The History of the Renaissance World (20 page)

This left Shirkuh in control of Egypt. He paid nominal homage to the Fatimid caliph Al-Adid, now barely twenty and completely powerless in affairs of state, but for all practical purposes Shirkuh had added Egypt to Nur ad-Din’s empire.

Two months later, Shirkuh died after overeating fat meat at a banquet; his move from soldier to ruler had happened at the very last moment of his life. His nephew Saladin took his place as administrator of Egypt.

Seven months later, the Crusader-Byzantine army returned to lay siege to the port city of Damietta, 120 miles north of Cairo.

The siege was the last pathetic move in a doomed campaign. The Byzantine ships dispatched to support the Crusader land force were underprovisioned, already running low when they arrived, and the Jerusalem army refused to share any of its food. Meanwhile, Saladin had no difficulty resupplying Damietta by sea with money, weapons, and stores. He spent, says Ibn al-Athir, “untold sums of money” on Damietta, knowing that if the city fell, the Christians would have a foothold that he might never undo. Rain soaked the Crusader tents for weeks on end; the Byzantine generals quarreled with the Jerusalem commanders over strategy; a score of the anchored Byzantine vessels were destroyed when the Egyptians sent a fireship into their midst. “The feeling was almost unanimous,” writes William of Tyre, “that our toil was being wasted.” After fifty days, the Christians gave up and went home, blaming one another for the loss.
¹²
Once again, crusade had failed.

By 1171, Nur ad-Din felt secure enough in his grasp of Egypt to order that the young caliph’s name be dropped from public prayers; this was equivalent to announcing the overthrow of the Fatimid dynasty. Saladin, whose job it was to enforce this decree, feared public protest. He stalled, argued, and waited. Just as Nur ad-Din was growing angry with him, the caliph fell ill (by all accounts, of natural causes). As he sickened, Saladin sent out letters ordering the change.

No one in the young caliph’s family told him of his de facto deposition. “ They said, ‘If he recovers, then he will get to know,’ ” writes Ibn al-Athir, “‘but if he is to die, it is not right to distress him with this turn of events before he does.’ He died on the day of ‘Ashura [September 13, 1171], still unaware.”
¹³

The Fatimid caliphate, which had ruled in North Africa since 909, was done; and although Nur ad-Din now claimed Egypt, Saladin was its true ruler. In the next years, the common cause that was supposed to unite them would prove even more fragile than the unity of faith between the Crusader kingdoms and Constantinople.

*
In 1159, the Byzantine emperor Manuel I took control of the remmants of Antioch.

*
This is a deliberate simplification of a much more complicated set of circumstances that also involved an internal struggle between Shawar and a rival for the viziership, Dirgham. The end result was the same: the Crusaders retreated, and Shawar found himself dealing with Shirkuh’s ambitions instead of Dirgham’s.

*
Manuel may have proposed the expedition first, but William of Tyre believed that Amalric originated the idea; it is impossible to know for sure.

Chapter Sixteen

Monks and Brahmans

Between 1150 and 1189,
the king of Sri Lanka takes control of both his island and its monasteries,
and a Hindu prophet tries to bring new power to the people

J
UST OFF THE SOUTHERN TIP
of the Indian subcontinent, a Buddhist hero was crowned king.

A century earlier, the island of Sri Lanka had been dominated by the empire of the Chola: the greatest southern Indian empire that had ever existed, a rich kingdom that stretched east all the way to the islands of Java and Sumatra and north as far as the Narmada river. The Chola king was a devotee of the Hindu god Shiva; temples to Shiva and
lingams
—seamless pillars with no features, representing the all-encompassing, transcendent essence of Shiva—dotted the massive expanses of Chola land.

That land had reached its greatest extent in the late eleventh century. And then, bits of it had begun to flake away. Off the southern coast, a rebel named Vijaya Bahu had declared himself king of the entire island; Chola troops, crossing the water, managed to retake the north, but Vijaya Bahu held on to the south until his death.

His sons and grandsons ruled after him, but the island remained splintered even after the Chola abandoned their claim. The ancient chronicle of Sri Lanka’s kings,
The Mahavansa
, laments that Vijaya Bahu’s descendants “divided the land among themselves and possessed it in portions.” The largest Sri Lankan kingdom was centered at Vijaya Bahu’s own capital city, Polonnaruwa; other royal cousins ruled in the Southern Country and in the smaller realm of Ruhuna.
¹

Around the middle of the century, a nephew of the ruling sovereign of Ruhuna began to grow restless. His name was Parakrama Bahu; he was also nephew to the Southern Country sovereign, and cousin of the king in Polonnaruwa. He could expect, eventually, to inherit one of these territories. But
The Mahavansa
tells us that Parakrama was more ambitious than this; the thought of ruling over a single principality made him restless, and he hoped “to make the whole island graceful by bringing it under the canopy of one dominion.”
²

16.1 The Island of Sri Lanka

He intrigued with one uncle, fought against the other, and convinced his cousin to make him heir. By 1153, he had gained the crowns of all three kingdoms, and for the first time in centuries Sri Lanka was united under a single ruler.

In over thirty years of reign, Parakrama managed to combine carefully targeted practical renovations with canny religious reform. He lowered taxes (a highly popular move) and channeled the remaining revenues into cleaning up and restoring the irrigation systems that made Sri Lanka fertile. (“In a country like this,” he is said to have remarked to his ministers, “not even the smallest bit of rain ought to be allowed to flow into the ocean without profiting man.”) Canals and causeways that had fallen into disrepair were cleaned out and rebricked. He ordered a small reservoir on the outskirts of the city enlarged and combined with other storage tanks, creating a massive new reservoir that became known as the Sea of Parakrama, and on an artificial island in its center he built a beautiful three-story palace that overlooked the new waters. Near the northern town of Mannar, he had an even larger reservoir built: the Giant’s Tank, an engineering feat that produced a massive artificial lake with completely man-made embankments on a sloping plain. The Giant’s Tank turned the dry, salty north of the island into an area so fertile that it is still known today as the Rice Bowl.
³

16.1 The Giant’s Tank
.
Credit: © 2009 Dhammika Heenpella / Images of Sri Lanka

None of this work was cheap, but the resulting crops balanced out the expense:

He drained great marshes and bogs, and made the water discharge itself into rivers, and formed paddy fields, and gathered together a store of grain. . . . Thus did this wise ruler make the revenue that was obtained from the new paddy fields alone to be greater than the revenue which had been derived from the old paddy fields in the [entire] kingdom; and when he had accomplished this he made the country so prosperous that the inhabitants should never know the evils of famine.
⁴

The sequel to
The Mahavansa
credits Parakrama Bahu with building (or rebuilding) 165 dams, nearly 4,000 canals, and nearly 2,500 reservoirs.
⁵

His religious reforms were equally energetic.

Parakrama’s ancestor Vijaya Bahu, driving away the Hindu occupiers, had ruled his new kingdom as a Buddhist king. In the century since, Buddhist temples and monasteries had risen to replace the Shiva shrines. The most magnificent of these temples was the home of the Buddha’s Tooth; the tooth, said to be one of the seven unburned relics that survived the Buddha’s cremation, had been brought to the island in the fourth century and been kept safe from the Hindu regime. Parakrama himself had fought for the Buddha’s Tooth, taking it away from a rival ruler in his battle to unify the island and enshrining it in his capital city.
⁶

But the Buddhism of the island was still interlaced with Hindu practice, and its monks and priests were divided and quarreling. Three
nikayas
, or monastic orders, struggled for dominance in the capital. They feuded over the rules of monasticism, the interpretation of Buddhist scriptures, and control of the temples. Parakrama’s kingdom had barely begun its existence as a single nation, and for the monks, who were the heart of the country’s religious practice, to remain divided into three parts would only serve to drive wedges into the barely joined fractures between the old three nations.

Seeking help, Parakrama Bahu turned to Mahakassapa, the senior monk at a nearby forest monastery. Forest monasteries had a character different from that of city or village monasteries; the monks tended to be more austere, less interested in political wrangling, stricter in practice. Forest monasteries were places of quiet meditation, not loud conflict; in the forest, removed from the centers of power, the monks were thought to gain a detachment and clarity that was missing from the bustling, wealthy monasteries of the cities.
⁷

In 1165, acting on Mahakassapa’s advice, Parakrama Bahu summoned the leaders of all three
nikayas
to a council. There he declared that as king—his sacred right to rule proven by his victories over his enemies and by his protection of the Buddha’s Tooth—he would abolish all three monastic orders. Instead, there would be only two kinds of monks:
gamavasin
and
arannavasin
, village dwellers and forest dwellers. To prevent quarreling, he himself would act as head of the practice of Buddhism in his country. The monks would no longer debate the final interpretation of scriptures; instead, he himself, with Mahakassapa as his advisor, would decide on the correct ways of understanding the canonical laws. Together they would produce an official
katikavata
, a royal lawbook laying out exactly how Buddhism should be practiced; and this would have the same force as divine law.
⁸