Siege of Angkor (1431)

A year with no day in it

No contemporary source permits reconstruction of a specific day in 1431. Later Cambodian and Ayutthayan chronicles preserve a tradition that Ayutthayan forces conquered Angkor in approximately 1431–1432.

Those chronicles were written centuries afterwards and disagree over dates and rulers. Contemporary inscriptions disappear in the early fourteenth century, leaving a major evidentiary gap.

Michael Vickery concluded that an Ayutthayan intervention of some kind probably occurred around 1431, connected to the Cambodian political centre's movement south toward the Phnom Penh river-port region — while cautioning that the chronicles cannot be read literally.

What the ground says

Sediment cores from Angkor Thom show that land use, burning, erosion and moat maintenance had already declined during the fourteenth century, before the traditional conquest date. The evidence does not support a sudden demographic collapse in 1431.

Occupation and ritual activity continued at Angkor after the political centre shifted, which contradicts the idea that the whole city was emptied permanently in a single sack.

Fifty Buddhas

Material evidence does support some fifteenth-century Ayutthayan presence. Researchers identified more than fifty early Ayutthayan-style Buddha images whose stone indicates manufacture at Angkor, interpreted as possible offerings by an occupying force and its artists; one proposal puts the occupation at twelve to fifteen years.

Those images are consistent with an occupying presence, but they cannot by themselves establish the date, the violence, or the political form of the conquest.

Scholars accept an intervention or occupation far more readily than the full traditional story of a seven-month siege, catastrophic sack, mass deportation and immediate abandonment.