The History of the Renaissance World (77 page)

66.1 Genealogy of Philip VI and Edward III.

The following year, the new Philip VI of France summoned Edward III to come and do homage for the county of Guienne. Isabella decided that it would be politic for her son to agree, and so the seventeen-year-old king of England meekly walked through the ritual of submission and loyalty: placing his hands underneath the hands of the French king, promising to remain his liege man. But the obeisance was Edward’s last act of obedience. He was nearly of age, and fed up with his regents. “The King began to grow in body and mind,” Gray notes, “which was not agreeable to the authority of the Queen his mother.”
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In the following year, 1330, the young king turned eighteen. Immediately he dissolved the regency, in the most direct way possible: he sent two of his younger friends with a party of soldiers to arrest Mortimer and his mother in the middle of the night.

Mortimer suffered the same fate as Hugh Despenser. After a quick trial, he was drawn and quartered, “upon a charge of having been party to the death of the King, Edward II.” Isabella was placed under polite house arrest; her son provided her with comfortable rooms, an income, and ladies in waiting, but ordered her never to go out or show herself in public again.
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Chapter Sixty-Seven

The Southern and Northern Courts

Between 1318 and 1339,
the Kamakura shogunate falls,
the Ashikaga shogunate rises,
and the Chrysanthemum Throne divides

T
HE
M
ONGOL INVASION OF
J
APAN
had failed, twice. The island still lay safe off the coast, a protective wall of water between the samurai and the Mongol soldiers of the Yuan dynasty.

But Japan’s convoluted, two-court arrangement was fragile; and in the aftershocks of the Mongol attacks, it shivered apart.

At the peak of the Mongol threat, the imperial court in Kyoto had divided over the succession to the Chrysanthemum Throne. A complicated argument between two brothers—one the oldest son of the emperor, the other his favorite—eventually resolved itself into an arrangement where the sons and grandsons of the older brother (the senior line) and the descendants of the younger alternated on the throne.

Like most compromises, this one made everyone unhappy. The two royal families grew increasingly hostile to each other. The junior line followed Confucianism, the senior Buddhism; the junior line patronized Chinese-style scholarship, the senior preferred Japanese literature written in traditional Japanese script. Within the clans, individual families quarreled over the right to put the next emperor on the Chrysanthemum Throne.
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Meanwhile, the military government headquartered at Kamakura, run by a regent on behalf of the figurehead shogun, grew slowly more tyrannical. After the Mongols were driven back, the
shikken
Hojo Tokimune and his successors began to act more and more autocratically: granting government positions to friends and allies, distributing land to loyalists, electing more and more Hojo clan members to be the military governors (the
shugo
) who ran the provinces farther away from Kyoto and Kamakura.
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As the grip of the Hojo fist tightened, lawlessness ballooned. Highwaymen flourished. Gangs of outlaws called
akuto
(“evil bands”) roamed across the countryside. Pirate fleets haunted the ports and shores. To each problem, the Hojo answered with more force, more regulation, and more punishment. Additional warriors were sent to each
shugo
, tasked specifically with hunting down outlaws. All ships were forced to register and to show the name of the owner and the port of registration at all times. Muggings on land and robbery at sea, once punishable with exile, were now capital offenses. Stealing crops before harvest, once a civil matter, now became a crime.
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And yet the disorder grew worse and worse. Piracy moved west, with fleets of ships sacking, stealing, and kidnapping along the coasts of China and Goryeo. The hordes of the
akuto
increased year by year, until the bands were often a hundred strong, armed with swords and bamboo spears, robbing villages and blocking roadways. “They pay no attention to the laws of the
bakafu
[the Kamakura shogunate], and the attempts of the
shugo
to suppress them have borne no fruit,” writes a fourteenth-century priest from Harima. “In this way, their numbers have swelled with each passing day.” Reports from the outlying provinces complained of night raids and roadside murders, burned farms and stolen crops, temples closed because the monks were too afraid to stay.
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I
N
1318,
THE EMPEROR
H
ANAZONO ABDICATED.
He was a son of the senior line, and so his cousin Go-Daigo, who belonged to the junior branch, was crowned the next emperor.

But his enthronement came with conditions. The two years before Hanazono’s abdication had been taken up with an increasingly bitter argument between the families. Although Go-Daigo was clearly next in line, most of the junior branch preferred his nephew, Kuniyoshi; but the principle of alternating succession meant that, after Go-Daigo, the crown would have to pass to the other clan, cutting Kuniyoshi out completely.

To prevent a total breakdown at Kyoto, the
shikken
in Kamakura ordered a compromise. Go-Daigo would be coronated, but none of his sons would be eligible for the title of crown prince; Kuniyoshi would follow him, but after that, the crown would revert to the senior line. And, to give more candidates a shot at the throne, all emperors would have to abdicate after ten years of rule.
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Go-Daigo was only thirty-one. Forced to swear away not only his own future as emperor but that of his sons as well, he began to plot to bring the Kamakura shogunate down.

His first step was to get more power back into his own hands. The Cloistered Emperor, theoretically more powerful than the sitting emperor, was his own father Go-Uda (thanks to rapid abdications, there were
three
living retired emperors, and Go-Uda was the oldest). But Go-Uda was more inclined to piety than to administration. “I passed four years touching the dust of the capital,” he later wrote, of his brief stint as Cloistered Emperor. “I lost my bonds with the propagation of [Buddhist] esoteric teachings . . . my bonds and my duties pulled me this way and that. Very strongly, thoughts of retirement welled up inside me.” Go-Daigo took advantage of his father’s natural inclinations; during the fourth year of his rule, he talked Go-Uda into giving up the traditional lawmaking powers held by the Cloistered Emperor and returning them to the throne.
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Over the next years, Go-Daigo ruled directly: a strange state of affairs, made bearable to the rival family only by his apparent intention to abide by the
shikken
’s ruling and abdicate after ten years. But in 1326, the designated Crown Prince, Kuniyoshi, fell suddenly ill and died within two weeks. “The distraught members of his household felt as though a light had gone out,” says the poetic chronicle
The Clear Mirror
, and soon the darkness of civil war spread across Japan. Go-Daigo suggested that, since the original arrangement had clearly designated another member of the junior line as his successor, one of his own sons should now become Crown Prince. The senior branch argued for the immediate reversion of the title to the senior line. The quarrel dragged on; without a clear successor, Go-Daigo remained on the throne past his ten-year expiration date. At the same time, he was developing a strong alliance with the notorious warrior monks on Mount Hiei; he sent two of his sons to study there, one becoming a priest, the other an abbot.
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The military government at Kamakura was slow to intervene this time. The young
shikken
, Hojo Takatoki, had been appointed in 1311 at the age of eight; his chief minister and competent grandmother had handled the earlier succession crisis, but now Takatoki had taken power in his own right and had turned out to be easily distracted from matters of state. The fourteenth-century chronicle
Taiheiki
says that he had developed a passion for dog fighting and was even willing to accept dogs in lieu of taxes owed. Dogfights were staged twelve days out of every month, and the best dogs were

fed on fish and fowl, kept in kennels having gold and silver ornaments, and carried in palanquins to take the air. When these distinguished animals were borne along the public thoroughfares, people . . . had to dismount and kneel in obeisance. . . . Thus, the city of Kamakura presented the curious spectacle of a town filled with well-fed dogs, clothed in tinsel and brocades and totaling from four to five thousand.
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Preoccupied with his entertainments, Hojo Takatoki paid little attention to the rumblings in Kyoto.

By 1331, Go-Daigo’s intentions of staying on the throne indefinitely had become perfectly clear to the senior line. Clan members sent an urgent and unambiguous message to Kamakura: “Most dangerous of late are the sovereign’s rebellious plottings. Let the military make inquiry quickly, lest disorder afflict the realm.” On advice of his councillors, Takatoki sent an army towards the imperial capital; Go-Daigo answered him with a call for open rebellion against the corrupt and weakened
shikken
.
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Samurai flocked to the new war. Some fought in support of the emperor, others in support of the Hojo
shikken
, and still others for themselves, hoping to seize a piece of the political pie. The most notorious of these samurai was Ashikaga Takauji; and in the course of the war, he rotated between all three loyalties.

The Ashikaga clan, an offshoot of the once-powerful Minamoto, hailed from the northeastern province of Shimotsuke, distant enough from both shogun and emperor to feel no overwhelming loyalty towards either. In the first six months of fighting, Ashikaga Takauji joined the forces of the shogunate, which quickly turned out to be the winning side; the Kamakura army drove Go-Daigo and his samurai into the mountains near Kyoto and trapped them there, and Go-Daigo was forced to surrender with embarrassing speed. He was taken back to Kyoto and housed in a shack behind the palace, where he was forced to listen to the joyous coronation of a prince from the senior line as the new emperor. He was then escorted under guard to Yasuki Harbor, west of the capital, and was taken by ship to desolate Oki Island: “almost devoid of human habitation,” says
The Clear Mirror
, “only distant structures marked a spot where fisherfolk boiled water for salt.” Here he lived for two years in makeshift housing, while the new Emperor Kogon ruled in Kyoto and Hojo Takatoki went back to his dogfights in Kamakura.
¹⁰

But the
shikken
’s incompetence won him no new friends, and the Emperor Kogon was widely regarded as his puppet; he had not even been properly coronated, since Go-Daigo had refused to hand over the imperial scepter and regalia to his rival. From Oki, Go-Daigo was able to quietly assemble a network of supporters—samurai, fishermen, and pirates—who wanted to be rid of Hojo Takatoki’s rule. In the winter of 1333, a small band of pirates and fishermen helped Go-Daigo escape from his island. He landed on the shores of Hoki Province and found an army there already assembled, waiting for his leadership.
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At the news, Hojo Takatoki dispatched his own army from Kamakura, led by Ashikaga Takauji and another commander. Nitta Yoshisada, also a descendant of the Minamoto clan. But Ashikaga Takauji felt that the
shikken
had been slow in rewarding his loyalty; contemplating a change in allegiance, he had been carrying on a secret correspondence with Go-Daigo for the last year. Once out of Kamakura, he swapped sides, followed closely by Nitta Yoshisada and most of the army. Together, the men led a two-pronged attack against Hojo power; Ashikaga Takauji took part of the force into Kyoto and drove out the Hojo officials there, while Nitta Yoshisada led the rest directly against Kamakura.
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