Campaign of Danture
The Danture campaign comprised a series of encounters between the Portuguese and the Kingdom of Kandy in 1594, part of the Sinhalese–Portuguese War. It is considered a turning point in the indigenous resistance to Portuguese expansion. For the first time in Sri Lanka a Portuguese army was essentially annihilated, when they were on the verge of the total conquest of the island. A 20,000-strong Portuguese army, led by Governor Pedro Lopes de Sousa, invaded Kandy on 5 July 1594. After three months, severely depleted by guerilla warfare and mass desertions, what remained of the Portuguese army was annihilated at Danture by the Kandyans under King Vimaladharmasuriya. With this victory, the Kingdom of Kandy emerged as a major military power; it was to retain its independence, against Portuguese, Dutch, and British armies, until 1815.Victory at Danture notwithstanding, only the mobile section of the Portuguese army in Ceylon was annihilated, while their strongholds remained intact, and so Kandy was unable to follow up with an advance into the lowlands. The Portuguese would in the future renew their offensive against Kandy under the reorganized forces of captain-general Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo, devastating Kandy in the process.
Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Campaign of Danture (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors).Campaign of Danture
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Central Province, Sri Lanka
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