The Pandyan Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century c16.30

c16.30

The conquest of Ceylon is borne out by the *Mahāvamśa* and appears to have taken place about A.D. 1284, when Parākrama Bāhu III was ruling the island.³ ‘Then there arose a famine in the land (Ceylon). Then the five brethren who governed the Pāndyan kingdom sent to this island, at the head of an army, a great minister of much power who was a chief among the Tamils known as Ariya Cakkavatti, albeit he was not an Ariya. And when he had landed and laid waste the country on every side he entered the great and noble fortress, the city of Subhagiri. And he took the venerable tooth-relic and all the solid wealth that was there and returned to the Pāṇdyan country. And there he gave the tooth relic unto the king Kulaśēkhara who was even like unto a sun expanding the lotus-like race of the great Pāṇdyan kings'.¹ The commander of the Pāṇdyan forces mentioned in this account, Ariya Cakravarti, is referred to also in an inscription (No. 110 of 1903) of the king in his thirty-seventh year as taking his orders from him.² Parākrama Bāhu had to bow before the storm and the Mahāvamśa says that he adopted persuasive methods with the Pāṇdya monarch, visited the Pāṇdyan court and succeeded in inducing Kulaśēkhara to surrender the sacred tooth as a favour.