Mannar mass graveyard and the martyrs of 1543
It happened in 1543. The Portuguese had set foot on Sri Lanka 38 years before, in 1505. The island of Sri Lanka was divided into many kingdoms. By then King Buwanekabahu of the most powerful kingdom of Kotte had formed an alliance with the Portuguese. His brother King Mayadunne who had an inherent revulsion towards the European invaders, was ruling the small kingdom of Seethavaka. He had formed an alliance with King Raigam Bandara, his other brother, to fight against the joint armies of Kotte and the Portuguese. The kingdom of Kandy, which covered the largest portion of the island, consisted of mountainous and wild terrain that was not so rich and powerful. The king of Kandy, Jayaweera Bandara, was vacillating between the two rival fractions. Many minor regional rulers of the jungle terrain of the Vanni were mostly passive observers of this conflict. The king of Jaffna kingdom, a decedent of Aryachakrewarthi dynasty had conflicts with the Portuguese who attempted to invade his territories.
Cankili I also k n own as Segarasasekaram( documented in Portuguese chronicles as Xaga Raya) was ruling the kingdom of Jaffna, from Nallur. He was the son of King Singai Pararasasegaram by one of his concubines. CankiliI inherited his throne via palace intrigues, in which many claimants to the throne died under mysterious circumstances. Mannar, which was a principle port of his kingdom, by then had few Tamil Catholics. This ancient port which is named in ancient Sinhalese Chronicles as Mahathitha, was controlled by Kings of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa up to the 13th century AD.
In the year 1541, St Francis Xavier left Lisbon on his 35th birthdaywith new viceroy Martim Afonso de Sousa to Goa. Before departure he was appointed as the apostolic nuncio to the East. He arrived in Goa, the capital of Portuguese India at that time, on May 6, 1542. His first mission was to restore Christianity among the Portuguese settlers in Goa. Its population consisted of a great majority of those who were riff raff of Portuguese society, picked up from Portuguese jails. Many of the arrivals formed liaisons with local women and adopted Indian culture. There were few preachers while no priests existed beyond the walls of Goa. St Xavier gave much of his time to the teaching of children and preaching
to the sick in the hospitals. He walked through the streets of Goa ringing a bell to summon the children and servants. He headed Saint Paul's College, a pioneer seminary of secular priests, which became the first Jesuit headquarters in Asia. Then he began preaching in the coastal villages in southern India with great success and many fishing communities began to convert to Christendom. His sagacity, virtues and effectiveness of preaching reached across the sea to Mannar.
The subsequent events that took place can be connected to the recent finding of a mass grave in Mannar in which bones of men, women and children were found. These events are well documented in Chapter 11 of Book 2 of ' The Temporal and Spiritual Conquest of Ceylon' written by the catholic priest Fernaõ de Queyroz of the Society of Jesus. Fr Fernaõ de Queyroz was born in Lisbon in 1617 and arrived in Goa in 1635. He wrote six voluminous books about Sri Lanka based on accounts given to him by many Portuguese priests, officers, soldiers and even Sinhalese and Tamils who were living in Goa by then. His writing on Sri Lanka was translated by Fr S G Perera in the year 1929.
According to his book “the rumour ( of St Francis Xavier) brought tidings to Mannar of the law which the saint was preaching, and of the prodigies he wrought all along the coast. The chief men of Mannar moved by divine spirit, determined to, send ( messengers) to signify to him the dispositions that were therein and the importance of his visiting it, and the account which he would have to give to God, if he failed to visit it.” Upon this invitation, St Francis sent out his envoys who were later joined by the Saint himself in
1543. “Francis Xavier reached Mannar, where he was well received, and after catechising the people he baptized, up to 600 people, thoroughly well-grounded in the faith as their constancy showed.” This action outraged the local religious leaders who “marched to Nallur to represent to the king in the darkest colours of a minister of another religion going about his territories perverting the people and setting them against him. ( They said) “Unless he took prompt action, he would soon find himself without a kingdom, without lieges and without pagodas, that a great many of existing pagodas were already razed and an unknown God was worshipped in their place”. Alarmed by these accusations, the king “mustered 5,000 menat- arms partly from the coast of the mainland and partly from Jafanapatao, and set out to Manar.”
In Mannar, Fr Queyroz says that “he (the king) met with no other resistance than that of tears which some shed out of consolation and joy seeing the consistency with which others died, the smallest children crying out, when their mothers tried to hide them, for seeing their companions beheaded, they offered their throats to the executioners with wonderful power of faith. The tyrant king himself was their captain and spared neither sex nor age, whereby he earned such hatred, over and above his other tyrannies.” “The tyrant thought that he could kill the Christians and the cleric Frances Xavier with impunity without considering that their blood would cry out to the outrages for vengeance, and sooner or later he would have to pay for the cruelty wherewith he cut off those tender plants and hard won fruits.”
The Saint escaped death and crossed the ocean and arrived in Cochin in 1544,
where he met the Vicar General Migual Vas. The massacre was reported to him, the Viceroy Martim Alfonso de Sousa and even the king of Portugal Dom Joao. In a letter written to the brethren of Rome the saint says that he could not personally baptize the Christians, which was done by a secular priest. Confirming the massacre he says in that letter, “when he had gone and baptized them, the king of that land put many of them to a cruel death because they had become Christians.”
Fr Queyroz in his book says that although the king of Portugal ordered immediate retaliation against the king of Jaffna, it was delayed by Portuguese forces being engaged in confrontations in the mainland. The viceroy who was fuming with anger said to the saint that “I will write to the captains of Nagapatao and the fishery to inflict this punishment with all the fleet they can get together, for I know they can do it.” The Saint at this point, “calmed him saying; that he preferred to baptize him rather than to destroy him. Such is holiness when offended! Such are its effects when vindictive.” This expedition set off on August 12, 1544. In a letter to the king of Portugal, Viceroy says, “he undertook this expedition in which wing to contrary winds I reached the Island of Crows with six Gallys, five galliots and a caravel; where I was thinking of attacking the tyrant, he came to see me begging mercy assuring tribute with sufficient hostage and other satisfactions.” The king agreed to pay 5,000 xerafins, two elephants a year and allow the Catholic priests to preach in his kingdom.
The remains of the mass graveyard found in Mannar have been carbon-dated to the period which falls between 1400 and 1650 AD by a report prepared by US-based Beta Analytic – Radiocarbon dating services. Therefore, it is very likely the skeletons found from the grave belong to the Christian martyrs of 1543. So far, 335 individual skeletal remains have been identified in the Mannar mass grave site; of these skeletons 29 belong to children. As the account of Fernaõ de Queyroz specifically mentions that Catholics of all ages and sex were killed by the King of Jaffna in 1543, with these findings this assumption gains much more validity.
(The writer is a medical consultant and an independent researcher on history. He is a life member of the Royal Asiatic society of Sri Lanka.)