16. Bagan - City of Temples

Towards the end of the 13th century, around the year 1293, the Venetian explorer and adventurer Marco Polo was traveling through Southeast Asia in the region of what is now Myanmar or Burma. Marco Polo had spent much of the last 20 years traveling the Asian continent on a remarkable series of voyages along the ancient route known as the Silk Road and had recently worked for the Mongol emperor of China, a man named Kublai Khan, impressed by this foreign visitor, the emperor had appointed Marco Polo ambassador and was now travelling. Through the forested mountains of southwestern China that now border Myanmar, he passed through these jungle hills filled with bamboo forests and shady groves and then descended into a wide river valley filled with wild animals, leaving the Cardandan province, enters a vast decline. that you travel without variation for two and a half days during which you do not find a room, then you arrive at a spacious plane.

Further south, towards the edge of India, is the

city

of Mee yen, the journey takes 15 days. through a very unpopulated country with forests where elephants, rhinoceroses and other wild beasts abound where there is no appearance of habitation in this country, many large elephants and beautiful wild oxen were found with fallow deer and other animals in great abundance but finally after In less than two weeks, Marco Polo came across a great

city

and it was a city that, despite everything he had seen on his travels, still stood out to him for its size and magnificence, a city where more than 4,000 golden

temples

raised their spiers towards the sky. the evening air over the plain of the river valley, after the 15-day journey that has been mentioned, you reach the city of miyan, which is large and magnificent and the capital of the Kingdom, the inhabitants are idolaters and have a peculiar language.

He related that in this country a rich and powerful monarch formally reigns, the city that Marco Polo called miyan had fallen on difficult times, everywhere the houses were abandoned and the

temples

had fallen into disuse and disrepair, there would have been signs of war, hungry and displaced. people in the streets, but above these pitiful sites the golden shrines of the city rose and bore witness to his former magnificence, and of all these two enormous temples stood out in particular as his death approached. The King gave orders to erect in the place of his internment at the head and foot of the Sepulcher Two pyramidal towers entirely of marble, ten steps high, of a proportionate volume and each one ending in a ball, one of these pyramids was covered with a gold plate an inch thick, so that nothing but the gold was visible and the other with a silver plate of the same thickness around the balls hung small gold and silver bells that rang when moved.

Due to the wind, the hole formed a splendid object. Years later, he would return to Italy and fall on the wrong side of a war between the city-states of Genoa and Venice and the Genoese would imprison him. He would share his cell with a writer called Rusticello of Pisa, who was very impressed with Polo's Tales of his Travels. While waiting in prison for the war to end, the two worked to clarify Polo's memories and write them down in vivid detail with what many scholars consider a surprisingly high degree of accuracy and authenticity, along with the rusticello writer Marco Polo who would become the first outsider to write a description of a city at the heart of an empire we know today by the name of Bagan that for centuries had united the lands of Myanmar and presided over a boom in art and architecture building one of the collections of religious monuments more surprising.

The buildings the world had ever seen, the Bagan Empire had flourished and survived and then, in an instant, its golden age was over, its people were gone and its great temples had slowly fallen into ruins. My name is Paul Cooper and you are listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast in each episode I look at the civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of History. I want to ask what they had in common, what led to his downfall, and what it felt like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of his world in this episode.

I want to tell one of the most colorful stories of civilization survival: the story of the Bagan Empire of medieval Myanmar. I want to show how this Kingdom arose in the Irawadi River. valley of central Myanmar and built one of the most notable series of monuments to have survived anywhere in the world. I want to show what life was like for the people who lived there and what happened to cause its sudden and complete collapse into the modern country of Myanmar. It is today the largest nation by continuous land mass in Southeast Asia. It is the size of Texas and almost three times the size of the United Kingdom.

Myanmar borders India to the west and China to the east and its lands extend between the Arakan, Pagu and Chin mountain ranges and Shan Yoma between the bony peaks of these mountain ranges that run like a series of thorns from north to south to Throughout the country flow the Chindwin Schwali Namai and Mali rivers, many of these rivers begin in the Himalayan glaciers of upper Burma and all flow down through the Gorges of the high mountains and join the watercourse largest of all in a wide and sinuous flow. This is the Great Irawadi River. The name of the Erawadi River derives from the Sanskrit name Airavati, a legendary white elephant with four tusks and the Seven Trunks which in Hindu mythology are the trusted mount of the god Indra and it is not difficult to see why the river deserves this great and mythical name: The Irawadi River meanders for more than two thousand kilometers through the dry zone of Burma through palm forests and scrublands.

In these lands and around the Sandy Islands, the river is also one of the widest in Asia and at times during the rainy season it can rise to almost a kilometer. These floods can be so dramatic that for millennia the people of Burma have built houses along the river atop tall bamboo stilts allowing the flood waters to rise beneath them. At the end of the river's journey, the irawadi bifurcates into a wide delta of mangrove forests, swamps and meandering streams where it finally empties into the Southern Ocean, the general center of the river's course is an arid heartland that is known as the dry zone of Myanmar, as it receives a relatively small amount of rain every year.

The mountains surrounding this wide basin on three sides absorb much of the moisture that holds the clouds in like a great wall, but rain falls instead. the hills and this rainwater then flows down through the Great Irawadi River, this means that as long as you stay close to the river, in the dry zone there is never a lack of water since humans first arrived in Myanmar, people have flocked in people on the banks of this river made their living by growing rice and building their cities. The first cultures we have evidence of arrived in Myanmar around 11,000 BC.

C. and around 1500 BC. C. the people of the region were already turning copper into bronze, growing rice, and domesticating chickens and pigs. He would be among the first in the world to raise these animals for food around the year 500 BC. C. iron was worked in the region is the earliest history the rivers have also been roads the people of Myanmar have always built boats often rafts made of strong and light Burmese bamboo that grows everywhere along the banks of the streams and on the lower hills or more refined barges made of teak wood. The teak tree has been adapted to contain a large amount of natural oil, giving it exceptional water resistance.

The teak that grows in Burma is so abundant that it has been used to make enormous buildings such as bridges that have lasted almost 200 years. A famous bridge called Ube spans more than a kilometer across Lake Tau Taman and is made up of more than a thousand teak wood pillars driven into the lake bed. People here even build floating islands. Gardens that rise and fall with the water level and that for centuries have turned the surface of the lake into productive agricultural land. If people wanted to travel south, they could easily float their boats down the river, but the prevailing winds also blew from south to north, which meant it was also possible to sail against the current, making it relatively easy to travel in both directions. along the river.

The Irawadi River was so conceptually important to the history of this region that people in Burma rarely spoke of the country in terms of North and South but instead used the words Anya and akie upstream and downstream. A traditional Burmese poet describes the arrival of summer in erawadi valley landscape as the hot season rebels against the cold in the contrast pattern the sky becomes cloudy and the winds It's hot again, it's summer the leaves of the trees turn yellow as they fall to show new leaves, the stems twist or break, but the buds on the Tama trees are now soft green like parrot eggs, while in summer the trees are thirsty in the Foothills, the tars and flowers climb the Tapia trees if they use fragrance.

Mixing with the air that floats at dusk, the pheasant crows coo and from afar the notes of the cuckoo come from time to time. The thunder beats across the expanses of the sky like lambara and the drums of Indie and I, oh, think of the water poured on the Bodhi tree and of the absent companion in the Golden Palace of victory and I am in foreign mourning like many languages ​​in Southeast Asia, the Burmese language has different levels of register depending on how educated or formal you must be and the land itself has different names depending on the register that In everyday speech, people most commonly use the name Bama to describe the country and its people, while the greatest and most poetic name is Myanmar.

Both names have been used together for centuries when the country became a British colony and the colonial government. used the informal name Burma, which is the name the British first heard used by ordinary sailors and merchants, but in 1989 the military dictatorship then ruling the country officially changed the name to the grander name Myanmar due to this complicated history in Myanmar today. The issue of the country's name has deep-rooted controversies, but in this episode I will follow the lead of the majority of the Burmese people and use both names interchangeably depending on the context. Foreign stage in which the history of the Bagan Empire would unfold in the dry zone. of the country surrounded on all sides by mountains and irrigated by the Great River Highway, the erawadi for much of the history of this region, whoever controlled the dry zone controlled the rest of the country, so it was also a land soaked in blood of the conflict. two main sources of the events that occurred in Myanmar during the medieval period, the first of them are the inscriptions left carved in stone in many temples and other buildings that the kings left to celebrate their exploits and the second of these sources are the so-called Chronicles of Burma, these Chronicles are a diverse collection of documents written over many centuries by monks and scholars on different materials, some are written on paper made from the Siamese bush or mulberry paper glued on very long sheets and folded in the shape of an accordion, While others are written on palm leaves or even carved on stone tablets, the earliest surviving Chronicle was written in the 13th century during the Bagan era.

The so-called mahayazawan or great Chronicle was completed several centuries later, in the year 1724, and was followed almost a century later. by the tet yazawan or new Chronicle that attempted to square some of the contradictions between the Chronicles and the stone inscriptions, as its author writes in his introduction, there are Chronicles written by ancient scholars, but in those Chronicles written by ancient scholars there are some matters that Not in accordance with the inscriptions, like many similar historical documents, these Chronicles were paid for by the kings and produced under their supervision and are instruments of official propaganda. They are also full of exaggeration, poetic license and mythology, especially in the early stages of Burmese history.

They truly include ridiculous exaggerations about the size of armies that often describe battles involving tens of millions of soldiers and frequently include the colorful appearances of ogres, ghosts, demons, demons and magicians along with countless figures from Burmese mythology, but In all their fantastic presentation, these Chronicles can be combined with official inscriptions. To preserve relatively precise dates and events and also preserve the folklore and traditional memory of the people in the year 1829, King Bhagya Dao of Burma commissioned a committee of scholars to write a Chronicle of the Burmese Kings that would act as the final complete version. . edition gathered them in the gleaming front wing of his residence known as the Crystal Palace and told themHe ordered them to get to work.

The king of the law, seeing the many discrepancies and repetitions in the previous Chronicles, thought about the matter, convinced that a Chronicle of Kings should be the standard and not a thing of contradictory and false statements. He assembled his ministers and ecclesiastical teachers in the Front Chamber of the Palace, which was variegated with various gems and a suitable place for the most exalted personages, and caused the chronicle to be purified. Comparing it with other Chronicles and a series of inscriptions against each other and adopting the truth in the light of reason and traditional books, this document full of tangents and footnotes would come to be known as the Chronicle of the Crystal Palace, a Despite its complicated nature, it is a remarkable text that gives us a real insight into how the inhabitants of ancient Bagan felt and thought about their lives and the world around them, as well as the birth of their empire.

The origins of the people who first spoke the Burmese language are shrouded in mystery. Chronicles claim that a line of kings dates back to the 2nd century, but modern scholars and archaeologists consider this extremely unlikely. A more plausible account traces the history of this town to the early 9th century and the powerful Kingdom called Nanchao, the power of Nanchao ruled the area across the mountains to the east into what is today. the elevated province of Yunnan in western China for years the kings of nanchao had set their sights on the rich erawadi river valley the year was 8 32. throughout the world at this time the Byzantine Empire the last remaining part of what had been the The Roman Empire was fighting for its life against increasingly confident Arab empires inspired by the young religion of Islam in the Mayan lowlands of southern Mexico.

The last king of the towering city of Copán, a man named, was commissioning a stone monument that would never be finished because his entire society was collapsing under the pressures of drought and war and the population was fleeing the city in what which today is France. King Pepin I of Accutane and his brother Louis the German rebelled against their father, the Frankish emperor Louis the Pious, son of Charlemagne, and in the mountains of southern China the armies of Nanchao marched to conquer the lands of Burma at that time. The society that occupied the dry zone around the Erawadi was a people who are remembered as the bank exactly who the banks were and what they called themselves.

I have no idea, it seems they spoke a Sino-Tibetan family language and lived in a loosely connected group of five city-states in the Erawadi Valley. Their culture was heavily influenced by trade with India in previous centuries. They had imported Buddhism. as well as other Indian cultural concepts, architectural styles and political structures, and had based their writing system on the Indian Brahmi script. A 9th century Chinese text known as the Manchu or Book of Southern Barbarians records Chinese impressions of this land and the Pew people. Those who lived there, south of the city of Yongchang, first pass beyond the lands of the Tang Empire, to the blue jungles of Phoenix, then to the vast skies, and then to the glades, there are huge rivers and settlements.

They live in multi-story houses without the city walls sometimes painting their teeth. always wearing fabrics not treated with rats and using red silk fabrics wrapped around the top bun and other hair hanging behind decoratively. Peacocks nest in nearby trees and elephants are as large as water buffaloes. The locals usually raise elephants to till the soil. fields and burned their dung for fuel, Nanchao armies marched through the narrow forest-covered mountain passes and swept across the Burmese lowlands in a series of devastating raids, carrying off loot and slaves in the tenth year of their genuine era. Nan Chao sought out and attacked them on the 21st day of the 12th month of the third year of the Xi'an Tong era on the cliffs of the Suli River, between 2000 and 3000 masked soldiers, according to ancient sources, the Nanchao deported many thousands of people from the Pew who lived and farmed in this fertile valley and were sent into slavery among the troops of nanchao was a group of cavalry warriors from a people known as the miyan, a small ethnic tribe of the high plateaus who spoke an ancestor of what would become the Burmese language but these troops dreamed of following their own path and once they tasted freedom in the Erawadi Valley they had no desire to return to Nanchao, accustomed to life on the plateaus of the northern Rocky Mountains, the Burma's arid plains were a familiar ecology to them and with the native population there devastated by Nancha raids, their lands were there for the taking, the Myan broke away from the kingdom of Nanchao and decided to settle in this new land and would eventually found a kingdom.

There, other historians question that the Burmese speakers already existed in the valley and that they were part of the Piau people and had nothing to do with the Nancha raids, but as with everything in these early stages of The Chronicles, we are left with a nebulous fog of contradictions and uncertainties and the answer. In reality, it may have been a mix of both on the other side of the world, at the same time, Norsemen from Scandinavia arrived in large numbers on the eastern shores of England, sometimes as raiders, sometimes as settlers, and sometimes as refugees. , and during the following century.

They would come to overthrow the Saxon kingdoms that ruled there and, in doing so, would implant a distinctly Norse character in the people of England and in the English language that emerged from them. I think it is possible that the Burmese people settled in the Irrawadi Valley. may have arrived in equally complex circumstances and formed a similar hybrid culture with the people who lived there with much of this matter hidden in the fog of history what we can say with some certainty is that around the year 849 just 17 years later from the given date Due to the Nanchao raids, the Mian built a world fortress at a place on the eastern bank of the Erawadi River, a place that would later come to be known as Bagan.

The location chosen for the city of Bagan owed much to the geography of the land around it. It appears to have been built on the ruins of an earlier settlement belonging to the Pew people and stood at a considerable bend in the meandering course of the Irrawadi River. The settlement had easy access to water and was surrounded by countryside that would be the most fertile. and productive of all of Myanmar for the next 500 years, part of the reason for this was the violent geological history of the region. About 50 kilometers southeast of Bagan was a large dormant volcano called Mount Papa, this volcanic cone covered in thick forests and shady bamboo groves is a sacred place, but for centuries it has been the focal point of worship for the people of Burma.

To the southwest of Mount Pope is Town Car Lot or Pedestal Hill, a surprising volcanic plug with steep sides that rises more than 650 meters above sea level and where a Buddhist monastery is located. Mount Papa has long been believed to be the home of powerful spirits that the Burmese call mosquitoes, and the cult of these spirits has always existed alongside Buddhist religious practices in a complex relationship, while this towering mountain towers above the wooded landscape below. The plain has long captured people's imagination and religious sensibilities. It is also partly due to the success of their partnership.

The ash spewed out by volcanoes during their eruptions is rich in elements such as iron, magnesium and potassium minerals, which are crucial for life. Healthy plant growth When volcanic rock and ash erode and leach into the soil, these elements are released and, combined with the fertility of the silty soil along the river and the abundant water supply, this meant that The soils of this region were immensely productive. and the people of Bagan were able to harvest two Bountiful rice crops per year and grow other crops such as pulses, cucumbers, sesame and millet. At the site they had chosen for their new city, the Mians built a tall, thick brick wall and built it according to the traditions of Buddhist cosmology and numerology.

The inner wall of Bagan was broken by Twelve Gates to represent the twelve signs of the zodiac with four main gates in each of the cardinal directions north, southeast and west of the world area of ​​the city. In fact, it was not huge, just over a square kilometer, but the walls contained only the Palaces of the Kings and the headquarters of their administration. Outside this fortified center, an expanding city would soon grow around it, much of it Built of teak and bamboo which has left few traces in the archaeological record in the mid 10th century there was a king in Bagan, although we do not know the exact names and dates of these early kings.

A 19th century Arab traveler to India and Burma named Suleiman Nadui wrote an account. of the powerful army that defeated the king of Burma they said that when he goes to battle he is accompanied by about 50,000 elephants, he campaigns only in winter, in fact, his elephants cannot stand thirst, so they can only go out in winter, His army, including washermen, is said to have numbered between 10 and 15,000. Thanks to ongoing study of inscriptions, we know the names of at least two kings who ruled around the turn of the first millennium and Kyong P Min, who once were once considered legendary in the year 1004, a Chinese source from the Song dynasty records that an ambassador arrived from what they called the Purul Khan Kingdom, which is believed to refer to Bagan and it appears that this ambassador sought recognition from Song China , which was then considered the great power in the region suggests that the Bagan kingdom now had enough confidence to look outwards and assert itself before its neighbors, but reliable sources about these early kings are extremely scarce and are all mixed with the legend of the The first king of Bagan to emerge from the historical record in Full Color would not arrive for another half century, he was long considered the founder of the Bagan Empire and, although we now know that it probably existed for approximately two centuries before his reign, it is He can say that he is his first great king and certainly the king who would take him to New and Glorious Heights He was a man called Anna Urata The first years of Anaurata's life were one of turmoil and family conflict His father was the king but he had been a usurper On the throne of Bagan after having overthrown the previous king in a rebellion and like most usurpers, Anarata's father lived in constant fear of being overthrown one day, Anurata grew up as a prince in the palace with his two half-brothers. older brothers called Kizo and Sokate, these brothers were actually the children of the previous king, but Anarata's father had adopted them and raised them as his own and so they grew up together, but his older half-brothers, Kizo and Socate, always treated Anarata younger as if he were inferior, something that must have irritated the young prince and it is clear that these two brothers also dreamed of one. day reclaiming some of the glory their adoptive father had stolen from them when he was still a child, Anaurata's treacherous brothers planned a coup to overthrow their now elderly father while the Crystal Palace Chronicle recalls when Kiso and Socrates came of age. old they built a nice monastery. and he said to king Kunsor, come and ask for your blessings from the monastery and the king received no criticism or scrutiny but he listened to them and kizo and Socrates saw the king and threatened him and made him become a monk and spread the rumor everywhere that the king in his zeal for future happiness had become a monk, this palace coup must have scandalized the royal court and, despite the relative frequency of coups of this kind, historians of Burma have a clear opinion on the matter, the Chronicle of the Crystal Palace relates how several bad omens accompanied this shocking act at the moment of its fall a miracle was seen in the Duck Pagoda the Friday star trampled the Moon the Moon made a complete circle in On the second day of growth the Earth trembled for seven days the water stopped.

In the river the brother named Kizo first ruled as king, but the Chronicles remember that one day he was killed by a hunter who mistook him for a deer. He built a royal box in the children's swamps and visited the ten villages of Bangi hunting deer. One day a hunter lay waiting for hunger in the place where they drank water, the king also came to the place to wait for the deer and the hunter did not know it was the king, but he shot with the bow and hit him, who died, he passed through the age of 28 years.

At the time of his death, an ogre laughed for a full half month and threw stones at the palace. After this unfortunate accident, the other traitor brother, Socrates, took the throne and it is perhaps not unreasonable to wonder if this hunter story was accidental. Killing the king could actually be a polite way for the chroniclers to avoid the fact that the new king had his Kizo brother murdered during all this turmoil.and betrayal, the anorata boy seems to have simply carried on with the things he was allowed to do. maintain his royal status at court and live there with his mother and in return he served the two kings who had overthrown his father and taken away the throne that would one day have been his, but when Anarata had turned 30, King Socrates . took things too far, he referred to an aurata at court using the word Nita nangmay, a compound word meaning something like brother son, confused by this aurata, traveled to the monastery where his father had been exiled and asked him what it meant. for the bitter old man.

King, the meaning of this was clear: Socate intended to marry Anurata's mother. Anurata said that word to his father. King Kyung Bu and his father said why he wants to take his mother. That's why he speaks, he was extremely angry and begged for the horse, weapons and equipment. that Sakura gave to her father and her father gave her the arendham alarms the thhilaunta sword the ruby ​​ring and the ruby ​​hairpin it's hard to tell if anarata was really motivated by his mother's honor or if he had been planning this all along and had just done so he found a convenient excuse, whatever the case, Anorato Rose rebelled against his half-brother and fled to the sacred volcano Mount Papa and gathered his forces there.

He gathered the lords and chiefs who were fed up with the brothers' treacherous antics and then marched towards the capital of Bagan, the Crystal. Palace Chronicle records what happened next, when he gathered his forces, marched towards Bagan and sent a message to his brother saying: will you renounce the throne or will you fight? And when Socrates heard the words of his younger brother, he became extremely angry. and he replied that his mother's milk is still wet on his lips and she says that she will fight with me so that all my ministers can see. I will fight him man to man on horseback when Anorata heard his brother's words he was glad and when the appointed day came he took the spear and rose that his father had given him and mounted the demon horse and reached the stream of tamati and socate his brother saw him coming and went out to find him and then he said brother anorata.

You, the eldest, hit first and Socrates pushed him with his locks and it didn't reach his body but went through the knob of his chair and when he saw it on football day he was so afraid and trembled then he said brother anorata, your turn. It's over now it's mine, deal with it as best you can and he hit it and impaled it with the sand damlance so that it came in from the front and came out from the back and Socrates' horse ran away with him into the river and there he died. The encounter depicted in the Crystal Palace Chronicle feels like something out of the Arthurian Legends, complete with chivalric duels.

Legendary weapons of great power and the fight to save a woman's honor. It would be foolish to take it at face value as a historical source, but it is so. give us a sense of the turbulent political landscape of medieval Myanmar and what it must have seemed like the clash of great heroic forces the material of medieval romances of myth and poetry with his defeated brother anaurata took the throne the chronicle records that anarata was torn by guilt for the death of his brother and tried to calm his conscience with the construction of large temples and infrastructure works throughout the kingdom.

Anarata could not sleep for six full months because he had killed his elder brother, so Sakura visited him with a dream that said King yes You, witch, to mitigate your evil deed and sin against your elder brother, build many pagodas, monasteries and houses rest and share the credit with your older brother. Devise many Wells ponds, dams, ditches, fields and canals, and share the credit with your big brother. The archaeological evidence does. show that anarato was in fact a prolific builder shortly after coming to the throne in 1044 he marched north to secure the northern border and built 43 forts along the irawadi river the north was traditionally the gateway to burma lands through which all potential conquistadors had previously marched, so it is clear that he was interested in protecting his land from invasion.

King Anarata built his network of fortresses as an armored corridor that protected valuable northern farmland and allowed his armies to move quickly along well-supplied routes. He fortified many of the cities in this region by building strong walls and garrisons, while in the north he also built extensive irrigation canals and improved the existing water infrastructure to make the most of the land's potential and many of the canals and reservoirs he built are still in use today, almost a thousand years later, having secured the north to his satisfaction, the Anarate king turned his attention to the south, the coastal cities of southern Myanmar were a jumble of independent city-states, many of which were They had become rich thanks to the commercial traffic that passed by sea to the lands of India and China.

Passage through the mountains surrounding Myanmar was difficult and so most goods coming into the country flowed through these port cities. Having good farmland was one thing, but if he started he had to keep paying trade tariffs. For these rich port cities could never become the kind of great power that King Anarata clearly dreamed of, according to the Chronicles, he marched south and first besieged the city of Taton, as the Chronicle of the Crystal Palace records, although it is worth worth noting that in his typically exaggerated style. He is probably multiplying the size of the army by at least a factor of a thousand.

He gathered all his brave men and marched over land and water. By water he sent 800,000 ships and 18 million combatants by land. He marched the four generals away from him. in front of him as he marched with the main army in the rear, his land force is said to have contained eight hundred thousand elephants, eight million horses and 18 million combatants. It is said that the line of troops was so long that when the first troops of the army reached the border of that territory, the rearguard had not yet left the capital, as this enormous force would far exceed the population of present-day Burma. and would have constituted about a quarter of the world's total population at the time we can assume this.

It is an exaggeration, but through the exaggeration the Chronicles make it clear that the army was certainly impressive at this strength. He besieged the city of Tartan and after holding out for three months the city capitulated from there, an aurata absorbed several of the other coastal cities. In what was now becoming a true Empire, by this time the city of Bagan had earned the Sanskrit title Arimadana Pura or the city that tramples its enemies. The linking of its capital with these coastal cities meant that Bagan was now connected by sea routes to the great centres. of culture in India and perhaps most importantly with the island of Sri Lanka Sri Lanka is a nation off the coast of southern India and for much of its history has retained a distinctive cultural character.

World Buddhism in its homeland, mainland India, had largely died out at the time, it had survived in Sri Lanka and this island nation had become the heart of an ancient, austere form of Buddhism known as Theravada. These new cultural links would transform Myanmar's culture and religion and bring it into contact with new forms. of religious thought and for King and Aurata newly returned from the battlefields of the South it would provide an irresistible opportunity that was a chance to confront some of their oldest rivals, not an enemy kingdom or empire, but an institution at the heart of his own kingdom.

The Buddhist Church itself for centuries a variety of Buddhism known as Ari Buddhism was the predominant form of religion in Myanmar. Ari Buddhism was a hybrid form of Tibetan Buddhism and was based largely on traditional Burmese beliefs, as a result its practices were quite different than we could imagine a Buddhist monk today, unlike most currents. From Buddhism, the Ari monks grew beards and long hair, wore blue-black robes, died with indigo, drank alcohol and practiced a form of martial arts similar to boxing, rode horses, and even occasionally went to war. They also worshiped the figure of the Naga, a powerful form of snake spirit drawn from Hindu mythology, and built statues representing them in their temples.

Due to their long history in Burma, the Ari monks enjoyed enormous power in the Kingdom of Bagan. They owned vast estates and possessed enormous deposits of wealth. The Mahayazawan or Great Chronicle even records the scandalous claim that the monks were practicing a version of the right of Prima Nocte or First Gentleman by taking the virginity of brides before their wedding nights, hence henceforth the Sons and Daughters of all beginning with and including the king general ministers The administrators of the village at that time when preparing to marry were to be sent to the monks Dusk to give them the flower of their virginity it was said that at dawn they were released and they were allowed to marry the king having matured had become virtuous and was heartbroken to hear and observe such incorrect practices, it is difficult to know whether to take this claim seriously without scholars or if it was a later piece of royal propaganda designed to discredit these monks , but one thing was certain: the monks of Ari were extremely powerful.

And king Anarata had long dreamed of crushing his establishment and remaking the church in a different image, an image more closely under the control of the heir king, Anoratus would find the opportunity to do this when he met a visiting wise man named Shin Arahan, This Shin arahan was From southern Myanmar, the region that Anarata had recently absorbed, the sage had traveled to Sri Lanka and told King Anarata of the merits of the different branches of Buddhism practiced there, a branch that claimed to be the closest to the original teachings of Buddha at this time. It was Taravata Buddhism incubated in the great Sri Lankan cities of Anaradapura and Polonarua.

This variety of Buddhism emphasizes that the priests live simple lives, live by begging, do not eat after noon, reject all intoxicants and do not even touch money, considering the seemingly uncontrollable nature of the Ari monks of Burma for the king. anarata this must have sounded ideal the chronicle of the crystal palace relates the king's conversion as a spiritual epiphany the king was filled with joy and rapture and spoke again when treating him my lord preach to me a little yes but a little of the law preached by the lord master and shin arahan preached the law beginning with things that should not be neglected, then the king's heart was full of firm and immovable Faith.

Faith sank into him as the oil was filtered a hundred times and soaked in cotton a hundred times bothered, perhaps King Anarata was genuinely moved by the teachings of Sage, but it is clear that he also saw an opportunity: if he brought this new branch of Buddhism to his kingdom, could weaken the control of the Ari monks, so King Anarata went to war with the church first, the king pursued the monk's ability to recruit. He enacted new laws that meant that ordinary people were no longer required to give up their young children to become monks as they had been before.

He then changed the law to eliminate the punishment for those who abandoned their life as a monk as a result of many dissatisfied monks simply hung up their robes and slowly went off to do something else. An aurata destroyed the monk's power with all the tools at his disposal. Of course, there were those who fought against the changes. Anarata banished thousands of monks who resisted his reforms. These fled to the nearby volcano of Mount Pope or to the east, to the narrow forested valleys of the Shan Hills and, although they were never completely annihilated, they would never again exercise the same power in the Kingdom to celebrate the conversion of their land and Arata sent a Sent to Sri Lanka and asked quite boldly that his most precious relic, a tooth belonging to the Buddha himself, be sent to Myanmar to be placed in one of its great temples, the Sri Lankans understandably refused, but at the last moment They remembered that they had a spare. and the envoy was sent back to Burma with what they were told was another Buddha tooth, like the small wooden fragments taken from the cross used in the crucifixion of Jesus that turned up in churches throughout medieval Europe.

Buddha's teeth had a way of multiplying. in Southeast Asia according to the needs of the people, but it was good enough for Anarata when the new tooth The relic arrived in the capital by boat, the king himself went into the river to find it was an effective ruler, but to He could also be uncompromising and harsh at times, he was often able to achieve what he wanted in his kingdom. He did this largely at the expense of his popularity and nowhere is this more evident than in the story that is remembered as the tragic romance of his son Kian Sita.great general and had led his father's armies into battle many times and when the people in the Pagu region complained about raiders destroying their homes and stealing their animals, the king sent kiansitter to deal with the situation .

The story goes that the prince dismissed the attackers. and the people of pagu were so grateful that they sent him home with several gifts for the king. Gifts of golden hair belonging to the Buddha and a beautiful young woman named ooh kin meant to be offered to the king as a bride who was on the journey home. Prince Cancer and Ookin fell in love when Anaorata learned of this Arthurian betrayal. She exiled her own son, who was forced to flee across the Myanmar countryside and into hiding. This story with its betrayal of Forbidden Love and its dramatic ending has proven irresistible to generations of playwrights, composers and poets in Myanmar But ultimately it seems that this uncompromising nature would ultimately lead to the fall of King Anarata on April 11, 1077.

The king was riding around the outskirts of Bagan on the back of his elephant. The Chronicles record that a tree spirit that the king had previously displeased appeared in the guise of a wild buffalo and gored him to death and then demons carried away his body so that he would never be found. It is much more likely that the king's unpopularity eventually got the better of him and he was ambushed and murdered by a group of rivals who made sure no evidence of his crime remained, the Chronicles remember his death with great pain, so this Noble King full of Glory, power of arm and Dominion who during 33 full years of Royal Prosperity had advanced the well-being of the religion, his own well-being and that of the generations of his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren died at the age of 75 approximately in the moment of his death bees clinging to the throne door of the palace an ogre laughed from the top of the gate of tarabar and The shine of the royal sword faded and a vulture alighted on the palace after the death of the great king Anarata .

His sons Saulu took the throne at the age of 26. Although he was not particularly young by royal standards, he would soon obtain the title of Min Lou. Lin or the boy King due to his inexperienced and naive style of ruling, after only five years of mismanagement of the Kingdom, faced a rebellion in the South among the Mon people who lived in the coastal cities that his father had conquered there. for the first time. The Chronicles recall a rather improbable-sounding version of events in this version of the story. King Saulu lost in a game of dice with one of his nobles, a childhood friend named Yaman Khan, and in a fit of rage at losing, he challenged the noble. to rebel against him one day, the king in Yaman Khan played a dice and Yaman won and he stood up and clapped his elbows, said King Sulu, you have won a simple game of dice and you dare to stand up and clap with elbows if you are a man Rebel with pegu his province in truth like Yemen we can, the kings said that the king we should say something other than the truth according to the chronicle Yaman can quickly return to peregu and start a rebellion as the king had suggested, Well, this account may not be exactly true, it probably contains some truth about the character of King Saulu who, from all indications, had a petty and childish nature and appears to have treated the task of ruling as if it were little more than a game he played. now he faces open rebellion.

The childish King Saulu turned. To someone whom his father had exiled long ago for the crime of falling in love with a woman who promised him that he is his half-brother, the romantic hero of songs and poetry, the man named Kian Sita came out of exile and agreed to help the child king lead his armies against the rebellion in the south but King Saulu would prove to have no better judgment on the battlefield than off it and would be deceived. One day by a devious stratagem he camped when they arrived at the island of Pi daughter saying that today is too much.

Late tomorrow we will fight then in the dim light of the moon Yaman Khan came out and provoked them to fight, so they followed him and fought without paying attention or observation and King Saulu thought that an elephant figure sitting in the mud was a royal elephant willing to fight and the royal elephant he was riding fell into the mud and got stuck and king solu got off his back and ran and entered a hole in the Banyan tree in the forest, he hid there and his elephant was captured and all the army was stripped and fled, there was no one to stop them.

Saulu was soon found hiding in the Banyan Tree and taken captive by the rebel Yaman Khan according to another slightly fantastical episode of the Chronicles. Saulu actually had a chance to escape when the nanny hero Kyan personally snuck into the enemy camp to rescue him, but Saulu feared that Kyonceta secretly wanted him. He wanted to kill him and refused to go to his savior. He believed that the rebel Yaman Khan, who had been his friend and with whom he had played many dice games, would not harm him. I am wounded, I am afraid that he will steal from me to kill me, but Yamankan is my guardian's son, surely he will not kill me, Solu shouted, Kianzito is stealing from me, Kianzita, he exclaimed, then die, fool, die, the death of a dog at the hands of these thrown scum, he lowered him and ran to save his life. , swam across the erawadi and eventually returned to safety, but like many of his other calculations, Saulu's gamble did not pay off for fear of further escape attempts.

Yaman Khan had the king killed in April 1084. the game of life seems that the king's saulu was always rolling once after the death of saulu kyansita continued to lead the pagan royal armies against the rebellion of Yaman Khan and the leader rebel fled south down the river in his opulent golden barge. It is already a sin to follow him and kill him if he could. The chronicle relates what happened next and Yasin, the hunter, caught him under the water and he climbed a fig tree and uttered charming notes like the voice of a bird when Yaman Khan heard that sound.

He opened the door of the golden raft and without saying what bird that is, emitting such sweet and wonderful notes, he had now kept a good eye and Yasin the hunter from the place where he was waiting, spying, took out his bow and shot and hit Yaman's eye. Khan and now dead, the once exiled kianseta was the only person in line for the throne. Kian Sita came to the throne on April 21, 1084 and assumed the title of SRI tribuva naditya Dharma Raja, which means something like lucky Buddhist king, son of the three. In many ways, he was the perfect unifying figure for the country after such a period of violence and division.

While he was exiled from his father, he had lived for seven years in the southern Mon region, among those coastal cities, and there he had developed a genuine love. for the Mon people and culture invited Mon nobles to court and appointed them to high positions in the Kingdom, some of whom had been part of the Rebellion only years before. The result of this generous approach was a long period of peace in and with Myanmar. A period of great prosperity came during this time, the capital city of Bagan grew to a size and wealth previously unimaginable. The population grew as a result of the city's growing agricultural potential, but Bagan also attracted people from all over the region.

Artists, sculptors, masons, architects, monks, scholars. and masters, we can trace the rise of the city in the increasing number of temples that were built in the 300 years following the reign of King Anarata. Each of which we can reliably carbon date, up to 4,000 temples were built during this time. Built alongside thousands of other brick structures that supported them, many of these temples had vast stupas or domed shrines at their centers and the effort and expense of building them must have been enormous. This construction effort would have required an army of bricklayers, carpenters, plasterers and sculptors. and silversmiths, whether paid in cash or working in exchange for food, animals and land, these artists would have required the support of an even wider range of supporting industries.

Bricklayers needed bricks. The builders needed firewood brought by woodcutters and porters, the sculptors of countless Buddha statues. They needed marble and dolorite miners and elephant trainers to carry the heavy blocks of stone and they all needed rice, fruits, vegetables, meat and game and, of course, the alcoholic liquors made from rice or the frothy punch made from the fermented sap from the palm tree with work. In every corner of the city, people traveled thousands of kilometers to find employment in the massive construction site that the city of Bagan had become. At one point, the Crystal Palace Chronicle lists the professions of people who were deported from a city conquered during the reign of King Anarata and from it we get an idea of ​​all the ways someone could make a living in the city.

Bagan City; From then on, he sent separately, without mixing, men skilled in carving, turning and painting, masons, plaster and flower moulders. patrons blacksmiths silversmiths braziers founders of gongs and symbols workers of filigree flowers doctors and trainers of elephants and horses makers of shields round and embossed men experts in frying, toasting, baking and frizzing yakin hairdressers and men cunning in perfumes smells flowers and juices of the flowers of the small The fortress capital that was once Bagon was expanded to occupy an area of ​​more than 100 square kilometers or more than double the size of ancient Rome. It is estimated that the population at this time reaches 400,000 people living in the city alone during this time.

One of the largest temples was built and the largest of all is the temple known as the Tatiana Temple, consecrated in the year 1144. The huge spired pagoda of this temple rises to a height of more than 61 meters or more 20 floors. Another temple nearby is called the Ananda Temple and rises to a height of 51 meters, this temple serves not only as a place of worship but also as a monastery and library. The first and second floor of the temple were used as the residence of the monks, while the third floor was used to house images, the fourth floor was used to store manuscripts and books and the fifth and last floor stored the precious relics.

The construction of temples in Bagan was considered the supreme form of devotion in which a king could engage when a later king, allowing situ, dedicated the completion. of the Shui Gugi Pagoda delivered the following prayer in which he visualizes the temples as a kind of great infrastructure of the Soul as a bridge through samsara or the endless cycle of rebirth and towards eternal enlightenment by this abundant Merit that I wish to hear even in the future does not. The angelic pomp of brahmas surahs maras nor the status and splendors of a monarch, not even to be a student of the Conqueror, but I would build a Causeway across the river of samsara and all the people would cross it at full speed until they reached the Blessed City. these days.

The temples were maintained with the highest reverence. One of the inscriptions in the unfinished temple built some time after the beginning of the era contains the following blessings for those who respect the sanctity of the temple, as well as a series of searing curses against anyone who damages or desecrates it. May he favor and defend as I do the gift of faith that I offer with all my heart, whether it be my son, grandson or any future king who comes after me Queens, princes, royal ministers, high or low, may he be favored over others with the treasure wheel.

He will be invested as King mandates with Glory, majesty and power, but whoever spoils even one oil lamp here, let him be oppressed with the eight dangers, the ten punishments, the 32 results of karma, the eight calamities, the 96 diseases, that they suddenly reach it. a great Affliction that a thousand doctors will not be able to cure, having suffered thus for long generation after generation, when his bodily elements are dissolved, let him suffer in and out between the eight main hells and the twelve minor hells and the 40 limbos of Yama and lokika that suffer with the hosts of demons, titans and hungry ghosts, even if he survives all these sufferings, may he revisit these lands five thousand times in the form of a pitiful, boneless creature, a ghost, a worm, a water leech, while the royal annals are like glass.

Palace Chronicle is extremely detailed about the comings and goings of the kings of Bagan. Unfortunately, they have very little to say about what life was like for the average person during this time. To get a picture of the daily life of the average person in Bagan, we can turn to the pages. of Classical Myanmar Poetry Myanmar has had a great poetic tradition for centuries and the Bagan era was no exception, many poets flourished among its scholar communities in its temples and royal courts and the manuscripts these scholars produced were exceptionally valuable records that show that in the year 1273, a complete set of Buddhist texts known as tripitaka cost up to 3,000 kiats or almost 50 kilos of silver, which would be enough to buy more than 5,000 acres of rice, four large monasteries or 150 slaves, the excess expense of these textsThey meant that literacy was never widespread and that most ordinary people would not learn to read or write.

A 15th century poet named Shin maharatatara wrote a poem describing the qualities that a man of knowledge requires if one does not attempt it with the enthusiasm of a daredevil. An eagle that firmly catches a chicken, if one does not study and reflect, one does not question or argue and only knows how to read Palm Leaves, how can one become a man of letters known as a cat that eats a shrimp with special enjoyment in an apprentice? he must study all the texts he must become sharp as the teeth of a sore penetrating deeply into all the unpleasant matters to unravel the subject from beginning to end without fear like a lion one area that these poets can really educate us about is in the area of food a 17 The named 19th century poet gives a description of the diet of an ordinary farmer who supplements his meals of rice and curry with various types of animal life he finds in his fields.

The farmer plows his field and in his rice fields there are holes full of water that house many small crabs, throwing them into his basket along with frogs, snails, super plants, kazoo leaves and kinhon and pilo, all for his curry, hunched over, he returns to Homemade, sweet and juicy, the curry is cooked upon arrival and quickly served with Kean Hing and kiwetna vegetables. the rice is hot and the curry is hot with spicy spices that make one suck taking considerable handfuls crouching down he eats surrounded on all sides by his children and grandchildren another source of information is the painted walls of certain temples and pagodas in Bagan that show us a little of the city's clothing styles as well, at least among the wealthy, the costumes of the people in these paintings are combinations of Indian and Chinese cultures, they wore long dresses and shawls with most materials made of silk and cotton , both men and women wore bracelets on their wrists and necklaces on their arms and chains on their feet and appeared to have worn jeweled belts around their waists.

A prominent cultural practice among many ethnic groups in Burma was extensive tattooing, especially on the legs, and this would probably have been evident on the streets of Bagan to a European visitor in the 19th century. century commented on this practice, all of Berman's men are tattooed in their childhood from the middle to the knees, in fact, he has a pair of tattooed pants, the pattern is a fanciful mix of animals and arabesques. But ultimately the people who lived their countless lives. In the streets and alleys of Bagan the cultivation of rice and cucumbers, the care of its animals and the building of temples have been forgotten, and only the furious dramas of the royal court have been remembered in true detail in the centuries to come, those dramas They would reach a fever. tone thank you throughout his reign King Kyan struggled so much to have a son that he almost lost hope without a son to provide a clear line of inheritance, the kingdom could be pushed into Civil War when a son was finally born to him in the In the In 1090 he was so pleased that he immediately crowned the baby King and resigned to serve only as his Regent.

The boy was called Situ. Kyan Sitter would die 22 years later and his son Situ would take the throne unopposed as would his father. be an excellent ruler in terms of politics and war, but it seems that he was not the best father. He had several children, but before they could come of age it became clear that for one reason or another his eldest son was unfit for the throne and so Situ had him banished, the second son who would take the throne was a man named Naratu and has been remembered in history as a tyrant and a psychopath.

When King Siddhu finally fell ill in his old age, this impatient son took advantage of the opportunity. to accelerate his inheritance now when he turned 101 he fell seriously ill his son Naruto took him from the throne and kept him inside the Schwego pagoda and the King regained Consciousness for a while and said: this is not my Palace whose deception is this and The The king was convulsed with anger, his whole body burned like fire, then his son Narato thought that if the king wakes up from his illness, he will be completely destroyed, so with clothes and garments he pressured the king until he died.

Marathu wanted to take the throne for himself. but there was still the problem of his older brother being banished, he devised a plan to place his brother on the throne first to make things look a little less suspicious but of course he wouldn't just sit there for long when he arrived at Leppen Port. Narathu, according to the oath he had taken, went down to the ship and, taking his brother's sword, lifted him up and placed him on the throne after his anointing, his food was poisoned and that night he died with all these threats. King Naratu ascended the throne himself and would rule in a predictable manner.

Tyrannical style as remembered by the Chronicle of the Crystal Palace. King Narathu had once been the guardian demon of a mountain that had overshadowed the Lord, so he was great in glory, power and dominion, his ministers, both great and small, his followers and all the people were fearful and amazed. . against him he raged furiously with anger and pride, the King was brutal and savage, the concubines and servants of the Queen of him were afraid and afraid of him and did not love him, but hated him and cursed him in their hearts. All the inhabitants of the Kingdom died of hunger at work and. sweat and many strong.

Villages and domains were left in ruins, apparently desperate to assuage his guilt over his heinous actions. Naratu became increasingly isolated in his palace and ordered the construction of what he intended to be the largest and most ambitious of all the Bagan temples, known as the Dharma. Yankee Temple, but Naratu would not live to see this great temple completed, it is not clear who gave the order, but Naratu was in his palace one day when he was approached by a group of eight men dressed as monks when the man got close enough to the king. They pulled out their daggers and each stabbed him when they were sure he was dead in a sort of suicide pact, they pointed their knives at each other and themselves as the Crystal Palace Chronicle records that they ascended the palace and Drew Nye, the King, surrounded him in disguise. . to present the nezagrass conscious and they pierced the king with the sword until he died then they chased the minister the deaca to pierce him but they could not catch him then they pierced their own bodies with the sword and all eight died the reign of King Naratu caused great damage to the kingdom of Bagan and damaged its reputation abroad, but in the end it was not tyranny, rebellion or royal mistakes that brought down the empire, after several more royal assassinations, Coos and seizures of the Throne, the kingdom would eventually return to peace. the long reign of a king called narapati situ who would reign until the year 1211. but all this time the forces that would eventually destroy this great city of temples were already at work; in fact, in an ironic twist of fate, it would be the temples. themselves who would contribute to the gradual weakening and eventual fall of this entire civilization despite King and Aurata's efforts to reign in the excessive power and wealth of the Ari monks, the terraced church that replaced them would soon become just as rich. and by the height of Bagan's golden age, he would far surpass the wealth and power his predecessors had enjoyed.

For pagan rulers, the church was a powerful tool to build their own legitimacy among their subjects. The kings of Burma ruled under the title of Dharma Raja, which means king. who would fulfill the duties of the church whenever a new king was crowned; He would begin his reign by lavishing gifts on nearby religious institutions, building new temples and donating land to monks, but it was not just the king who contributed to these institutions. The church also encouraged private citizens to donate land and money in exchange for benefits when they were reborn in the next life. An ancient Burmese poem offers a clearly transactional approach to these incentives, offering a sort of tiered system of rewards for the giver and urging others to give. giving things in charity will be reborn Rich surrounded by numerous attendants and with vast possessions will be a bright moon in the Assembly of Men He who seriously encourages others to give donations freely while he himself offers nothing in future rebirths will still be deficient in material goods Many attendants and relatives, children and grandchildren will be in his retinue.

Anyone who is not generous or urges others to be generous will meet a bad fate after the dissolution of his body, will never feel satiated, and will hardly find eating plants that show hunger day and night. He will become a hungry Spirit who will meet everyone. the types of foreign misery with such punishments awaiting those who refused to donate to the church in the next life it is not difficult to see why the people donated freely and generously these donations of gold items and labor made the church incredibly rich , but it was the donations of land that really tipped the scales in the Kingdom, everything that was given to the church was given forever and therefore, as time went on, an increasing amount of the Myanmar's land mass and much of its productive farmland was slowly donated piece by piece to the Buddhist Church.

This would not have been a big problem except for one thing: the fact that, according to long tradition, the Buddhist Church in Bagan was exempt from paying all taxes, which meant that these large Temple Estates ended up acting as tax havens. Today the equivalent of 10 of the world's wealth is kept in tax havens where the rich keep their money to avoid paying taxes on it, but in some modern states such as Russia, several Latin American countries such as Argentina and in the oil states of the Persian Gulf the amount of wealth held in offshore tax havens may exceed 60 percent.

A state's ability to function is directly related to its ability to raise funds and manage its collective resources for the public good. Money taken to tax havens has effectively left the economy and in Myanmar between the 10th and 13th centuries, the situation began to resemble some of the worst areas of the modern world for tax evasion. Began in the late 13th century up to 63 percent of the Kingdom's lands that once belonged to the crown, as well as most. Of its gold and silver was in the hands of the tax-exempt church for successive pagan kings, this resulted in a link of sorts: its entire legitimacy rested on the belief system that began and ended with the Buddhist Church and therefore , the idea of ​​using any kind of force to take the land from unarmed Buddhist monks was unthinkable, the church was not only a beloved religious institution but it was also the largest employer of the land and countless people depended on it for their livelihood, So if the Burmese kings had any hope of recovering their lands they would have to use the doctrines of the church against them.

Buddhist doctrines in Burma allowed a kind of safety valve on the power and influence of the church. Monks were supposed to live by the vinaya or Buddhist code of conduct. which emphasized giving up worldly possessions and it was considered the duty of kings to periodically purge the church when it strayed too far from this ideal. If the church had become too rich then by definition it must have deviated from the vinaya and therefore a process called sasana could begin. This was a kind of Inquisition in which individual temples were inspected and excess wealth or land could be confiscated according to a strict religious code was a way for the crown to recover some of the wealth it had lost to the church, but the process of sasana was slow and often insufficient once a stage of purification of the church was completed.

The king had purified the church and his descendants often made donations. even more generous at the time they ascended the throne to increase their own legitimacy and so, over the centuries, the wealth of the Bagan empire flowed in one direction from the great reserve of the royal treasury downhill towards the sector. Exempt from taxes by the religious establishment, historian Michael Aung Twin summarizes the situation in the following terms: the kingdom of Bagan declined because the factors that had nurtured it in the first place became over time forces that contradicted and destroyed the seeds that sowed the destruction of Bagan are what previously made its success possible and the institutions that led to prosperity and power eventually devolved and impoverished the state.

What had been a blessing became a curse, but since society began it was unable and unwilling to change what were once constructive forces when they became destructive. The political power of the dynasty collapsed under the reign of a king named Linden. minlow who ruled at the beginning of the 13th century it is clear that theroyal treasure was fighting he was the last king of Bagan to build any major temples, although he did so mainly in remote regions far from the capital, the kings who followed him were apparently penniless and no major buildings were erected after this period, When talking about the collapse of societies, historians often talk about what they call the remote origins of the collapse.

These are slow, broad trends that accumulate over time cracks that begin to appear and wear away in the structure sometimes invisible and then there is what they call the immediate origins this is the wrecking ball that comes and delivers a decisive blow that resonates through the cracked and weakened structure and causes everything to shatter the reduced capacity of the Bagans state to control its lands and resources was not fatal in itself, but it left it increasingly vulnerable to external events. In 1258 a series of rebellions began in the southern Arakan and killed and posed a challenge to the Empire, with up to two-thirds of its land in their hands. of the church, the state of Bagan struggled to finance the military campaign necessary to contain these rebellions, although it would ultimately return order to those regions after a long struggle was a clear indication of the weakened state of the country, but soon An even more terrible threat began to emerge: this was a force of size and strength that the people of Bagan had never encountered before, a force that even now was rampaging across the Eurasian landmass, laying waste to empires that had ruled for centuries and leaving behind death. and destruction in their wake these were the armies of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan Kublai Khan was the grandson of the great Mongol warlord Genghis Khan who had united the peoples of the pass. of Mongolia and led them on a campaign of conquest the likes of which the world had never seen, conquering lands from the South China Sea to the Mediterranean, from Siberia to Afghanistan.

Kublai was 12 years old when his grandfather Genghis Khan died and after the death of the great Khan, the vast Mongol Empire began to split into warring rival states. Kublai Khan would find himself at the head of the Chinese portion of the Mongol Empire and founded a dynasty known as the Yuan with its capital in Beijing. In just three generations, the Mongols were gone. from wandering nomads to emperors, and in time the Yuan dynasty would come to rule most of modern-day China, Mongolia, Korea, and southern Siberia by the late 13th century, at the same time as the Bagan Empire struggled to contain its rebellious northern provinces and the Claw.

To recover some of his Church's lands and wealth from him, Emperor Kublai Khan was involved in an immense war against his last remaining rivals in China. These were the Southern Song Dynasty, a large Chinese kingdom that had until now resisted the advances of the Mongols, but by the year 1270, the Song were on the ropes. Kublai Khan had blocked the Yangtze River cutting off its supply routes and was now eager to encircle and destroy the remaining Song armies, but he had a problem: there was still only one escape route left for the Song armies. and that was through the narrow mountain passes in southwestern China and into the lands of Myanmar.

If the Song armies could escape through the lands of Bagan, they could continue their fight, so Kublai Khan decided to put the Bagan Empire under his control. Bow down and close the song's final Escape Route with his forces all engaged in an all-out war against the song. Kublai at first had no desire to come into conflict with Bagan, he sent an envoy to the Burmese court and demanded that the king swear allegiance to him and pay a small tribute according to Mongol tactics. This was as polite as possible but things would not go according to plan. his plan the pagan king at that time was a man called naratiyapati he was a man of overwhelming appetites who loved his food and drinks so much that the Crystal Palace Chronicle records that he was the reincarnation of an ogre who lived on Mount Pope.

The Lord had left a prophecy on the summit of Mount Tangvi that the guardian ogre of the mountain should become king three times in Bagan even so. It happened that he became king once it is said as narathia pate and because he had become a man of the state of an ogre, he was violent in envy, proud, wrathful and gluttonous in eating and drinking, he was great in anger, haughtiness and envy. Extremely greedy and ambitious, he had three thousand concubines and ladies-in-waiting, if the Chronicles are to be believed, this king Narutia Pate also ruled tyrannically and some of his concerns extended to the territory of the bazaar, the king being one of those who had received the prophecy of the Lord. not from any of the 96 diseases and he has never sneezed or yawned so much and that is why no one was allowed to sneeze or yawn in his presence if someone sneezed or yawned he was decapitated one day a young servant in the presence of the king was very desired to sneeze and As she could not contain it, she put her face in a large jar and sneezed, hoping that the king would not hear her, but alas, the sound was louder than if she had sneezed openly and the King asked what sound it is, because it is only through the soft intervention of a of his queens that the unfortunate girl was allowed to escape alive also took to especially boasting about his famous appetite, as an inscription left by him at the Mingalas Eddie Pagoda in 1274 shows King Nara tihapati supreme commander of 36 million. soldiers and who is a consumer of 300 dishes of Curry daily, consecrated 51 gold and silver statuettes of kings, queens, Nobles and Ladies-in-waiting on Thursday of the full moon of casein in the Year 636 and so in January of the year 1271 a group arrived in Bagan of ambassadors from the court of Kublai Khan in Beijing with the offer of the Mongol emperor.

These ambassadors asked to see the Burmese king's narutia party and when they were let into the throne room they demanded that the king submit to being a vassal of the Mongols, this ogre-like king rejected the crystal. Palace Chronicle recalls this encounter in dramatic terms and uses the Burmese name taruk or Turkish to describe the Mongol ambassador. The tarok sent 10 ministers and a thousand horsemen to demand golden rice pots, golden vessels and silver ladles, gold and silver because he said they were once offered by King Anarata, furthermore, some Chronicles say they came demanding a white elephant. Tariq's ambassadors in making demands did not show due respect or reverence in the presence of the king, therefore, the king ordered to kill these 10.

The ministers and a thousand horsemen did not let anyone escape. Burmese and Mongol inscriptions from the period indicate that this sentence was not actually carried out with the king's advisors, perhaps begging him to be rational, but it shows the extent to which Mongol demands angered this Naratiapati king. In Beijing we can only imagine the scenes in which Kublai Khan was informed of this insult, but he was still reluctant to order an invasion. He was fighting the last remnants of the Song dynasty in the South and had just attempted an ill-fated maritime invasion of Japan. He captured the island of Tsushima and attempted to land on the Japanese mainland but his ships had been destroyed in a pair of typhoons that the Japanese most They would later call Divine Winds or Kamikaze and ten thousand Mongol soldiers had been lost after this shame.

Kublai Khan had no great desire to commit large numbers of troops to a small border dispute with Bagan, but instead ordered his armies to move into a wide swath of disputed borderlands in the towering mountain ranges between his Empire and Burma, in response, the king of Bagan refused to endorse. and he sent his own armies to recapture the region backed by a large force of war elephants. This Burmese army marched into the densely forested hills. We can only imagine how the soldiers felt marching to war with this unknown enemy they must have heard terrifying talk about.

The stories that a Burmese poet later wrote would give a description of an army marching into battle um we are not afraid of anything we are bold and brave willing to sacrifice Our lives marching towards the Royal City on this day set as Victory Day in our camp in the forest are green the branches full of small buds of sweet flowers are the sounds of military drums and gongs in the soft evening twilight just as the mists and clouds disperse so too we must destroy our enemies this army will finally disappear Encountered the Mongol garrison in a rocky, forested ravine known as the Vo Chang Valley, the explorer and adventurer Marco Polo was at the time serving as a diplomat at the court of Kublai Khan.

He remembers the force that the king of Bagan sent, so this king prepared a large force and war ammunition. and he had let me tell you two thousand large elephants, in each of which there was a well-structured and strong wooden tower that carried 12 to 16 well-armed combatants and also had horsemen and a footman, about 60,000 men. In short, he equipped an excellent force, as befitted such a powerful Prince, in fact it was an army capable of doing great things and what can I tell you when the king had completed these great preparations to fight against the Tartars, he did not stop, they arrived in three days. of the great Khan's hosts then in the territory of Zardandan, it is likely that for many of the Mongol soldiers this was their first experience of seeing war elephants deployed in combat; these enormous creatures would have advanced on a terrifying wall with their wooden superstructures carrying Marco Polo archers describe what happened next, when the king's army arrived by plane and was within a mile of the enemy, he made all the castles that were on the elephants were ordered for battle and that the combatants took their places on them. and he arranged his horse and his foot, the horses of the Tartars were so frightened at the sight of the elephants that they could not face the enemy, but always turned aside and returned while all the time the king and his forces and all his elephants continued to advance towards them, but the Mongols had learned their tactics in the vast open passes of Central Asia and knew that when an enemy was too strong to engage directly, they could always retreat and pepper them with arrows from a distance, and that's exactly what they did.

When the Tartars realized what the case was, they became very angry and did not know what to say or do, but their Captain acted like a wise leader who had considered everything beforehand, they did it as he did and they handled their bows bravely. shooting so many. arrows to the advancing elephants that in a short time had wounded or killed most of them as well as the men they were carrying. When the elephants felt the pain of those arrows that were thrown at them like rain, they turned their tail and fled and nothing about The earth would have induced them to turn and face the Tartars and then they plunged into the forest and ran back and forth crashing their castles against the trees, breaking their harnesses and crushing and destroying everything on them.

With the enemy in disarray, the Mongols. The cavalry charged at them and Bagan's forces scattered. The Mongol Chronicles can barely hide his pride at the size of this victory. They say that only 700 Mongolian soldiers were able to defeat a Burmese army of 50,000 men and they only lost one soldier. This is clearly an exaggeration. It is perhaps understandable that the Burmese Chronicles make no mention of this disastrous campaign: Bagan's main force had been completely defeated in what should have been their territory and there was now little distance between the Mongol armies and the rich river valley of the Irawadi.

The Mongols were quick to capitalize on their Kyong victory without the next fort along the way falling just six days later on December 9, 1283 and now the Mongol forces advanced towards the Erawadi Valley, it is clear from the exaggerated tones of the Burmese. Chronicles of how threatening this Mongol invasion force was, the Turks had to gather all parts of their army until they reached the number of six million cavalry and 20 million infantry and they arrived marching, the situation clearly seemed grim, he ordered two of his generals to take their remaining forces. and fortified the city of Nyasangkian at the crucial crossing of the Erawadi River, reaching the city of Nasong, they fortified it and surrounded it with forts, ditches and ditches and fought in its defense at the crossing of the Barmo River for three full months, they killed the enemy. and he did not spare even the elephant and horse feeders, but killed them all, but when ten Myriad men were dead, the Taruks sent 20 Myriad when 20 Myriad were dead, he sent 40 Myriad, the King's men were tired ​and foredun and as soon as the taruks crossed the The Nasson River fell at the news of the fall of Nyasang Gyan, the ogre king's courage failed him, he fled from the city of Bagan and headed south, then the king called for his ministers and consulted with them saying that Bug untown is now too narrow for us. at too shallow a depth it cannot contain the hosts of combatants, the hosts of elephants andhorses, let's go directly to the south and establish a strong city, for this reason the king naratiapati would go down in history in Burma with the name of taruk pie Min o The king who fled from the Turks retired to the south of Burma and left the rest of the leaderless country plunged into chaos, with no trust in the pagan king to protect them.

Many of the Empire's provinces simply separated and looked at their own. defenses for the following year, the king attempted to negotiate with the Mongol invaders and throughout this time the lowlands of Burma were a battlefield convulsed in a series of constant skirmishes. In reality, it is not certain whether or not the Mongol forces reached the capital city of Bagan, according to Burmese sources, the generals the king had sent to defend the north seemed to have been able to slow the Mongol advance and even repel them about 100 miles away. north of the capital; Some sources quite plausibly claim that Mongol soldiers fought in the scorching heat of the dry zone of Myanmar and suffered from diseases such as malaria that sapped the momentum of their campaign.

Archeology seems to support this story as there is little evidence of war damage or burning in the temples and structures of Bagan. Marco Polo at the court of Kublai Khan states that the Mongols reached Bagan, but explains that they left the temples intact out of a mixture of respect and superstition, they marched until they reached the country and the province of Myan and conquered it completely and when They found Las Dos Torres in the city. of gold and silver were very amazed and sent a message to the great Khan asking him what he wanted done with the two towers, seeing the great amount of wealth that was on them and knowing the great Khan that the king had caused these towers to be made for the for the good of his soul and to preserve his memory after his death, he said that he would not harm them but that he would leave them exactly as they were and that was not surprising either, because you must know that no Tata in the world will ever, if he can help him, throw hand of anything belonging to the dead, whatever the situation, the Mongols had no interest in a protracted conflict in the year 1287, the Mongol Khan had agreed to a provisional peace, the Burmese delegation formally recognized Mongol power. over his kingdom and agreed to pay an annual tribute, there was a certain proportion of the country's annual agricultural production, but the agreement was broken only a month later, at the end of June, the defeated and humiliated king Naratiyapate returned from the south traveling north. down the river in his royal barge to assume his position as puppet king in the capital from which he had fled years before, but on July 1, 1287, king Naratiyapate was intercepted en route by his second son, the hatu who had murdered, they went upriver on the route. and disorder without union or order and when they came to the poor to promise they had to stop the royal raft and put poison in the food, he offered it to them and said: Oh King, eat, but the king knew that there was poison in the food and he did not want.

He ate when the hatu heard that he had made three thousand soldiers go and stand around the royal raft with shadowless gleaming swords in their hands, then he took off the ring from his finger and dropped drops of water on it and gave it to him. to his Queen and He bowed solemnly and said that in all the lives in which I wander through samsara until I reach nirvana, may a son never again be born to me and he took the food and ate and while eating he died, the death of this King It was the final death blow to the disintegrating Bagan Kingdom, all the remaining provinces that had once been loyal to it now seceded, there was no king for the next two years and when one of Naratiyapati's sons, called Kiosua, emerged as ruler, he would reign.

Only the diminished and impoverished city of Bagan and had practically no army would be killed along with his son and heir on May 10, 1299. It was during this time that the explorer Marco Polo visited the city of Bagan and saw before his own eyes, the glorious views of their temples now diminished by the years of war throughout this period, the Mongols could easily have moved to occupy the territory of Bagan, but it seems they had no interest in doing so, in fact they would not send any more. expeditions to restore order, his policy appears to have been to allow the fragmentation of the Kingdom to continue and watch from afar as the once great power that had challenged them simply tore itself apart and sank into irrelevance.

A 14th century king named Minghy Swasauke wrote a later inscription with a short sad note about this time when the Burmese Empire disintegrated due to internal conflicts the collapse of the Bagan empire was now complete the Bagan city area would remain occupied for much of the next century and people would continue to farm and raise animals on the lands around the great temples and stupas as they slowly crumbled under the forces of the elements, other kingdoms would occupy this region over time, some kings were even crowned in Bagan and the titles of the ancient emperors were granted, but the city would never again have the same prominence, a smaller number of new and impressive religious monuments still rose until the mid-15th century, but after that, new constructions of Temples were reduced to a minimum and then stopped completely and little by little the city fell into ruins.

The city of Bagan remained a place of pilgrimage to this day, as farmers grazed their livestock on the pastures rising through the bricks. Pilgrims would travel hundreds of miles to visit its unique landscape and see the stunning sight of its golden domes and spiers emerging from the morning mist of the Flat River Valley, some of the largest and most impressive temples would even be maintained and repaired over the centuries. coming, but thousands of the less famous and more remote temples fell into disrepair and some were ruined and disappeared. Completely crumbling into ruined mounds swallowed by forests, the English writer Williams Somerset Morm, who traveled through Burma and Thailand in 1923, wrote a memoir of his travels titled A Gentleman in The Parlor, in which he writes about how his sight affected him.

From the ruins of cities like Angkor Ayutaya and Bagan in these Eastern countries, cities are founded, increased to greatness, and destroyed in a way that cannot fail to fill the Western traveler accustomed for many centuries to relative stability with a some suspicion here and there in the jungle. Far from anywhere, you will find ruined temples covered in trees and among the broken gods of Dank Verger and elaborate bas-reliefs as the only sign that there was once a prosperous city here and you will encounter them.Poverty-stricken villages that are all what remains of the capital of a rich and powerful kingdom.

It is a grim reminder of the mutability of human things, for in the morning the sight of these ruins reminded him that the Empire in which he lived could also be one. On the day of being consigned to history, Morm writes evocatively of his first visit to the ruined temples of Bagan as he approached by steamboat along the Great River at Awadi. A light rain was falling and the sky was dark with heavy clouds when I reached Bagan in the distance. I saw the pagodas for which it is famous, standing huge, remote and mysterious through the early morning mist, like vague memories of a fantastic dream.

I don't know how many pagodas there are in Bagan, when you are on an eminence, they surround you. for as far as the eye can see, they are almost as densely scattered as the tombstones in a cemetery, they are of all sizes and in all states of preservation, their solidity, size and magnificence are the more surprising on account of their surroundings, as they are the only ones that remain. to show that a vast and populous city once flourished here, today there is only a scattered village with wide, untidy roads lined with large trees. Quite nice little place for the next few days, morning I would explore the ruins of these temples and pagodas and walk among them. the buildings in ruins and everywhere he found the place infused with a strange and lingering melancholy within the pagodas, the images of Buddha sitting in meditation, the gold leaf having long since worn away from the colossal figures and the figures being crumbling to dust, the fantastic lions that guard. the entrances rot on their pedestals a strange and melancholy stain the grass grows in the cracks of the pavement and the young trees have taken root in the cracks they are the refuge of the birds The falcons circle on their summits and the green parrots chatter in the eaves the birds were singing loudly in the trees The crickets were chirping and the frogs were croaking croaking somewhere a child was whistling a melancholy tune I would like to end the episode with a reading from one of the great poets of the Bagan period, a man called ananta Surya ananta Surya was a scholar who served as chief minister in the Kingdom of Bagan under King Narutenka, who ruled in the second half of the 12th century.

As a result of a palace coup, the king's brother took the throne and began purging the government of those loyal to Because of this, the previous king, Ananta Surya, was ordered executed, and like Marco Polo sitting in his cell in Genoa a century later, on the other side of the world, Ananta Surya dedicated himself during his time of imprisonment to writing while in prison. While awaiting his death, he wrote The Following Poem, which has gone down in history as one of the most beautiful writings produced during the flowering of art and culture that took place during the Bagan Empire.

It is a poem of loss and forgiveness about the final acceptance of the fate of all things to pass into darkness and dust. As you listen, he imagines what it would feel like to walk through the empty streets of the city of Bagan as its temples crumbled and grass grew on its streets and houses. Imagine seeing the trees break through the bricks of the houses. the temple stupas and shadowed gates, the animals running wild through the streets as the sun set in a red haze over the hills and the poets sang of the end of days, often, when one man prospers, another must suffer. destruction, such is the nature of things, the satisfaction of a courtier. enjoying royal confidences in Golden Palaces and a king's own Good Fortune are mere bubbles on the surface of a vast momentary and evanescent ocean if Mercy and mercy dictated, he would be freed and freed from execution, but would not escape death.

I am inseparable. From Karma, the nature of every living being is decay. If I were to meet my Lord the King again in one of my future rebirths in the cycle of samsara, I would not envy him anything, all I would do is forgive him lovingly because my blood body is impermanent. Danger and death are constant enemies and in this world we must thank you once again for listening to the podcast about the fall of civilizations. I would like to thank you for my voice access for this episode. Jay Forrester Michael Hagian intones Alexandra Bolton and Paul Cassell's readings in Burmese. were performed by Daniel San, you too my researcher Brian Stulk, if you like listening to The Fall of Civilizations as a podcast but would like to see them come to life on video, you can also find us on YouTube with a state-of-the-art drone.

Photography 3D Reconstructions Maps and Recreations I love hearing your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so come and tell me what you think. You can follow me on Paul mm Cooper if you want to receive updates on podcast announcements about new episodes and images. maps and reading suggestions you can follow the podcast in the fall of Civ pod with underscores separating the words this podcast can only continue with the support of our generous subscribers on patreon you keep me going you help me cover my costs and also let me spend more time to research, write, shoot and edit to deliver the episodes to you faster and give them as much life and detail as possible.

I want to thank all my subscribers for making this happen. If you enjoyed this episode, consider heading over to patreon.com. forward slash fall of civilizations underlines the podcast or just Google full of the civilization patreon that is p-a-t-r-e-o-n for now goodbye and thanks for listening abroad