Apogee of Empire: The Reign of Jayavarman VII (1182-ca. 1220)

The seventh Jayavarman was certainly the greatest of Cambodia's kings, and is held in veneration today by the Khmer people. His claims to royal descent are still not well understood, but at some point in his youth he was in exile in the Cham court at Vijaya, during a period when relations between local Khmer principalities and their Cham neighbors fluctuated between alliance and conflict.

From the days of his youth, Jayavarman had been a Mahayana Buddhist, and his marriage to the very devout Jayarajadevi only reinforced his faith. His greatest ar­chitectural monument, the Bayon, was at the exact center of Angkor Thom, a huge, square urban compound surrounded by a high laterite wall and an enormous moat. In Angkor Thom's northwest quadrant was his royal palace, fronting on a vast reviewing area. While the Bayon temple' s central focus was on the Buddha, its many shrines ded­icated to various Hindu gods illustrate the tolerance of his religion toward Hinduism.

After taking the throne, Jayavarman VII carried out a building program on a co­lossal scale, within the capital and throughout the empire. Among these projects were 102 “hospital chapels” scattered through Khmer territory; each has its own inscribed stele, enabling historians to map out the full extent of his political power. This was indeed the greatest of all Southeast Asian empires. In the north it extended as far as modern Vientiane (Laos) on the Mekong River, northeast to the Dai Viet border, southeast to include all of Champa and the Mekong Delta, south to the northern part of the Malay Peninsula, west to take in the Chao Praya basin (loca­tion of modern Bangkok), and northwest to border the Burma's Pagan kingdom.

With death of the great Jayavarman VII about 1220, the empire began to shrink. The accession to the throne in 1243 by Jayavarman VIII was a traumatic break with what had gone before. Mahayana Buddhism was completely overthrown as a state religion and was replaced by Hinduism, and there was an unbelievably ferocious, reactionary iconoclasm that resulted in the desecration and destruction of tens of thousands of Buddhist images throughout Angkor and beyond (orthodox Hindus consider Buddhism in any form a heresy). ^[1246] What ensued was slow decline of the empire, and its eventual “collapse.”