CYIL vol. 14 (2023)

PUNSARA AMARASINGHE CYIL 14 (2023) In general, the Iberian view of law was dominated by its divine creation that undermined any attempt of consolidating the legal making process by a one ruler, but it was a capacity extended to different corpora as all of them stood for the concept of “ iurisdictio ”. 10 Portuguese utilized the same model in their global quest of imperial building. Following the Castilian principle of “ Audiencias ” in the late medieval period, that represented the juridical order of the kingdom, the Portuguese in their overseas occupied territories transferred the centrality of law into the hands of the officials by allowing them to declare the law that included entering into treaties and issuing the decrees. Regarding the mechanism adopted by the Portuguese in its overseas expeditions, Hespanha states “Outside of the king’s jurisdiction, relations with foreigners and foreign rulers, with allied potentates through “Amistad ” (friendship) and with enemies were also regulated by “ius gentium”, creating different sets of norms that, though beyond the power of the monarch, were not foreign to the unitary framework of the juridical order of the ancien regime.” 11 Early Portuguese encounters in Sri Lanka The gap between Vasco de Gama’s arrival in Calicut in 1498 and the Portuguese landing in Sri Lanka under Lorenzo de Almeida in 1505 was seven years. The ostensible gap of this relatively brief period strengthened the Portuguese venture as a technologically powerful European power to confront all its adversaries in the Indian Ocean. In the advent of Portuguese presence in Sri Lanka, the island’s internal political stability was at stake due to a serious of internal power struggles that encompassed the chief polity called “Kingdom of Kotte”. The eclipse of Kotte before the Portuguese arrival in Sri Lanka resulted in the emergence of rebellious regional polities in Sri Lanka such as Kandy and Jaffna, but kingdom of Kotte did not completely lose its political significance by the time Portuguese reached the Sri Lankan shore. The monopoly of cinnamon trade was under the Muslim merchants in the West coast of Sri Lanka as their commercial interests were harboured by Kotte rulers for a longer period of time. Also, it should be noted that the despite the serendipitous nature of Almeida’s arrival in Sri Lanka, Portuguese were not unaware of the strategic significance of the country and probably well briefed on it from the sources available in Calicut and Cochin which were centers of Muslim trade with it. However, the initial objectives of the Portuguese ventures in Sri Lanka contained no explicit ambition of a territorial acquisition and their visit to the island was not differ from other merchants from Middle East and China except the fact that Portuguese were bearing fire arms. The status of Kotte as a powerful polity was ebbing under a weak leadership of its old king Dharma Parakramabahu who showed an amicable sign to receive Portuguese. 12 Fernao Cotrim happened to be the first envoy sent by the Portuguese to discuss with the king of Kotte, where Cotrim clearly explained the attitude taken up by the Portuguese towards the potentates whose territories they visited: their only desire, he 10 SAAVEDRA, M. B., Jurisdictional Autonomy and the Autonomy of Law: End of Empire and the Functional Differentiation of Law in the 19 th Century Latin America, Legal History , Vol. 26, 325–337, 2018. 11 HESPANIA, A. Early Modern Law and the Anthropological Imagination of Old European Culture, Global Jurist , Vol.4, No.1, 2017. 12 DE SILVA, C. R. Portuguese Kotte , Colombo: Gunasena, 1956, p. 40.

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