Introduction
With the upswing in trade across the Indian Ocean in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, entrepots and places of transshipment developed into port cities; that is, cities facing the sea which drew upon the resources of their hinterlands to engage in the regional trade that rolled across the Indian Ocean regulated by the monsoons.Footnote 1 These cities often fell under the jurisdiction of established polities— but they also provided a way for others to stake a claim to land, sea, and a share in the trade. One way in which port cities established claim to passing trade was through the enforcing of a tax, known as right of the port. Sri Lanka and specifically its port city of Kotte began to play an ever-increasing role in regional trade, and in the fourteenth century, this port became especially contentious in the political organization of the country. While the prevailing polities of Gampola and Jaffna attempted to establish control over the area and the attendant trade, the locally powerful Alakeshwara family also used the port to establish themselves in power. The Alakeshwaras used the right of the port to establish control over the land-and-sea realm of Kotte and its surrounding maritime space, and in doing so, they mirrored the actions of many rulers across the region.
In understanding the Alakeshwaras and their maritime policies, the first question to be asked is why. Why did this family want to control maritime space and trade? In a study of the sultanates of Kish and Dahlak in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Margariti explores how Indian Ocean polities established their rule over maritime spaces by using force to control sea trade.Footnote 2 These claims that Margariti refers to as ‘land-and-sea realms’ were often fiercely contested by other rulers, leading to the rulers of Kish and Dahlak being written out of the record.Footnote 3 This attempt at state-building is mirrored by the situation on the Malabar coast in the late eighteenth century; when invasions created political instability among the established territorial states, leaving room for the development of sea-facing polities which sought to stake a claim in the area. Menon writes about the agency of individual merchant families, who controlled lands, waterways, and people, sometimes nominally in the service of a king.Footnote 4 The political, military and ideological power of these states were directly proportional to their share in the region’s trade and commerce— making control over sea traffic of utmost importance. The Alakeshwara family too came from a merchant caste, and in the midst of shifting politics of the fourteenth century, they attempted to gain a secure foothold along the coast and in the maritime trade; an ambition that was contested by other polities and which has led to the Alakeshwaras being narrativized as vassals of other states instead of rulers in their own right.Footnote 5
The second question to be asked is how. How did the Alakeshwaras establish their claims over the sea and ports? To answer this, I turn to Prange’s study of political projects in the premodern Indian Ocean.Footnote 6 Prange discusses how various polities established and contested sovereignty over the maritime space, including the rulers of Barkur who forced shipping into their port so that the right of the port tax could be levied. The use of the “threat of maritime violence to exercise compulsion over commercial shipping”Footnote 7 was based on a definite claim to the maritime space. Since taxation and tolls are one of the main physical manifestations of sovereignty, the right of the port and its attendant practices were often fiercely contested. In the case of the Alakeshwaras, this contestation reached a peak in 1380 with a battle against Jaffna, which forms the subject of the epic poem Alakeshwara Yuddhaya.Footnote 8
This paper follows the rise of the Alakeshwaras over the fourteenth century, from Raigama to Kotte, answering the questions of how and why the family used the right of the port to establish themselves. Further, the Alakeshwaras have been remembered as viceroys or ministers of the Gampola kings,Footnote 9 a remembrance which draws their teeth and gives them to the interior rulers who were all but irrelevant at this time of fast-growing regional commerce. This paper instead seeks to position the Alakeshwaras’ policies and plans within the context of contemporary state-building within the Indian Ocean world, presenting an alternate picture of the division of political power in fourteenth century Sri Lanka.
Although the establishment of Kotte is included in what has become the standard historical narrative (based on various court documents including the Nikaya Sangrahaya and Rajavaliya),Footnote 10 it is not usually regarded as a major centre of power until the early fifteenth century. This paper offers an alternative perspective of fourteenth century political developments from the ‘periphery,’ a position which affords a clearer understanding of the economic factors that drove much of the action. Further, this paper tries to contextualize the case study of the Alakeshwaras’ rise to power by drawing on the wider literature of the Indian Ocean World and its trade systems, to demonstrate the continuities and commonalities of port cities and states in the region.
Port City politics
As trade became ever more important to the economy of the island, cities - especially port cities that were involved in trade - grew in prominence. From the thirteenth century, port cities rose meteorically and with a distinct difference from their predecessors.Footnote 11 Whereas during the previous centuries ports were subordinate to their hinterlands and the capital cities behind them, from the thirteenth century onwards they began to enjoy much more autonomy.Footnote 12 Permanently settled groups of foreign traders appeared along the southwestern coast, and often, port cities would feature heavy military guards.Footnote 13
The rise of these semi-independent port cities was made possible by the particular form of sovereignty that existed at the time. Various scholars, notably Tambiah, have explained the “galactic polity,” which is a loose amalgamation of sub-states, held together by allegiance to a central ruler.Footnote 14 The polity was oriented towards the centre, which also meant that boundaries did not have the same meanings as they do today. Boundaries were not fixed for all time, but rather fluctuated depending on the power that radiated out from the centre. Tambiah suggests that this is why many kingdoms of Southeast Asia were named after their capital cities—a feature that is consistent in the Sri Lankan kingdoms as well. As rulers weakened their grip on their capital, the outer provinces would occasionally attempt to break away and gather their own vassals.Footnote 15 Provinces not strong enough to do this would sometimes seek to join polities centred around other rulers. Also, when a galactic polity attempted, amoeba-like, to engulf a hitherto independent kingdom, it would do so mainly through the imposition of a system of tribute.Footnote 16 Within these shifting constellations of states, the independent port city was able to come into its own.
Around this time, regional rulers across the Indian Ocean World were attempting to establish themselves in trade networks. Port cities were uniquely positioned to give these rulers such an opportunity—as major nodes in the trade routes, as peripheral to the centres of power, and as already fortified cities.
During upswings in the region’s trade, port cities were pearls on a necklace that lay draped across the shores of the entire Indian Ocean. A series of entrepots lining the coasts, they offered their hinterlands a place to exchange produce with traders from across the region.Footnote 17 Port cities without a rich hinterland depended on providing facilities for others to come and trade there, to use the port as a site of transshipment. Or, as mentioned above, they depended on being able to force ships to use their port. Gaining control of one of these “pearls” assured a ruler a fair share of the goods and money that constantly passed through the port, which is why port cities often became sites of contention and dispute.
More than simply platforms for the exchange of goods, ideas, cultures, and religions, port cities also had a role to play in the geopolitics of the area. Polities along the coast competed for “resources, trade, and control of the littoral and maritime space.”Footnote 18 Port cities played a crucial function in the imagining of power over land and sea, located as they were on the physical border between land and sea. Often fortified against attack (from sea or land), port cities were a tangible marker of various rulers’ aspirations to rule over land and sea realms. Many of those who routinely had recourse to violence on the sea embarked on their battles from port cities.Footnote 19 Establishing or controlling port cities proved to be an important part of state-building. From the sultans of Kish and Dahlak to the Kunjali Marakkars to the Alakeshwaras, groups across the Indian Ocean who wished to break with their terrestrial polities used port cities as a place from which to defy other polities and control trade in the area.
There are numerous examples of states which rose to power in this manner; some scholars use the term “thalassocracies” or “sea-facing states” to refer to these and draw a line between them and terrestrial states.Footnote 20 This summed up the zeitgeist—the polities which turned their backs on land-based economy, turning outwards instead towards a global network of trade. Of course, from their beginning at the coast, some of these states developed towards their hinterlands and eventually became the nucleus of a new terrestrial state. At their inception, however, these cities and nascent polities often faced condemnation and fierce contestation from their neighbouring states.
One such polity was the state of Barkur, on the Malabar coast. From ibn Battuta’s mid-fourteenth century testimony, a picture of the right of the port emerges, drawn on the outskirts of the rich pepper trade. Unable to produce its own pepper and thus draw trade to itself, Barkur instead followed the right of the port religiously. Ships passing within Barkur’s seaspace were expected to provide the ruler with gifts; if they did not, a fleet of “pirate vessels”Footnote 21 compelled them to put in at the port and “gift” the ruler a portion of their cargo.Footnote 22 This allowed Barkur to establish its sway over a far bigger area than its control of a strip of coastline would have otherwise meant.Footnote 23 Occupying a later time period, but no less relevant, are the Marakkars of Calicut. This clan rose to prominence as the navy of the Zamorin, engaging Portuguese ships and contesting other rights to the whole western coast of the Indian subcontinent.Footnote 24 By the late sixteenth century, however, the Kunjali Marakkar had started adopting regal titles for himself, alongside establishing his group in fortified cities. The Zamorin joined forces with the Portuguese, and, in 1600, the Kunjali was beheaded in Goa, ending his family’s state-building attempts.Footnote 25 Securing to oneself a port city was a tried-and-tested method of political expansion. Polities across the Indian Ocean, across the pre-European ages, used this tactic to varying degrees of success. Allowing, enticing, or forcing shipping to enter one’s own port was the quickest way to enter the regional trade. Once a polity was established in a port, a few of them went on to emulate the galactic polities on land; amoeba-like, engulfing their neighbours and forming a loose circle of tribute.
One such ‘success story’ is Jayawardenapura. It was the successor to the Alakeshwaras’ capital of Raigama, and later became the nucleus of the Kotte Kingdom. Originally a small village close to the coast named Darugama, Jayawardenapura’s story is closely linked to the Alakeshwara family’s state-building project, defying the authority of both Gampola and Jaffna. Through establishing their power at the fortress at Jayawardenapura, the Alakeshwaras gained a foothold in the lucrative sea trade off the southwestern coast. Jayawardenapura, from being a fortress, became the stronghold in the hinterland behind Colombo and, eventually, the accepted capital city of the main terrestrial kingdom.
In dealing with Jayawardenapura, we encounter an anomaly of a city which fits into the regional trend of port cities without actually being a port city itself. Jayawardenapura is located along waterways which allowed goods to be transported and traded easily; but the actual node of the region’s trade was Colombo, about six kilometres away.Footnote 26 The Alakeshwaras were used to this model of overlordship—their original lands were at Raigama, which was also inland and relied on its connections to the port of Beruwala to control external trade. In the 1340s, unwilling to pay tribute to and come under the suzerainty of the Jaffna king, the Alakeshwaras began building a fort at the village of Darugama.Footnote 27 Throughout the fluctuating fortunes of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Jayawardenapura remained one of the centres of political events in the island. It was only in 1415, after the intervention of Zheng He, that a consecrated king claimed both the city of Jayawardenapura and the legitimacy of Gampola for himself.Footnote 28 From the rule of Parakramabahu VI until the installation of the Portuguese puppet Don Juan Dharmapala in 1551, Jayawardenapura remained the capital city of the new kingdom of Kotte.Footnote 29 Jayawardenapura was built specifically to retain control over the taxes of the ports. Holding this fort as key to control the southwestern littoral, the Alakeshwaras could and did extend their influence in the area, finally creating a polity that far overshadowed their former overlords of Gampola and brought them into repeated conflict with the power to the north, Jaffna. An example of the Alakeshwaras breaking free of the orbit of Gampola is evident in the Kithsirimevan Kelaniya Vihara slab inscription. This inscription records a donation made to the temple by the ‘lord of Vilgammulla.’ Unusually, this inscription also leaves out the name of the reigning monarch (Gampola’s Buvenekabahu IV), instead, noting the patronage extended by ‘the Minister Alakeshwara.’Footnote 30 Paranavitana takes this and several other inscriptions to mean that, “by 1344 AD, the Ministers Alakeshwara and Vilgammula did not acknowledge the Gampola king as their monarch.”Footnote 31
The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the rise of a form of Sinhala literature known as sandesha kavya– long poems figuratively entrusting birds with messages to be taken to various figures of importance. The descriptions of the locations which the bird messengers must pass over serve to highlight the areas under control of the ruler invoked in the poem,Footnote 32 developing what Pieris calls “place-based and politically-constructed ethno-cultural loyalties.”Footnote 33 The Hamsa Sandeshaya, written in the fifteenth century, spends several stanzas on the Kelani River; specifically mentioning traders in canoes and boats. Other centres of trade are discussed in the Mayura Sandeshaya (fourteenth century), which also emphasizes the ocean.Footnote 34 These lines in such poems are charged with meaning; they indicate that the poet considered the eulogized ruler to have a claim over whichever areas he wrote about. Sandesha kavya and other forms of ‘soft power’ ensured that rulers such as Buvenekabahu IV of Gampola could claim sovereignty over coastal areas, which in actual fact were held by their ‘viceroys’ the Alakeshwaras.
The prominence of Jayawardenapura is emphasized in the sandesha kavya of the period. Usually, sandesha kavya lay more emphasis on the city considered to be the capital; the Hamsa and Salalihini Sandeshayas, composed during the fifteenth century, focus on Jayawardenapura as a matter of course. More surprisingly, however, the Mayura Sandeshaya also dwells on the city. For comparison, the most prominent city (Gampola) is given seven stanzas. Jayawardenapura receives four, and Raigama six. The poet evidently considers these two cities to be almost as important as Gampola. The most telling part of the Mayura Sandeshaya is, however, its eulogizing of Alakeshwara. Buvanekabahu, the king, gets only three stanzas in his praise. Alakeshwara, the ruler of Raigama, gets eight. The poem explicitly refers to Alakeshwara as “the lord of this city.”Footnote 35 Raigama and Jayawardenapura are also described in military terms—their ramparts, moats, and armies are praised.Footnote 36 The attempts made by the Alakeshwaras to establish themselves as a power to be reckoned with on the seaboard bore results in a shockingly short space of time—within less than seventy five years, the fortified city of Jayawardenapura had become a main city of the island, the mighty army and navy of Jaffna had been bested in at least one encounter, and the Alakeshwaras had even challenged the Ming fleet of Admiral Zheng He. The heyday of the Alakeshwara family as state-builders came to an end in 1415, but the rise of Kotte had just begun.
Taxation and Sovereignty
One of the simplest ways of staking a claim to any space is the levying of taxes to pass through, trade in, or do any activities within that space. Throughout the past, rulers have used taxation to establish their sovereignty both on land and sea. This holds true across the Indian Ocean during these times being discussed.
In the Anuradhapura period, the chiefs of the Vanni proclaimed their independence by refusing to pay the taxes they had hitherto paid to Mahinda II.Footnote 37 During the many rebellions against European rule in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the refusal to pay taxes was usually one of the first signs of rejecting authority.Footnote 38 Whereas on land, toll gates and other physical barriers can be built, on the sea it is harder to have a fixed physical barrier to movement. Ports of course can be monitored, and it is even easier to restrict movement; but how many polities got around the conundrum of restricting movement in a specific area of the sea was by patrolling. Even today, coast guards and navies around the world have to rely to a great extent on physical boat-based observation. For the small emerging polities of the Indian Ocean world, however, organized and armed navies were often beyond their financial means. Instead, they relied on irregular navies made up of small, swift boats. These irregulars were often seasonal fishermen, sometimes dedicated mercenary forces, and usually known to their adversaries as pirates.Footnote 39
Right of the port went together with steep taxes and usually, a comparatively impoverished hinterland.Footnote 40 In most cases, this right was restricted to ships that were wrecked near the harbour, or which entered the harbour by an Act of God. In a few cases, the ‘Act of God’ was provided by the fleets of small boats which harried the larger ships into the nearest port of safety. Of Barkur on the Malabar coast, ibn Battuta writes: “It is a custom … that every ship that passes by the town must needs anchor at it and give a present to the ruler. This they call the right of Bandar.”Footnote 41 That this tax was inescapable is highlighted by Chakravarti: “Avoiding the port and so the local ruler was followed by a chase in the sea, and when caught, the ‘culprit’ ship had to pay a double tax and could be detained as long as the local ruler wished.”Footnote 42
The fifteenth century Undang-Undang Laut Melaka (Maritime Law of Melaka) gave the sultan’s patrol boats the right to inspect and tax any shipping found within the sultan’s maritime “territory.”Footnote 43 Leaping ahead in time, the Angrian “pirates” continued imposing their taxes on coastal shipping despite English threats and opposition.Footnote 44 Finally, in Sri Lanka, is the Nainativu inscription. Erected by Parakramabahu I in the twelfth century, this inscription establishes the right of the port in the northern harbour of Uraththurai, claiming half of the merchandise of any wreck and a quarter of the horses and elephants carried on any ship that was wrecked.Footnote 45 These customary laws and taxes provided emerging sea-facing states with the perfect entry point into the rich trade that would have otherwise passed them by. It was also a most effective way of building up a state’s treasury and—if successful, after the passage of some time—would serve to establish the state as legitimate in the eyes of their neighbours. It is therefore logical that the Alakeshwaras should choose this method of establishing themselves, and that they in fact did so will be shown later.
In fourteenth century Sri Lanka, the established kingdoms performed their sovereignty through taxation. Even in cases where the ruler’s actual sphere of influence had dwindled to a tiny geographic area, as long as outer regions still paid taxes they were at least nominally under the rule of the kingdom. On the other hand, strong rulers were always on the lookout to extend their areas of taxation, pushing slowly into lands considered to belong to other rulers.
The map in Figure 1 shows the relative spheres of influence of the three main states in the island in the second half of the fourteenth century. Gampola is seen to have a fairly small area under its control, entirely based on land. Raigama/Kotte has a similar area, extending over land and sea. And Jaffna, the most powerful kingdom at the time, enjoys a space almost three times the size. As discussed above, kingdoms of this period can best be understood within the framework of the galactic polity. In this context, the enforcing of tribute was a tool used to bring outer regions under the control of the polity. As such, both Gampola and Jaffna used taxation and tribute to emphasize and extend their spheres of influence. Jaffna was in the process of levying taxes from the “nine ports”Footnote 46 and extending its influence further south. Initially, neither Gampola nor Raigama were powerful enough to halt this advance and had to acquiesce and pay taxes to the Jaffna chakravarthi. Not being able to tax territory, or not being able to prevent other polities from taxing your territory, was probably the most significant indicator of powerlessness. Thus, it was in the interests of the ruler and kingdom to gloss over instances in which they had lost the power of taxation to other polities.
Figure 1. Map of Sri Lanka in the fourteenth century, showing the relative spheres of influence of Jaffna, Gampola, Raigama/Kotte. Drawn by Jayel Josh Perera.
One such significant example of this loss of power is represented by the various accounts of Jaffna taxing regions in the south.Footnote 47 Whereas the traditional understanding of this taxation has been the Jaffna kingdom’s infringement of Gampola sovereignty, according to the norms of galactic politics, this taxation was merely the physical sign of the powerful Jaffna chakravarti attempting to legitimately bring weaker southern kingdoms under his control.
For Gampola, however, this taxation was the humiliating proof that Buvenekabahu IV had lost the power to prevent another ruler from imposing sovereignty over his territory; and this is why the Jaffna incursion has been framed as an affront and a threat to the ‘rightful king.’Footnote 48 This spin on the actual events made Gampola seem like a strong polity, unjustly harried by the forces of the north. In actual fact, Gampola was merely an insect in the path of the Jaffna forces, who were focusing on defeating the other kingdom of the southwest – Raigama/Kotte. This Gampola-centric narrative plays an important role in the 1380 war and its conflicting accounts, which will be discussed later.
It was against this backdrop of taxation by the established galactic polities that the Alakeshwaras attempted to establish themselves; and the simplest way to do that was by instituting their own system of taxes, especially in the ports.
The right of the port was well-established in the southwest at this time, as evidence presented below will show. The lucrative income from this tax, as well as the other benefits of possessing the ‘nine ports’ are more than enough to explain the fierce competition over the harbours. The Alakeshwara family fought to control the ports and enforce the right of the port, using this to bolster their claims to sovereignty over the land-and-sea realm of Raigama/Kotte.
Previously I have made reference to the right of the port as it was practiced in other regions, as well as in Uraththurai in the time of Parakramabahu I. This section draws on evidence from travellers of the mid-fourteenth century to demonstrate the extent to which the right of the port was enforced in the southwest of Sri Lanka. The main feature that differentiates the Alakeshwaras from other polities that practiced right of the port – and even from the rulers of Jaffna – is their comparative lack of actual sea power. There is no evidence to prove that either Gampola or Raigama possessed any sort of navy, whether regular or irregular, and in fact the evidence given in the Alakeshwara Yuddhaya (discussed below) suggests the opposite — that they possessed no way to engage militarily on the seas. The right of the port, then, must have been enforced entirely within the bounds of the port itself.
Travellers’ accounts from the mid-fourteenth century give a clear picture of the ‘right of the port’ being enacted in the southwestern ports. In 1339, a ship carrying Giovanni di Marignolli of Florence was caught in a storm and escaped “by Divine Mercy” into a Sri Lankan harbour that has been identified as Beruwala. The ruler of the port,
under the name of a loan… took from us 60,000 marks, in gold, silver, silk, cloth of gold, precious stones, pearls, camphor, musk, myrrh, and aromatic spices, gifts from the Great Kaam and other princes to us, or presents sent from them to the Pope.Footnote 49
Marignolli, from a background of a fast-rising Florentine merchant class, which challenged the authority of the traditional gentry,Footnote 50 was quick to point out “Coya Jaan” as a “tyrant” who has control of the port of Colombo “in opposition to the lawful king.”Footnote 51 “Coya Jaan” is variously described as a “Saracen,” a “eunuch,” and a “tyrant”, words which are all loaded with meaning. In the Florentine context, the words “Saracen” and “eunuch” both denoted a MuslimFootnote 52 while “tyrant” was an unlawful or illegitimate ruler, who held power as the negative, unlawful opponent of the anointed king.Footnote 53
From Marignolli’s writing, therefore, we get a picture of a Muslim ruler who for some reason does not appear legitimate. The right of the port is very clearly admissible here; the ship has been blown into Beruwala by a storm and thus the ruler of the port has every right to claim tax according to the usage of the time and region.
Ten years later, in 1349, a Chinese traveller, Wang Ta Yuan, visited Colombo and complained about the “churlish customs” of the people.
Sailors who are so unlucky as to be wrecked, or who put in at this place for a short sojourn, are exploited solely for the benefit of the over-lord. All the merchandise with which their ships are laden, mostly consisting of gold and jewels, is confiscated by the chief, who looks upon it as a gift from heaven.Footnote 54
Once again, the form of this exploitation is very reminiscent of the right of the port. The seizure of the cargoes of any ships which were wrecked or which entered the port was legitimate in the eyes of the chief and according to the custom of right of the port, although less so in the eyes of those exploited.
Yuan’s account fits in well with the religious aspect of the right of the port. “A gift from heaven” finds parallels in Marco Polo’s account of the right of the port in Malabar— “You are bound for somewhere else, and it is God has sent you thither to us, so we have a right to all your goods. And they think it no sin to act thus.”Footnote 55
Both accounts cited here are written by travellers from outside the immediate region–one from the East and one from the West. Their reactions, disapproval, and condemnation of the custom indicate its alienness to the systems of law to which they were accustomed.Footnote 56
From these examples, we see clearly that controlling the ports along the southwestern coast was a matter of economic importance. Owning the right of the port was a simple and somewhat passive method of earning income from the regional trade, and this explains the need for the competing polities to establish their own control over the ports.
Rising States and Right of the Port
As mentioned before, in order for new states to break into existing trade, they often had to wrest the rights and control they wanted from established states and rulers. Inserting oneself into the trade network sometimes involved open conflict, whether in the form of wars and battles or as skirmishes between “pirates” and their “legal” opponents. The emergent states’ claims to sovereignty were hotly contested by their neighbours, which refused to acknowledge them and delegitimized their actions. In this way, actions and power moves which would otherwise be accepted statecraft were seen as unlawful.
Reid posits that violence at sea can take place in several ways and emphasizes the insular Southeast Asian tradition of using violence to force shipping to come to specific ports.Footnote 57 While the owners of these ships would regard the violence as piracy, the rulers of the ports would perceive it as a normal part of statecraft. The right of the port, as well, sometimes made use of irregular navies as explained above. This sea power was problematized and stigmatized as piracy, despite the wide range of the custom of the right of the port.Footnote 58 Ports such as Barkur thus became known as hotbeds of piracy.Footnote 59
Refusing to recognize the legitimacy and authority of the rulers of these emerging states (which sometimes posed a threat to their own economic and political interests), neighbouring states dismissed their claims to taxes and the right of the port as ‘mere piracy,’Footnote 60 even when a closer look would reveal a clear political motive and a state-building project.
By enforcing the custom of right of the port as mentioned above by ibn Battuta, Barkur opened itself to the stigma of “pirate,” by relying on the “coercive threat of maritime violence to exercise compulsion over commercial shipping.”Footnote 61 A similar custom is written about in Islamic sources, where captains avoiding certain ports, if caught, had to pay substantial customs dues in the form of gifts.Footnote 62 Labib claims that in this matter, there was little difference between Arab, Persian, Indian, and Southeast Asian ports. That this practice was not specific to the period under study is borne out by the example of Sheik Rahma, the eighteenth century ruler of Busheab in the Persian Gulf, who fell afoul of the British when he plundered a wrecked ship on his coast. Rahma’s laws differed from those of the British in the fact that he adhered to the custom that every country had the right to the salvage of any ship wrecked on its shores.Footnote 63 Once more, this attempt to use customary laws to gain (or retain) control over commercial shipping led to the ruler’s criminalization at the hands of antagonistic powers.
Margariti, too, focuses on the predatory actions of the rulers of Kish and Dahlak in the eleventh century, contesting modern scholars’ characterization of these two states as “piratic”Footnote 64 and instead situating them within the political climate, “in the context of a sustained bid to create a land-and-sea realm.”Footnote 65
When the French attempted to insert themselves into trade in Vietnam in the nineteenth century, they were accused of piracy by Vietnamese emperor Tu Duc; claiming that “[the French] roam the seas like pirates, establishing their lair on deserted islands, or hide on the coasts, in the depth of valleys, and from there foment troubles and revolutions in the neighbouring countries.”Footnote 66
Broadly speaking, this phenomenon of piratically inserting oneself into the existing trade networks has existed across the region for centuries; it is almost always a tool for political expansion, and it is always contested by one or more rivals. Getting into the trade network was the best way to gain physical and financial control over an area; and inevitably in the process, other powers would oppose it as being against their own interests. The Alakeshwaras were obliquely accused of if not piracy, then certainly illegitimate violence “in opposition to the lawful king.”Footnote 67
Piracy was not, however, the only way emerging states could confront their rivals. Occasionally, these states also engaged in open, declared war against other powers, which did not always go in favour of the established states, despite the newer states’ usual lack of an organized and regular military.
In 1380, the Alakeshwaras and the state of Raigama/Kotte engaged in open war with the biggest established power in the island– the kingdom of Jaffna. This war and its outcome were essential to the Alakeshwaras’ state building project, as it resulted in giving them the uncontested right to control the ports and the taxation of the southwestern littoral. While the war between Nissanka Alakeshwara and the Jaffna Kingdom is commonly seen as singular, Somaratne’s research suggests that it was merely one of many such wars.Footnote 68 Arguably, the importance of this war was established by the composition Alakeshwara Yuddhaya, the war poem which celebrates the victory of Nissanka Alakeshwara over the Arya Chakravarti kings.Footnote 69
From at least the 1340s, Jaffna had been sending its tax collectors to the areas of the southwest. The Medawala inscription discussed above is one indicator of this tax, which is mentioned in many written sources as well. Although the kings at Gampola may not have been strong enough to resist this tax in any meaningful way, the Alakeshwaras were and did, founding and fortifying Jayawardenapura Kotte to this very end.Footnote 70 Once their nearly forty years of preparations were at an end, the Alakeshwaras hanged the Jaffna tax collectors as a declaration of war. Upon this open act of defiance, the Jaffna ruler despatched troops “by sea and land with warlike purpose.”Footnote 71 Jaffna at this point in time was a force to be reckoned with on the ocean—ibn Battuta, writing in 1341, referred to the Arya Chakravarthi as “a sultan powerful on the sea”Footnote 72 —but Gampola and Raigama/Kotte have left no reliable traces of sea power.Footnote 73 This slight issue was apparently overcome, as the forces of Raigama/Kotte are said to have “destroyed and crushed by elephants the [Jaffna] ships anchored in the ports of Panadura and Colombo.”Footnote 74 Lack of sea power in this instance was compensated for by using land-based means to overpower the enemy’s ships.
The Mayura Sandeshaya, composed during the reign of Buvenekabahu IV, was written at this time of frequent wars and military upheavals. Thus, although the Alakeshwaras are described as great strategists, the poet also invokes blessings on them to “grant them victory” in the future.Footnote 75 Especially interesting is the stanza which explicitly talks about the “fighting forces at Wattala”—a place name also cited in the contemporary Nikaya Sangrahaya which details the places in which the Alakeshwaras’ troops defeated the armies of Jaffna.Footnote 76
As discussed above, the imposition of tax on an outlying area was a symbol of the central state’s power in a galactic polity. By taxing the ports and country to the south, the Jaffna rulers were slowly expanding their own sphere of interest in the manner commonly accepted. This unfortunately brought their tax collectors into direct conflict with the Alakeshwaras’ state building project, which was also expanding their own sphere of interest in another manner commonly accepted. Thus the 1380 war and the wars before and after it were inevitable results of two different political ambitions.
Conclusion
The Alakeshwara family was very much a product of its time and place. Their meteoric rise to prominence as rulers of the southwestern coast is just one example of similar new states that mushroomed along the littoral of the Indian Ocean, drawing nourishment from the ocean trade. Using the regional customary tax known as the right of the port, the Alakeshwaras laid claim to a land-and-sea realm that centred on their hometown of Raigama and their newer, fortified city of Jayawardenapura Kotte.
This paper set out to answer two main questions; firstly, why the Alakeshwaras wanted to control maritime space and trade; and secondly, how the Alakeshwaras established their claim over the sea and ports. Through the examples laid out above, I conclude that the Alakeshwaras wanted control over the maritime space and regional trade networks in order to establish themselves and their nascent state as legitimate in the eyes of regional powers. Controlling this trade also afforded them an advantage over their established, landed rivals, the galactic polities of Gampola and Jaffna. In behaving thus, the Alakeshwaras were following a pattern laid out across the Indian Ocean world by emerging states claiming the sea and entering trade networks.
To meet this end, the Alakeshwaras marked their claim over the maritime space by enforcing the right of the port. The right of the port was used across the region as a way for less-powerful states and polities, with less products to offer, to make a profit off the rich sea trade of the time. In many instances, polities which exercised these claims were dismissed as pirate states, with the more powerful states which were their victims refusing to acknowledge their claims to sovereignty. Instead, these states were criminalized as pirates. In some cases, such as that of Raigama/Kotte, the rulers’ insistence on controlling the ports and taxes led to direct and open warfare with another state; and not all of these wars ended in favour of the emergent polity.
By positioning the Alakeshwaras and their state-building project within the Indian Ocean region and its politics of the time, this paper has tried to tell the story of the late fourteenth century from a slightly different angle. The common (mis)understanding of the Alakeshwaras as viceroys or ministers of the Gampola kings leaves us with a fascinating story of dynastic wars and succession; but it is only by reorienting the study of the Alakeshwaras from the centre of the island to the shore that the intricacies of state-building and the connections with the wider Indian Ocean world come into focus.
Acknowledgement
Among the many people who have helped me in this research, I would like to especially thank Andi Schubert, Samudrika Sylva, and Sujit Sivasundaram for their comments on this article and general guidance. I am also indebted to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.
Lara Wijesuriya graduated from the University of Colombo with a BA in History.
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