’t enough soldiers to do anything effective, made a couple of desultory raids into Muslim territories, and then declared his vow fulfilled and went home.

The meager Crusader force remaining waited until the spring of 1218; Frederick II of Germany had promised, faithfully, to join their cause. In April, the hoped-for German Crusaders finally arrived, although without Frederick. He was still fighting against supporters of the deposed Otto in Germany, and again made his excuses.

The Crusaders, led by King John of Jerusalem (actually regent for his young daughter Yolande, but still the most powerful sovereign present), decided to make for the Egyptian port city of Damietta, which was under the governorship of al-Adil’s oldest son, al-Kamil. Conquering Damietta would give them a good strong base from which to attack the Egyptian capital of Cairo.

39.1 The Fifth Crusade

They sailed for Damietta, arriving in May, and found themselves faced with a triple set of walls. Damietta could not be broken into; it would have to be starved out, and it was supplied with food and water by a branch of the Nile that was protected by a tall, fortified tower; from the tower to the walls of Damietta, says the Arab historian Ibn al-Athir, “massive iron chains [were] slung across the river . . . to prevent ships arriving from the sea from travelling up the Nile into Egypt.”
²

All summer, the Crusader forces labored to get past the chains and block the Nile. Late in August, they finally succeeded in scaling the fortress tower and cutting the chains. Immediately, al-Kamil sank cargo ships in the Nile in front of the city, creating a reef too shallow for the Crusaders to sail past.

This meant that the Crusaders had to spend the next winter dredging out a canal that would allow them to sail around the reef. This was unrewarding and bitterly difficult work, and Crusaders began to seep away; few new reinforcements arrived. Meanwhile, says Ibn al-Athir, Damietta was “reinforced and supplied uninterruptedly” and stood “safe and unharmed, its gates open.”
³

Then the Crusaders had an unexpected piece of luck. The old sultan suffered a stroke and died, leaving the Ayyubid throne to his son; but a Cairo nobleman mounted a bid to usurp it, rallying his supporters against al-Kamil. Al-Kamil deserted Damietta and headed towards Cairo. Without its governor, the city’s defenses weakened. The Crusaders made their way around the reef, back into the Nile, by February, and blocked Damietta from resupply. The blockade gave them hope that the city might eventually fall, but Damietta still held out, even while its people began to starve.

Sometime in the late summer, a visitor arrived at the Crusader camp on the Nile: Francis of Assisi, founder of the order of the Lesser Brothers. Francis, says his thirteenth-century biographer Bonaventure, was driven in his mission both by the burning desire to preach the Gospel and by an equally fiery desire to suffer martyrdom for the sake of Christ. He had tried twice before to travel to Muslim lands; his first effort had been derailed by storm and shipwreck, his second by illness. Finally, he had managed to make his way to Egypt, where he hoped to bring peace to the Crusade-wracked country by converting the Sultan.

Jacques de Vitry, the same priest who had discovered the rotting body of Innocent III in a deserted Italian chapel, was also at the Crusader camp; three years earlier he had been appointed Bishop of Acre, and had traveled to the siege with the Crusader army. In a letter to his colleagues back at Acre, he described Francis’s visit. “He was so inflamed with zeal for the faith that he did not fear to cross the lines to the army of our enemy,” he wrote. “For several days he preached the Word of God to the Saracens, and made a little progress.”

Francis then set out for Cairo and eventually gained an audience with al-Kamil himself. By this time, al-Kamil had managed to put down the rebellion in the capital with the help of his brother al-Mu’azzam, deputy governor in Syria. He received Francis politely and listened to his sermons. (“In fact,” Jacques de Vitry adds, “the Saracens willingly listen to all these Lesser Brothers when they preach about faith in Christ and the Gospel teaching, but only as long as in their preaching they do not speak against Mohammed as a liar and an evil man.”) The new sultan was ultimately unconvinced, but he dismissed Francis of Assisi with unfailing courtesy, and had him escorted safely back to the camp at Damietta. There, Francis tried to discourage the bored soldiers from visiting brothels and gambling to pass the time, with an equal lack of success.
⁴

By late October no defenders were left to man Damietta’s walls. The Crusaders stormed the city on November 4, expecting riches and glory. They found a graveyard.