Blog Archives

Kandyan armies which kept Europeans at bay for two centuries-P K Balachandran King Rajasinha II receives the Dutch Ambassador Source:Dailymirror The Kandyan army also had local Malays and Kaffirs (Africans) and also Indians like Malabars, Tamils, Telugus, and Canarese (Karnatakas).  There was also an assortment of European deserters and prisoners. These mercenaries also served in the armies of European powers The Kandyan Kingdom’s dogged resistance to European invaders from the 17th Century to the second decade of the 19th Century has not received the attention it deserves from military historians, laments historian Dr. Channa Wickremesekera, the author of “Kandy at War: Indigenous Military Resistance to European Expansion in Sri Lanka 1594-1818” Kandy was but a small, landlocked, sparsely populated place in central Sri Lanka surviving on subsistence agriculture and without any other material resources. But it had kept at bay, and inflicted heavy casualties on, better armed and trained Portuguese, Dutch ...