By the end of fifteenth century, the chronicles suggest, conflict had developed between these new rulers, as they renewed and formalized their relations with Ayadhya and with officials or chieftains with following n rooted in the Southeastern Sruk or districts, some of these forces, the chronicles state, were led by a former slave,Europeans writing some what later stated that this new King was in fact a relative of the monarch whom he had disposed, what is important for later events is that the disposed King,Chan, took,temporary refuge in Ayudhya before returning with an army to dispose the usurper, his restoration under Thai patronages set a precedent that many Cambodian King were to follow, as did the fact that he was disposed by forces coming from Eastern portions of the Kingdom.
From the 1620s onward, these regions of dissidence could often rely on Vietnamese support, a Cambodian King married a Vietnamese princess in the 1630s, and as a bride-price ,allowed Vietnamese authorities to set up customs post in the Mekong Delta, than inhabited largely by Khmer but beyond the reach of Cambodian administrative control, over next two hundred years,Vietnamese immigrants poured into the region, still known to many Khmer today as "Lower Cambodia" or Kampuchea-Krom, by the twentieth century, only four hundred thousand Cambodians remained in Southern Vietnam, surrounded by more than ten times as many Vietnamese,they developed a distinctive culture, and many twentieth century, Cambodian political leader including Son Sen,Ieng sary,and Son ngoc Thanh were born and raised as members of this minority,the presence of rival patrons to the West and East set in motion a whipsaw between Thai and Vietnamese influence over Cambodia, and between pro-Thai and pro-Vietnamese Cambodian factions at the court,this conflict lasted until the 1860s, and revived in different from after the communist victory in Vietman 1975.
The first European to write in detail about Cambodia was "Tome Pires, who Suma Oriental was written between 1512 and 1515, the Kingdom is described as a warlike one, whose ruler "Obeys no one" and Pires hinted at the richness of the products that could be obtained from it, he was relying,however,on hearsay,the first eyewitness account comes to us from the Portuguese missionary Gaspar Da Cruz,who visited Lovek toward the end of King Chan's Reign in 1556,he left after about a year,disappointed by his inability to make converts,and chose to blame the superstitions of people and their loyalty to Buddhist Monks .Da cuz was impressed,indeed,by the solidarity of the Cambodians,and in a interesting passage he remarked they :
Dare do nothing of themselves, nor accept anything new without leave of the King,which is why Christians cannot be made without the King's approval ,and if some of my readers should say that they could be converted without the King knowing it, to this I answer that the people of the country is of such a nature, that nothing is done that the King kneweth wherefore everyone seeketh news to carry unto him, to have an occasion for to speak with him,whereby without the King's good will nothing can be done.
He suggested that the Sangha contained more than a third of the able bodied men in Cambodia or, by his estimate, some hundred thousand-a fact with clear implications for politics and economy.these monks commanded great loyalty from the population, and Da Cruz found them to be :
"Exceedingly proud and vain... alive they are worshipped for Gods, in sort that the interior among them do worship the superior like Gods, praying unto them and prostrating themselves before them, and so the common people have great confidence in them, with a great reverence and worship,so that there is no person that dare contradict them in anything,,,[It] happened sometimes that while I was preaching,many round the hearing me very well,and being very satisfied with what I told them,that if there come along any of these priests and said, This is good ,but ours is better, they would all depart leave me alone "
The absence of inherited riches cited by Da Cruz provides an example of Royal interference in everyday life,when the owner of a house died, Da Cruz remarked.all that is in it returners to the King, and the wife, and children hide what they can, and begin to seek a new life, possessions, in other words,were held by people at the King's pleasure, as were ranks,land and positions in society,this residual absolute power,it seems, gave the otherwise rickety institution of the monarchy great strength Vis a' vis elite ,one consequence of the arrangements cited by Da Cruz was that rich families
could not in theory at least, consolidate themselves into lasting anti monarchical alliances ,the King's response to them (dispossessing a generation at a time) suggest that Kings distrusted the elite.
Da Cruz said nothing about Angkor, although a later Portuguese writer Diego Do Couto reported in 1599 that some forty years before hand (in 1550 or 1551) a King of Cambodia had stumbled across the ruins while on an elephant hunt, the story is not confirmed by other sources, but date inscriptions at Angkor reappear in the 1560s.suggesting that the date of the rediscovery may be accurate, although it may have taken place during a military campaign instead of during a hunt, for the Angkor region was a logical staging area for Cambodian armies poised to invade Siam.
Do Couto wrote that when the King had been informed of the existence of ruins.
He went to the place, and seeing extent and the height of the exterior walls , wanting to examine the interior as well ,he ordered people then and there to cut and burn the undergrowth, and he remained there, beside a pretty river while this work was accomplished, by five or six thousand men, working for a few days ,,and when everything had been carefully cleaned up, the King went inside, and,,was filled with admiration for the extent of these constructions.'
He added that the King then decided to transfer his court to Angkor. if he ever did so , in fact , it was probably for only a brief period, for his sojourn is not mentioned in Thai or Cambodian chronicle, two in inscriptions from Angkor-Wat. moreover indicate that the temple was partially restored under Royal patronage in 1577- 1578,both of these , and two more incised at Phnom-Bakeng in 1583,
honored the King's young son, in whose favor he was to abdicate in 1584, possibly to delay a coup by his own ambitions, in fact , may refer to this infighting by expressing the hope that the King would no longer be tormented by "Royal enemies "It is equally possible, however, that the phrase refers to the Thai Royal family , with whom the Cambodian elite had been quarrelling throughout the 1570s.
Indeed, in spite of the apparent ideological solidarity noted by Da Cruz, the period 1560- 1590 was a turbulent one in which Cambodian troops took advantage of Thai weakness (Brought on in part by the Burmese sacking of Ayudhya in 1569) to attack Thai territory several times,according to Europeans , the Cambodian King, worried by internal and external threats, changed his attitude toward Catholic missionaries, allowing them to preach and sending gifts of rice to the recently colonized centers of Malacca and Manila in exchange for promises of military help ( which never in fact arrived) early, the King had apparently attempted to seek an alliance or at least a nonaggression ការមិនឈ្លានពានគ្នា pact, with The Thai.
By 1593. Thai preparations for a new campaign against Lonvek forced the King to look overseas for help, he appealed to the Spanish governor-general of the Philippines, even promising to convert to Christianity if sufficient aid were forthcoming, before his letter had been acted on, however, the King and his young son fled North to Southern Laos, and another son was placed in change of the defense of Lonvek . the city fell in 1594.
Although Cambodian military forces were often as strong as those of the Thai throughout most of the seventeenth century and although, as we shall see ,European traders were often attacked to Cambodia almost as strongly as they were to Ayudhya, Thai and Cambodian historiography and Cambodian legend interpret the capture of Lonvek as a turning point in Cambodian history.ushering in centuries of Cambodian weakness and Thai hegemony អនុត្តរភាព. the face of case as they appear in European source are more nuanced than this , but the belief is strong on both sides of the poorly demarcated border that a traumatic event ( for the Cambodians)had been taken place.
The popular legend of Preah-Ko Preah-Keo, first published by a French scholar in 1860s, is helpful on this point and is worth examining in detail, according to the legend, the citadel of Lonvek was so large that no horse could gallop around it, inside were two statues ,Preah-Ko ("Sacred-Cow") and Preah-Keo ("Sacred precious Stone") inside the bellies of these statues "There were Sacred books,in
gold,where one could learn formulae, and books where one could learn about anything in the world..now the King of Siam wanted to have the statues, so he raised an army and came to fight the
Cambodian King.
The legend then relates an incident contained in the chronicles as well ,Thai cannon fired silver coins, rather than shells, in to the bamboo hedges that served as Lonvek's fortifications , when Thai retreaded, the Cambodians cut down the hedges to get at the coins and thus had no defences when the Thai returned in the following year to assault the City ,when they had won, the Thai carried off the statues to Siam, after opening up their bellies ,the legend tells us,They were able to take the the books which were hidden there and study their contents ,for this reason(emphasis added) they have become superior in knowledge to the Cambodians, and for this reason the Cambodians are ignorant, and lack people to do what is necessary, unlike other countries.
Although keyed to the capture of Lonvek, the legend may in fact be related to the long term collapse of Angkor ( in so far as this could be "remembered ") and perhaps to the relationships that had developed between Siam and Cambodia by the nineteenth century, when the legend emerged in the historical record, the temptation to prefer the earlier collapse as the source for the legend may spring from the fit between the legend's metaphors and what we know to have happened -ie. the slow transferal of Cambodia's regalia ,documents,customs, and learned men from Angkor to Ayudhya in the period between Jayavarman VII's death and the Thai invasion of 1431, the statues of Preah-Ko is a metaphor for Cambodia's Indian heritage, the less precisely described Preah-Keo .seems to be a metaphor for Buddhist legitimacy, embodied by a Buddha image like the one taken from Vientiane by the Thai in the 1820s (and known as a Preah-Keo) to be enshrined in the Temple of that name in Bangkok, the see page of literary skill from Cambodia to Siam, and increasing power of the Thai from the seventeenth century onward. are ingredients in the legend,which, like that of the leper King discussed in Chapter 4, may contain a collective memory of real occurrences half hidden by a metaphorical frame of reference, the myth ,in other words, may have been used by many Cambodians to explain Cambodia's weakness Vis-a'-vis the Thai in terms of its un-meritorious behavior( chasing after the coins) and its former strength in terms of Palladio that could be taken away.
The last five years of the sixteenth century are well documented in European source, these years were marked by Spanish imperialism in Cambodian, directed from the Philippines and orchestrated largely by two adventurers named Blas-Ruiz and Diego De Veloso , their exploits illuminate three themes that were to remain important in Cambodian history, the first was the King's susceptibility to blandishments and promises on the part of visitors who came, as it were, from "outer-space" both Spanish were honored with bureaucratic tittle and given "Sruk to govern and Princesses for wives, the second themes was the revolution in warfare brought on by the introduction of firearms, particularly naval cannon, which played a major part in all subsequent Cambodian wars ,because they were master of new technology ,Ruiz and De Veloso were able to terrorize local people- just as their contemporaries could in Spanish America , which accompanied by fewer than a hundred men.
The third themes was that by the end of the sixteenth century, the Cambodian King and his courtiers had become entangled in the outside world, symbolized at the time by the multitude of foreign traders resident in Lonvek and Phnompenh, European writers emphasized the importance of these people and the foreign residential quarters at Lonvek , these included separate quarters for Chinese, Japanese,Arabs, Spanish, and Portuguese as well as traders from the Indonesian archipelago ,they were joined briefly in the seventeenth century by traders from Holland and Great Britain, the traders worked through officials close to the King and members of the Royal family, as well as through their compatriots, in the seventeenth century ,according to Dutch source, foreign traders were required to live in specific areas of the new capital,Udong, reserved for them and to deal with the Cambodian Government only through appointed representatives, or Shabanda .this pattern may have originated in China and also applied in Siam ,. Its presence at Lok-Vek in the depths of Cambodia's"decline" like other bits of data, suggests, that the Kingdom was by no means dead.
The Spanish missionary San Antonio left an account of the closing years of the sixteenth century,
which includes the adventures of Ruiz and De Veloso, it is often illuminating and occasionally comic,
as when he attributed the construction of the temples at Angkor to the Jews, echoing local disbelief in Cambodian technology ,he was also convinced that Span should colonize the Kingdom for religious and commercial reasons, and this way have led him, like many early explorers, to exaggerate the value of its resource,as French visitors were to do in the 1860s. his impressions of prosperity may have sprung from the fact that visitors were forced by the absence of overland communication to limit their observations of Cambodia to the relatively rich and populated areas along the Mekong North of Phnompenh- and area that was still one of the most prosperous in Cambodia when it was studied four hundred years later by Jean Devert, the goods that San Antonio saw including gold,
silver, precious stones, silk and cotton cloth, incense, lacquer, ivory, rice fruit, elephants , buffalo,
and rhinoceros, the last was valued for its horns,skin,blood,and teeth as a 'subtle antidote for a number of illnesses , particularly those of the heart-' a reference to the Chinese belief that rhinoceros by products were effective as aphrodisiacs ,like Frenchmen of the 1860s San Antonio stressed that Cambodia was prosperous because it was a gateway to Laos, which, almost unknown to Europeans, was assumed to be some sort of El Dorado ,he closed his discussion of Cambodia's prosperity with a passage that might seem to have been lifted from,"Hansel and Gretel" there are so many precious thing in Cambodia that when the King [recently] fled to Laos, he scattered gold and silver coins ,for a number of days, along the road so that the Siamese would be too busy gathering them up to capture him.
San Antonio also remarked that the country contained only two classes of people ,the and the poor:
The Cambodians recognize only one King ,among them there are nobles and commerce,, all the nobles have several wives ,the number depending on how rich they are ,high ranking women are white and beautiful, those of common people are brown, these women work the soil while their husbands make war,,,the nobles dress in silk and fine cotton and gauze,nobles travel in liters, which people carry on their shoulders, while people travel by cart,on buffalo, and on horseback, they pay to the principal officials,and to the King,one-tenth of the value of all goods taken from the sea and land.
The slave-owning, non mercantile "middle"class noted by Chou Ta Kuan in the thirteenth century seems by now have diminished in importance ,although there is evidence from legal Codes and least one chronicle that it continued to exist ,it is possible that its place was taken in Cambodian Society by foreign traders and semi-urban hangers-on. while ethnic Khmer remained primarily rice-farmers ,officials monks, and gatherers of primary produce, another mediating"class" in Cambodia Society, of course, consisted of the Sangha , about whom San-Antonio's contempt exceeded his curiosity. what emerges from his account, and from others by European visitors, is a picture of a Cambodia social structure that remained essentially un-changed from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth .
But as so often in Cambodian history, the rice farmers are omitted from the record, we see the people the visitors saw - the King,and elite, the foreign traders,and their slaves , inland from the Kompong,
Villages were linked to the trading capitals by economic relationships by taxation, and by the social mobility provided by Sangha ,the villagers also led their own lives ,at least,this is what we must suppose, for without such relationships,Kingship and other institutions would have withered, but like the particles of subatomic physics, in terms of which atomic behavior makes sense,these major actors are invisible to the eye.
In the first haft of the seventeenth century,Cambodia became for the first time since the "Funan" era a maritime Kingdom, with the prosperity of its elite depended on seaborne overseas trade ,conducted in large part by the European traders ,Chinese, and ethnic Malays operating out of Sumatra and Sulawesi,European visitors-Dutch,English,and Portuguese-left records of this period that are useful as they corroborate and supplement the Cambodian chronicles, these people were also involved in factionalism at the court and in plotting among themselves.
Noted.
The period came to a climax of sorts in the early 1640s when a Cambodian King married a Malay and converted to Islam, he is known in chronicle as the " King who chose [ a different] region." in 1642s. a Dutch naval force attacked Phnompenh, to avenge the murder of Dutch residents of Capital, but it was driven off, in the 1650s, rival princes sought military help from Vietnam to overthrow the Muslim monarch, and when the troops came. they were reinforced by local ones recruited in Eastern Cambodia a pattern followed in Vietnamese incursions in the nineteenth century and the 1970s. after a long Campaign, the Cambodian King was captured and taken off in a Cage to Vietnam, when some sources assert he was killed and others that he died soon afterward of disease.
The remainder of the seventeenth century saw a decline in international trade as Cambodia's access to the sea was chocked off by the Vietnamese and coastal settlements controlled by Chinese merchants who had fled Southern China with the Advent of the Qing dynasty, the newcomers turned Saigon into an important, accessible trading center, Phnompenh became a backwater, and by the eighteenth century, Cambodian was a largely blank area on European maps.
The End of Cambodia in the Fifteenth and sixteenth Century.
