Sinhala army in the 16th and 17th Centuries
KAMALIKA PIERIS
There was a corp of trained war elephants in the Sinhala army. These
elephants were trained to slash the enemy with swords held in their
trunks. They had steel points in sockets fitted to tusks. They carried
on their backs turret like shelters filled with soldiers.
 They were used to batter down walls as well. Rajasinha I had a
formidable corp of 200 war elephants, ‘making his army very difficult to
match on level ground’. They were used against Portuguese musket men in
open battle.
The Portuguese were terrified of these elephants and Portuguese
writers record their charges with horror.
Rajasinha used them in his two sieges of Kotte and also at
Mulleriyawa. The names of some of the war elephants used at Mulleriyawa
are mentioned in Rajavaliya.
The Portuguese introduced the Sinhalese to new weapons, particularly
guns and cannon. The Sinhalese promptly added these new weapons to the
ones they already had and fought using both old and new.weapons. They
responded to the new weapons very quickly. They got down muskets from
India for their first war against the Portuguese in 1521. By 1539, the
Sinhalese had their own muskets and field artillery. They used plenty of
muskets and cannon when they besieged Kotte.in 1557 and at Randeniwela,
(1630) at least a thousand soldiers had muskets.
Continuous warfare helped the Sinhalese to become adept in using the
new weapons. Queyroz says Sinhala soldiers could fire at night and
extinguish lighted matches. They could fire five consecutive bullets
into the same spot and at 60 paces they could split the bullet on a
knife blade. New departments were created in the army to accommodate the
new units. There was Vadana tuvakku regiment for musketeers, Kodituvakku
regiment for the foot muskets and Vedikkara regiment for the artillery.
Commanding officers were appointed to these regiments, such as
Kodituvakku lekam. There was also the vedi beheth maduwa.
The Portuguese built walled forts defended by cannon. The Sinhalese
followed and constructed similar forts. Pieris says the Sinhala forts
built in 1559 were a strong check on the Portuguese. He also says that
when the Portuguese dismantled such a fort, they found that it had been
constructed with considerable skill.
The writings of T B H. Abeyasinghe, C R. Boxer, C R. de Silva, Haris
de Silva, P E P Deraniyagala, V L B Mendis, C Gaston Perera, Edmund
Peries, P E Pieris and Ralph Pieris were used for this essay. |
