No one can remember how it started, this riot of work. Some think Colombo was an emporium at the edge of the Arab world. Others say the Moors arrived as an army-for-hire. By 1344, there were already five hundred ‘Abyssinians’ in town, spoiling for a fight. Marco Polo, writing half a century earlier, explained it like this: ‘The people of this island are by no means of a military habit, but on the contrary, are abject and timid, and when there is occasion to employ soldiers, they are procured from other countries, in the vicinity of the Mahometans.’ If true, the Moors must, at some stage, have
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1344 you say... Might explain Polunnaruwa period lasting from 100-1200…
