Reign of Parakramabahu I in Sri Lanka

The main source for the reign is the Culavamsa, the continuation of the Pali chronicle Mahavamsa, which celebrates the king at great length; historians check it against his inscriptions and the records of the Cholas. Born about 1123, a grandson of Vijayabahu I through his mother, Parakramabahu succeeded his uncle Kirtisrimegha in Dakkhinadesa, raised a large army and fought a long war against King Gajabahu II of Polonnaruwa and his own cousin Manabharana. He was crowned at Polonnaruwa in 1153, put down a revolt of mercenaries and subdued Rohana in the south, whose queen Sugala held the Tooth and Bowl relics of the Buddha; the relics passed to the king, and by about 1157–1158 he ruled the whole island.

He rebuilt Polonnaruwa and the old capital Anuradhapura, laid out gardens and raised religious buildings, and the chronicle credits him with an immense programme of irrigation and the resolve that not even a drop of rain water should reach the sea without being made useful to man; he enlarged the Parakrama Samudra, the ‘sea of Parakrama’ beside Polonnaruwa — its northern basin, the Topa Wewa, goes back to about 386 — into a reservoir of some 22–24 square kilometres. About 1165 he convened a council at Polonnaruwa that purged the sangha and reunited its rival fraternities, recognising the orthodoxy of the Mahavihara, and the reformed Sinhalese ordination soon drew monks from Pagan. An inscription at Devanagala mentions an expedition in his twelfth regnal year (about 1164–1165) against Bhuvanaditya, king of Ramanna in Burma, after the Burmese had ill-treated his envoys; the chronicle’s account of its success is greatly exaggerated, and the date is disputed: G. Coedès places the raid in 1180, early in Narapatisithu’s reign. From the late 1160s Parakramabahu also intervened in a civil war of the Pandyas in southern India, where his general Lankapura was at first victorious but was then defeated and killed by the Cholas, who nailed his head to the gate of Madurai.

The wars and buildings were paid for by heavy taxation, and the larger gold coins disappear towards the end of the reign. Parakramabahu died in 1186 without having secured an orderly succession, and the civil wars and invasions of the following decades undid much of his work.