Famous Samurai: Kamiizumi Nobutsuna by William de Lange

Famous Samurai: Kamiizumi Nobutsuna by William de Lange

Author:William de Lange [Lange, William de]
Language: nld
Format: epub
Tags: History, Japan, Asia, Biographies & Memoirs, Medieval, Fencing, Biography & Autobiography
Publisher: Floating World Editions
Published: 2012-12-13T23:00:00+00:00


Matsunaga Hisahide, the warlord who had made his fortune as a tea merchant

A decade after Yoshimasa’s death, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Miyoshi had responded to a call from the Hosokawa and embarked with a large force from their stronghold of Shōzui and landed at the port of Sakai. From there they had rapidly widened their sphere of influence, seizing and building castles throughout the Kinai region. In doing so, they had virtually seized control of the capital, and thus the Bakufu, for by this time the Hosokawa, too, were a waning influence.

All this was illustrative of the inexorable current of the times, of the ease and ever growing pace with which one warlord deposed another, and of the depth to which the once mighty institution of the Bakufu had sunk. In the same way as the once all-powerful emperor had been reduced to little more than a mascot during the tenth century, cleverly manipulated by powerful shoguns, the shoguns of the sixteenth century had become pawns in the self-seeking schemes of ruthless warrior clans—clans like the Miyoshi, which, by the time Hisahide had arrived on the stage, was led by Miyoshi Chōkei.

Though a warlord in the standard mold of the Warring States period, Chōkei had a number of redeeming qualities. For one, he was a shrewd and able administrator, influential and widely respected, who, by the time he died in 1564, controlled most of the provinces in the Kinai region. He had thrown himself up as the guardian of the infant shogun Ashikaga Yoshiteru and had become one of the first warlords in the Kinai region to be converted to Christianity by the Portuguese missionary Caspar Vilela, when the latter visited the capital in 1559.



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