The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c29.s3.39

v3.c29.s3.39

He was succeeded by his son Thihathu (1422–26), who took his father’s queen Shin-Bo-me and was so fond of her that his first wife retired into religion. But during a raid on the Delta he did so much damage that the Talaing chief presented him with his sister Shinsawbu to buy him off; he brought her to Ava and crowned her queen consort in great state, so Shin-Bo-me had him assassinated. The court set up his nine-year-old son; Shin-Bo-me poisoned him and brought in a cousin of the royal house, Kalekyetaungnyo (1426–27), and when he was supplanted by a kinsman she married the kinsman Mohnyinthado (1427–40); this was her fifth crowned consort, but she died childless. Mohnyinthado’s reign was spent in striving, with tolerable success, to retain his throne against the principal fief-holders and the Shān states of Hsipaw and Yawnghwe; Hsipaw once drove him out of his palace for eight months, withdrawing only on payment of a large sum. It was in his reign that the first European wandered into Burma—Nicolo de’ Conti, a merchant of Venice; Conti visited Tenasserim, Mrohaung and Ava. His note¹ is brief, but its references to the white elephant, to tattooing the thighs, and to what he imagined was a prayer to the Trinity (the Buddhist invocation of the ‘Three Names of Refuge’), suggest that Burmese civilisation was then the same as in the nineteenth century.