Vijayabahu I drives the Cholas from Polonnaruwa

Rajaraja I had conquered the north of Sri Lanka, where Anuradhapura was sacked and Polonnaruwa became the centre of a Chola province, and in 1017–1018 Rajendra I completed the conquest. Resistance continued in Rohana in the south, where Prince Kitti, after defeating rival chiefs, became ruler under the name Vijayabahu — in 1055 according to some chronologies, in 1058 according to W. Geiger’s scheme followed by K. A. Nilakanta Sastri. The Culavamsa, the later continuation of the Pali chronicle Mahavamsa, tells how his first attack took Polonnaruwa, but a fresh Chola army from the mainland defeated him near Anuradhapura and forced him to withdraw to the fortress of Vakirigala. After crushing a rebellion in his rear he sent two armies, by the coast road and west of the mountains, against Polonnaruwa and Anuradhapura while he himself advanced along the Mahaweli river; Polonnaruwa fell after hard fighting, and, the chronicle says, the Chola king ‘sent out no further army’.

The latest Chola inscription at Polonnaruwa is dated 1070, the year when a succession crisis in the Chola empire brought Kulottunga I to the throne. The Culavamsa places the beginning of the war of liberation in the twelfth year of Vijayabahu’s reign, his entry into Anuradhapura in the fifteenth and his coronation as king of all Lanka in the eighteenth — in 1072/1073 or 1076/1077, depending on the chronology. Polonnaruwa, renamed Vijayarajapura, became his capital. He married Lilavati, daughter of Jagatipala, a prince from northern India who had ruled in Rohana, and Trilokasundari of the royal house of Kalinga; he brought monks from Ramanna (Lower Burma) to renew the Buddhist ordination — in 1071, according to G. Coedès, he asked Anawrahta of Pagan for monks and scriptures — and had a temple for the Tooth Relic built in the capital. About 1085 his Tamil mercenaries, the Velakkaras, refused to fight the Cholas and rebelled, but he suppressed them; he died about 1110.