The History of the Renaissance World (29 page)

He believed that the time was ripe to bring the Taira crashing down, but he was wrong. Kiyomori could still raise a larger samurai force than any of his rivals; he marched thousands of Taira-loyal warriors into Kyoto, put Go-Shirakawa under house arrest, and then forced the young Emperor Takakura to abdicate in favor of Takakura’s baby son Antoku—Kiyomori’s own grandson.
²

Taira Kiyomori now stood at the crest of his power. He was grandfather of the Emperor, master of the Cloistered Emperor, virtual ruler of Japan. His climb had taken over twenty years. “As Prime Minister,” the epic history
Tales of the Heike
tells us, “Kiyomori now held the entire realm within the four seas in the palm of his hand.” His ultimate victory lasted less than a year; and then he died, of a sudden severe fever, in March of 1181.
³

Already, the backlash was building.

Its architect was one of the survivors of the Heiji Disturbance: Minamoto Yoritomo, son of the beheaded Yoshitomo. Thirteen at the time of the Disturbance, Yoritomo had been exiled by the victorious Kiyomori, rather than executed. The act of mercy had been a strategic error. In his banishment, says the
Gukansho
, Yoritomo “had been thinking deeply about world affairs.” He was now in his early thirties, and for two decades had been gathering allies and planning his revenge.
⁴

He began in the southern cluster of volcanic islands known as the Izu Islands, where he had lived since his father’s death, and traveled up the eastern coast. This was traditionally Minamoto territory, and he was able to collect volunteers as he went. In a series of small battles—some defeats, but more victories—his army slowly gained strength, until he was able to establish himself strongly in the coastal city of Kamakura.

23.1 The Kamakura Shogunate

Meanwhile, Kiyomori’s son Munemori was gathering Taira adherents in Kyoto. But fourteen months of wretched weather—alternating drought and flooding, followed by a severe food shortage and then by plague—delayed the confrontation. So did the unexpected rise of a third party: Yoritomo’s cousin Yoshinaka, seven years his junior. An ambitious and skilled samurai who had lost his father in the Taira purges of 1159, Yoshinaka preferred to fight on his own account, rather than join his cousin’s campaign. He claimed the western city of Shinano for himself, and before long had accumulated an even larger following than Yoritomo.
⁵

Munemori decided to tackle his biggest enemy first. Rather than marching directly against Yoritomo, he assembled a huge army—contemporary chronicles put it at a hundred thousand men—to drive forward against Yoshinaka.

Munemori was not a gifted strategist. He apparently believed that numbers would win the day, but his massive army was filled with press-ganged peasants, farmers, and woodcutters. When it approached Yoshinaka’s front, the Minamoto samurai stalled until nightfall by engaging the samurai of the imperial army in courteous traditional duels. As soon as dark fell, Yoshinaka ordered a herd of oxen, equipped with pine torches lashed onto their horns, driven straight at the enemy. Panicked, the inexperienced Kyoto army stampeded into a nearby narrow valley called Kurikara Pass, where the men were pinned down and slaughtered. “The mountain streams ran with their blood,” says the
Tales of the Heike
, “and the mount of their corpses was like a small hill.”
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Hearing of the defeat, the sitting emperor and his Taira adherents fled from Kyoto, and Yoshinaka marched straight there and occupied the city—where he was welcomed by the Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa, who had been canny enough to switch allegiances and join the Minamoto cause.

The Battle of Kurikara had punctured Taira power, and over the next two years it deflated with astounding rapidity. From Kyoto, Yoshinaka pursued and destroyed as many Taira clan leaders as he could find; from his eastern headquarters, Yoritomo did the same. The five years of destruction between 1180 and 1185, the Gempei War, saw the almost complete destruction of the Taira by the Minamoto.

The culminating battle of the war took place on April 25, 1185, when a Taira fleet that carried the eight-year-old Emperor, Kiyomori’s grandson, and his grandmother, Kiyomori’s widow, was trapped at the strait of Dan-no-Ura and battered to pieces by the Minamoto navy, under the command of one of Yoritomo’s brothers. As the enemy closed in, the Emperor’s grandmother took her grandson in her arms and leapt from the ship. They were followed by their courtiers and by the defeated Taira samurai, dragged to the bottom by their armor.

Munemori, who had been responsible for the defeat at Kurikara Pass and had not managed to distinguish himself since, refused to jump until one of the Taira courtiers, embarrassed by his leader’s cowardice, pushed him off the side. He was a good swimmer, though, and one of the Minamoto boats fished him out of the water and took him prisoner. He was beheaded at Kamakura a few days later.

Later, one of the surviving members of his family remarked that Munemori’s disgraceful behavior wasn’t surprising; everyone in the clan knew that he wasn’t a real Taira. His mother had confided to them all, after the debacle of Kurikara, that she’d bought him from an umbrella seller as a baby.
⁷

With the mass drownings, the history of the Taira in Japan came to an abrupt and utter end. Minamoto Yoritomo claimed the lordship of Japan, driving his cousin from Kyoto and taking for himself the prestigious title of
utaisho
, Commander of the Inner Palace Guards: a warrior’s title for a victorious fighter. Another of Go-Shirakawa’s grandsons, the three-year-old Go-Toba, was crowned Emperor. But Yoritomo controlled Japan’s fighting forces, and the Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa, who had an unerring instinct for staying on the right side in a fight, recognized his rule. The struggle for power had ended as it began, with a toddler on the throne and power in the hands of others.
⁸

Seven years later, in 1192, Yoritomo accepted from the young Emperor’s hands the title of
shogun
: Military Commander in Chief, supreme commander of Japan. The authority to rule had shifted again, from Cloistered Emperor to soldier; and for many centuries to come, the shogun would rule as second emperor of Japan.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Kings’ Crusade

Between 1188 and 1199,
three kings go on the Third Crusade,
and Richard Lionheart comes to an unexpected end

E
ASTER OF
1189 was the appointed time. On that date, the kings of England, France, and Germany would depart for the Holy Land, prepared to drive Saladin out. “Let your hearts be strengthened in the Lord,” Henry II of England wrote to the beleaguered bishops in Jerusalem and Antioch. “Sooner than you could believe . . . vast multitudes of the faithful will by land and sea come to your rescue.”
¹

He was a skilled king, but a poor prophet.

The peace with Philip lasted barely six months; in July of 1188, Henry was forced to abandon his preparations in England and return to France to protect his lands there. And an unexpected development was complicating his relations with Philip. Richard, Henry’s oldest surviving son, had struck up a friendship with the enemy. “Richard remained with the king of France,” says the English chronicler Roger of Hoveden, “though much against the will of his father, and the king of France held him in such high esteem, that every day they ate at the same table, and from the same dish, and at night their beds were not separate.”
²

As the historian John Gillingham points out, this phrase doesn’t necessarily suggest sex; Ralph of Diceto uses the same wording to describe Henry the Younger’s amicable relationship with his father in 1175. Rather, Richard and Philip had identified with each other. Their cause was the same: both of them wanted Richard to inherit the throne of England.

After Henry the Younger’s death, Henry II had not settled on one of his surviving sons as heir. Geoffrey had died in 1186, accidentally killed at a jousting tournament. Richard, the natural choice, was still fiercely loyal to Eleanor and hostile to his father; Henry had not forgotten Richard’s long holdout in Poitiers, back in 1174. John, on the other hand, had been young enough during that earlier rebellion to escape full blame and seemed to be rising in Henry’s estimation. Henry had already named him Lord of Ireland, intending to give him the kingship of the Irish lands.

Richard, watching his father shower John with favors, could see his throne slipping away. So could Philip II, who wanted the Western Frankish lands bordering his own governed by a sympathetic king of England, not a mere duke subject to a younger brother’s decrees.

In the fall of 1188, Philip and Richard together summoned Henry to a conference at Bonsmoulins, on the eastern edge of Normandy. There they demanded that the king name Richard his heir and require the barons of England to swear loyalty to him at once.

Henry II refused. Now aged fifty-six, he had spent thirty-five years ruling both England and his family, rejecting all attempts to block his will, demolishing opposition, ignoring threats. He would not be bullied by his own son and Louis’s stripling successor.

According to onlookers, the conversation began to degenerate into shouts; and then, to drawn swords. No one struck, though. Instead, Richard turned his back on his father and went on his knees to Philip II, swearing homage to the king of France in place of his father.

That night, Henry sent the English knight William Marshal after Richard, hoping to persuade his son to return to England. But Richard had already left his quarters and could not be found. Marshal did make a new discovery: The night before, Richard had sent out perhaps two hundred letters. He was already raising his supporters to fight; he had never intended to make peace with his father.
³

Henry returned to England and, entirely abandoning his plans for crusade, began to prepare for all-out war instead. But over Christmas he began to grow ill. Contemporary chroniclers mention a fever, arthritis, and a fistula: most likely an abscessed anal gland, in itself miserable but not fatal, which eventually escalated into a septic infection and attacked the king’s joints. Over the next seven months, Henry became progressively sicker, even while he tried to prosecute the war against his son. Philip and Richard, aggressively pushing forward against the English-held lands, scored victory after victory. In July of 1189, so ill that he had to be supported by two of his knights in order to stay on his horse, Henry II agreed to meet the two rebels and yield to their demands. These had expanded: Henry was now required to give up any claim to the allegiance of all English knights who had gone over to Richard’s side.
*

Almost unable to stand, Henry took the required oaths and then came forward to give Richard the customary kiss of peace. Gerald de Barri, Henry’s royal clerk and chaplain, records that as the king kissed the air beside Richard’s ear, he whispered, “God grant that I may not die until I have had my revenge on you.”
⁴

Back at his headquarters in the castle of Chinon, Henry received the list of knights who had deserted his cause for Richard’s. At the head of the list was his son John. Until that moment, says Roger of Hoveden, Henry had not known that his favored son had crossed over to the enemy. “Surprised at this beyond measure,” Roger of Hoveden concludes, “[he] cursed the day on which he was born.” He had already lost the ability to stand. On his deathbed, he made his last confession; and on July 6, 1189, Henry II died in the thirty-fifth year of his reign.
⁵