Indravarman II

Indravarman II is among the most obscure of the major Angkorian kings, his reign reconstructed from scraps. He is generally identified as a son of Jayavarman VII and is assumed to have succeeded his father around 1218, but no inscription of his own survives to confirm the date or the circumstances of his accession. Even his death in 1243 is known only from a later text, the inscription of the Mangalartha temple, which mentions it in passing. The near-silence of the epigraphic record after the torrent of texts under Jayavarman VII is itself one of the notable facts of the period, and historians disagree over whether it reflects exhaustion of royal resources, a change in religious practice, or simply the chances of survival.

What can be said about the reign concerns mostly contraction. Khmer forces withdrew from Champa around 1220, ending the occupation Jayavarman VII had imposed, and a Cham prince was installed at Vijaya — apparently a negotiated disengagement rather than a military defeat, perhaps prompted by the rising power of Dai Viet and by pressures elsewhere. In the west, Tai polities in the upper Chao Phraya basin were slipping out of the Khmer orbit during these decades; the traditional account of Sukhothai's foundation as an independent kingdom belongs to roughly this era, though its details rest on later chronicles.

Like his father, Indravarman II was a Buddhist, and some continuation or completion of Jayavarman VII's vast building program is usually assigned to his reign, since several of the great Bayon-style monuments show multiple construction phases. Attributing specific works to him, however, is conjectural.

His significance is largely transitional. He inherited an empire at its greatest extent and governed it through a quarter-century in which its periphery began to peel away, handing on to his successor Jayavarman VIII a state still wealthy and centered on an enormous capital, but no longer expanding. The contrast between his invisibility and the overwhelming documentation of his father's reign has made him a standing reminder of how uneven the sources for Khmer history are.