The Journal of the Siam Society Vol. LXIV, Part 1-2, 1976 - Khamkoo

218 RFVIEW ARTICLE
king as vV writes, but a conflict among Cambodian princes in which the
Thai aided the one whom they had restored to the throne. Unexplainable
though, as Wyatt remarks, is that Naresuan is said to have gone from
Cambodia to conquer Champa, something which finds no support in any
other source. Could it be that there is here confusion of events of the
1590's when the Cambodian prince Ream Choeung Prey, who ultimately
drove the Thai forces out after the invasion of 1593-4, then sent a
Cambodian army to conquer Champa?
As I remarked before, and as Wyatt also noted (p. 8), the
chronological confusion shows that van Vliet bad some other source•for
the true dates of many events. It should not be thought that vV may
possibly preserve a more accurate account than the standard chronicles
or that it will "assist in opening, and hopefully settling, the question of
[the] validity" of the chronology in "the period immediately following
the Burmese sack of Ayudhya in 1569" (p. 10). The true dates for wars
with Burma and Cambodia in the latter half oft he 16th century are fairly
certain from the combined evidence of the Burmese, Cambodian and LP
chronicles plus contemporary European writings,2o and van Vliet must
have tried to insert these events in a framework which his ignorance of
traditional arithmetic, and perhaps also the b~sic text he used, had
distorted. (\notber bit of evidence for his use of different sources is the
double mention of Chiang Mai as "Jangoma" and "Tsieengh Maeij" (p. 86),
the first the common term used by Europeans of the time, and the second
which van Vliet would have taken from his written Thai source, perhaps
not realizing they were the same place.
As to textual content, there is somewhat more difficulty in
identifying van Vliet's sources than in the case of his chronology. Since
the latter is the framework of S one could legitimately expect its textual
20) The chronicles are Relationship, LP, and Nang, cited above. The European
evidence is Les Voyages Advantureux de Fernand Mendez Pinto, trans. by
Bernard Figuier, Paris 1628; Reports from Europeans who were in .Burma
between 1569 and 1600 in Publications of the Hakluyt Society, Extra Series,
Vol. X, pp. 110-217; letters of Diego Beloso and Blas Ruiz de Hernan Gonza·
lez, who participated in the Cambodian events of the 1590's, in Blair and
Ro~~rtson,.The Phillipine Islands, Vols. lX ang X,V,