When Sena V took over his father's throne in 991 CE, his kingdom was running on borrowed time - and had barely ten more years of life to it. At this late stage, there was little if anything either he or his successor, his son Mahinda V, could have done to avoid their fate. The seeds of their doleful destiny had been sewn as far back as 6791 CE when their illustrious Lambakanna ancestor, Manavanna, had secured his throne with the aid of the Indian Pallava dynasty. The military assistance and subsequent alliance had won him a throne, but at the cost of enlisting Sri Lanka in whatever was going on in southern India, where five dynasties were fighting one another for dominance.

Sometime around 800 CE, Mahinda II replaced the old Pallava friendship pact with one with their enemies, the Pandyans, a choice that seemed sensible at the time but was to prove his dynasty's undoing. It was to prove the wrong choice in every way, for just waiting in the wings was a third dynasty ready to emerge from the gloom of anonymity as the ultimate warrior. In about 847 CE, Vijayalaya, a Chola warlord of otherwise unremarkable obscurity, emerged out of the chaos caused by the Pandyan and Pallava wars and seized the great city of Thanjavur. It was the start of a celebrated and pugnacious dynasty. He would go on to inflict many defeats on the two older kingdoms and, bit by bit, his successors rolled up the whole of southern India.

Around 897 CE, the Pallava kingdom began its slow fall to the Chola kings, beginning with Aditya I. By 915 CE Parantaka I, had captured its capital Madurai. The Pandyan king fled into exile in Sri Lanka, and the Chola took over the most of his lands. The Chola kingdom itself suffered a series of reversals until, in 958 CE, King Parantaka II recovered most of his lost lands and annexed large sections of the Pandyan kingdom. Most of the remaining Pandyan lands were captured soon after by his son, Uttama. By the mid-980s, the Chola dynasty, under Rajaraja I, had become the only show in town. Ancient inscriptions, known as the Larger Leiden plates, relate how Rajaraja "conquered the Pandya, Tulu, Kerala, Simhalendra and Satyashraya ; destroyed ships at Kandalur-Salai , captured Vengi, Gangapadi, Nulambapadi, Tadigaipadi, Kudamalainadu, Kollam, Kalingam, and removed the splendour of the Pandyas."

Rajaraja, known not without cause as “the Great,” reigned from 985 to 1014 and internationalised his kingdom. From Goa to Andhra Pradesh, much of India was under him and his son, Rajendra I; the Indian Ocean Trading Zone, from the western Arabian Sea to Vietnam, was transformed into a Chola lake, with the kings dominating, influencing, or directly ruling much of everything in between – including Sri Lanka.

At the heart of the Chola’s expansion lay a wholly reimagined view of naval power. Star charts, wind and monsoon patterns were calculated to improve navigation and mapping, and a spy network was set up among merchants and other mariners to deliver intelligence to Chola military planners. Boat-building technology was improved and different woods identified for different parts of their boats – teak for hull strength, bamboo for the flexible sections, and ironwood for parts most exposed to salt. Their new ships could carry up to 200 soldiers in multi-decks over 200 feet long and furnished with specialised ramming heads and compartmentalised storage areas. Smaller, faster ships were developed to outflank the enemy; others to serve as more effective scout ships, and still others to provide support and munitions. A Crescent Formation was developed to devastate the enemy, using the navy as if it were a single, vast, curved simitar. The Chola adapted Byzantine fire, creating their own recipes using coconut oil, sulphur, and tree resins, and adapted catapults, fire arrows, and other projective devices to hurl flames far and wide. Sailors were specially trained in ship-to-ship combat drills, including siege techniques to break coastal forts. Given such attention to detail it was hardly surprising, therefore, that when either Rajaraja I or Rajendra set their mind to achieve something, it happened.

When Mahinda IV died in 991 CE after a long 16 years trying to restore the rule of law in his kingdom, whilst simultaneously seeing off at least two Indian invasions, one of them a Chola enterprise, his successor was his 12-year-old son, Sena V. This was no time for the office junior, however royal he was, to be in charge, and inevitably, pandemonium broke out almost at once. Advised rather poorly by his mother, he had the brother of his main general executed, prompting a full-scale rebellion, with the aggrieved general calling up a large band of Tamil mercenaries who set about looting the kingdom.

Peace emerged only when the hapless king accepted his general's ongoing counsel. The emasculated young king turned his mind to more pleasurable distractions. As the Culavamsa puts it – “but while now the Ruler of Lanka had his abode there his low class favourites who obtained no leave from their teacher to drink sura, praised in his presence the advantages of drinking intoxicating liquors and induced the Ruler to drink. After taking intoxicating drinks, he was like a wild beast gone mad. As he could no longer digest food, the Ruler had to surrender the dearly-won place and died in the tenth year of his reign, still youthful in years.”

Ever eager to point out the moral of any story, the Chronicle went on to observe, “When they see from this that the yielding to evil friends leads to destruction, let those who seek their highest good here or hereafter, avoid such evil friends as a snake full of deadly poison.” “Things, Howard Jones wrote in his hit song in 1985, “can only get better.” But this was not the experience of Sena’s successor and brother, Mahinda V, who was to live out the horror of Murphy's alternative law for his whole reign: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."

It little helped that Mahinda inherited a threadbare realm in 982 CE. “Splendid Anuradhapura,” wrote the Culavamsa sorrowfully, “was full of strangers”, and mercenaries washed up by the disasters of the previous reign. The state's coffers were bare, its peasants recalcitrant, and the new king himself not up to the task. Within the first paragraph of its description of his reign, the Culavamsa pulls no punches, saying of its new overlord, “he wandered from the path of statecraft and was of very weak character; the peasants did not deliver him his share of the produce.” Soon enough, he had “entirely lost his fortune and was unable to satisfy his troops by giving them their pay.”

The new kings' rule effectively ended in 993 CE with the first sacking of Anuradhapura, though its formal end dragged on a little longer. But in these roughly 10 years of rule before the curtains began to fall, calamity piled upon catastrophe, misadventure upon misfortune, and farce upon fiasco. At its heart lay not just a weak and incompetent central government but also a country awash with mutinous mercenary Tamil soldiers.

The kingdom was bankrupt. The heavy taxes Mahinda levied backfired, prompting even more revolts. As the Culavamsa records, “All the Keralas who got no pay planted themselves one with another at the door of the royal palace, determined on force, bow in hand, armed with swords and other weapons, with the cry 'So long as there is no pay he shall not eat.” But the King duped them. Taking with him all his movable goods, he escaped by an underground passage and betook himself in haste to Rohana.”

And just as everything was imploding, “a horse-dealer who had come hither from the opposite coast, told the Chola King on his return about the conditions in Lanka.” Rajaraja I wasted no time, assembling h...