"Sri Lanka and the Maldive Islands" is part of a series of books concerned with the Portuguese Encounters with the World, in the Age of Discoveries. Its primary objective is to provide access to translations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents which illustrate various aspects of this encounter, combining documents from indigenous sources with those from the Portuguese histories and archives. A historical introduction provides the context in which the documents can be read, and a select bibliography indicates the most recent and authoritative secondary works on the subject. The present volume contains chapters covering the Portuguese arrival in Sri Lanka, and their first encounters with the island and its peoples, their subsequent relations with Kandy and Jaffna, and a final chapter on Portuguese relations with the Maldive Islands.