Maravarman Sundara Pandya’s sack of Thanjavur

01The old score

Kulottunga III, the last strong Chola king, had invaded the Pandya country in his own time and humbled Madurai. Maravarman Sundara Pandya I came to the Pandya throne around 1216 and paid it back. His inscriptions say he burnt Thanjavur and Uraiyur, the two royal cities of the Cholas, and drove Kulottunga to flight. He then performed a virabhisheka in the coronation hall of the Cholas at Mudikondacholapuram, the palace town near Pazhaiyarai, and took the title of the Pandya who took the Chola country.

02A crown handed back

Sundara Pandya did not keep the Chola country. When Kulottunga came to him and submitted, he returned the kingdom, an act his inscriptions celebrate as generosity. The Hoysala king Narasimha II, related to the Cholas by marriage, had marched south to their aid, and this probably weighed on the Pandya’s choice. The great temple at Thanjavur, Rajaraja’s Brihadeeswara, still stood. But the balance of the south had turned: within sixty years the Pandyas under Jatavarman Sundara Pandya would be the leading power from Nellore to Lanka, and the Chola line would end in 1279.