This was the beginning of a two-hundred-year tradition of Cloistered Emperors, during which emperors abdicated at the height of their powers, leaving the throne to child heirs, and then went on ruling from behind the scenes. Everyone knew who was in charge: “After Shirakawa’s abdication,” says the Gukansho, “the state was governed for a long time by Retired Emperors.”5
9.1 Japan under the Cloistered Emperors
It was not an entirely impractical system. The Cloistered Emperor regime neatly divided time-consumingritual duties (ceremonially important but politically pointless) from the equally time-consuming duties of actual governance. The sovereign on the throne took care of the first; the ruler in the monastery, the second. It also preserved an appearance of cooperation between the emperor-in-name and his Fujiwara advisor, while the actual power struggle between king and Fujiwara clan went on, more or less, in private.
But the Cloistered Emperor system also, inevitably, multiplied the battles for power within the royal family itself.
WHEN THE THREE-YEAR-OLD Emperor Konoe was crowned in 1142, the imperial household was already filled with crackling hostilities.
Those hostilities had unfolded over three generations. Back in 1107, the emperor of Japan had been four-year-old Toba; the Cloistered Emperor, wielding the real power from the traditional monastery, was Toba’s imperious and long-lived grandfather Shirakawa. When Toba reached his teens, Shirakawa arranged for him to marry the beautiful teenaged Shoshi—his own adopted ward. Court gossip said that Shoshi was much more than Shirakawa’s ward. When Shoshi gave birth to a son and heir in 1119, the baby was generally assumed to be Shirakawa’s, even though Toba claimed the child as his own.6
The rumors got an imperial stamp of approval in 1123, when Shirakawa forced Toba to abdicate in favor of the four-year-old boy, who now became Emperor Sutoku. This relegated Toba, still just twenty-three, to a completely powerless position; he was now a Cloistered Emperor, but he was junior to his vigorous grandfather and inferior to his crowned son. Toba simmered in impotent resentment until Shirakawa finally died in 1129.
Once able to assume the real power of a Cloistered Emperor, Toba allowed his son-in-name to stay on the throne. But in 1139, Toba’s favorite wife, Tokuko, finally gave birth to a son—Konoe, his actual flesh and blood. Three years later, Toba forced Sutoku to abdicate in Konoe’s favor—just as he himself had been forced to abdicate in Sutoku’s favor, twenty years before.
9.1 Family line of Konoe and Sutoku.
This put Sutoku in exactly the same position Toba had occupied, all those years: junior Cloistered Emperor, powerless, resentful. Given the various hatreds and ambitions flying around the court, it is perhaps surprising that Konoe lasted thirteen years before someone slipped poison into his food.
At Konoe’s death, in 1155, Toba proposed that his next son (barring Sutoku, of course) become the new emperor; Sutoku objected, proposing either himself or his own oldest son as the logical candidate. Toba, who had more soldiers, won the argument; his son Go-Shirakawa (“Shirakawa the Second”) became the new emperor, and peace briefly descended on the royal house. “While Toba was alive,” the Gukansho tells us, “no rebellions or wars broke out.”7
But Toba died barely a year later. Before his funeral had even ended, the courtiers, clan leaders, and samurai were lining up behind the rival brothers, Go-Shirakawa and Sutoku had commandeered two different royal palaces to use as their respective headquarters, and the capital city was preparing for war.
The sides did not break neatly along clan lines. Taira and Minamoto clan members could be found in both armies, as could Fujiwara officials. Sutoku’s right-hand commander was the Minamoto clan leader Tameyoshi, accompanied by his son Tametomo. In The Tale of Hogen, an account of the struggle written in the early fourteenth century, Tametomo is a superhero, more than seven feet tall: “Born to archery, he had a bow arm that was some six inches longer than the arm with which he held his horse’s reins . . . [and he used] a bow that was more than eight and a half feet in length.” Tametomo’s skill was restricted, though, by the presence of his brother Yoshitomo on the other side; Yoshitomo had been one of the first courtiers to declare himself a supporter of Go-Shirakawa, and had put four hundred hand-chosen samurai warriors at the emperor’s disposal.8
The two sides finally met in battle on the night of July 29, 1156, in a brief and violent clash known afterwards as the Hogen Incident.* Tametomo picked off a number of warriors on the opposing side, but his brother Yoshitomo had the brilliant idea of sending an arsonist in to set Sutoko’s headquarters on fire. As the Cloistered Emperor’s men scrambled away from the flames, Go-Shirakawa’s archers took them down, one at a time. “Those who were afraid of the arrows and terrified by the flames even jumped into the wells in large numbers,” the Tale of Hogen says, “and of these, too, the bottom ones in a short time had drowned, those in the middle had been crushed to death by their fellows, and those on top had been burned up by the flames themselves.”
Sutoku’s forces were scattered, and the Cloistered Emperor himself was arrested and exiled. Yoshitomo had his own father put to death—a cold-blooded and vicious decision that, says the Gukansho, caused “some commotion around the country.” Tametomo was allowed to live, but the sinews of his arms were cut so that he could no longer use a bow.9
Minamoto Yoshitomo considered himself the architect of Emperor Go-Shirakawa’s victory, but when the normal business of government resumed, a Taira clan member named Kiyomori (who had joined the emperor’s cause after Yoshitomo) managed to gain a higher position at court, and the emperor’s apparent favor. Before long, Yoshitomo and Kiyomori were at odds; and the hostility between them was fanned by a Fujiwara clansman named Nobuyori, who himself felt unappreciated by the emperor. “Having noted rivalry between Minamoto Yoshitomo and Taira Kiyomori,” the Gukansho explains, “and having assumed that the victor in a war between them would seize control of the state, he allied himself with Minamoto Yoshitomo . . . and began immediately to plot a rebellion.”10
The inevitable fight—the Heiji Disturbance—broke out in 1159.
Go-Shirakawa had just abdicated in favor of his teenaged son, who became the emperor Nijo; Yoshitomo and Nobuyori waited until their Taira rival Kiyomori left the capital city Kyoto on a pilgrimage of devotion to Kumano, a sacred site nearly 175 miles of mountainous road away. When he was well away, five hundred Minamoto samurai surrounded the palace of the Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa, took him prisoner, and set his palace on fire. Others kidnapped the young emperor.
9.2 Detail from the Heiji Scroll: Burning of the Sanjo palace.
Credit: Werner Forman / Art Resource, NY
Their intention was to force both rulers into declaring the absent Taira Kiyomori an enemy of the state, thus throwing the entire Taira clan into disfavor. But Kiyomori, getting word of the coup, came thundering back into Kyoto at the head of a thousand hastily gathered samurai, all loyal to the Taira cause. The conspirators were quickly overwhelmed. Young Emperor Nijo was rescued; the Cloistered Emperor escaped; and the troops of Minamoto Yoshitomo and Fujiwara Nobuyori, falling like leaves, finally scattered in the face of the Taira attack.
Nobuyori was taken prisoner, and Kiyomori ordered him taken to a nearby riverbed and beheaded. Yoshitomo managed to escape, during the battle, and fled barefoot to the south with his faithful retainer Masakiyo. But when it became clear that capture and execution was inevitable, he asked Masakiyo to behead him. Masakiyo reluctantly obeyed and then killed himself. When the pursuers caught up to the two corpses, they took Yoshitomo’s head back to Kyoto and hung it in a tree beside the imperial prison.11
In the aftermath of the Heiji Disturbance, Taira Kiyomori executed or exiled almost every important member of both rival clans. In the span of twenty years, the power of the Fujiwara had collapsed. Now the Taira clan was rising; but the Cloistered Emperor still controlled the palace, and the other clans waited their chance for revenge.
* * *
* In 8
84, the Fujiwara official Mototsune invented for himself the post of kampaku, or “civil dictator.” The kampaku had as much authority over a grown emperor as a regent, or sessho, had over a child ruler. By the twelfth century, the titles sessho and kampaku seem to have often been used interchangeably, but the highest post in government—with authority over the throne itself—was almost always held by a Fujiwara official. See, for example, Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan (Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), pp. 48ff.
* Stephen Turnbull provides a useful definition: “The actual definition of a samurai changed considerably throughout his history, so the reader is recommended to see the samurai initially as a high-ranking warrior in service to a master. To think of a samurai as a Japanese knight is a helpful analogy.” See The Samurai: A Military History (1977), pp. ix and following.
* Shirakawa’s younger brother died before he could take the throne, and Shirakawa’s own son became heir; he inherited the throne in 1087 as Emperor Horikawa. Because Horikawa was the son of a Minamoto mother, though, Go-Sanjo’s intentions were carried out. Horikawa died in 1107 at the young age of twenty-eight, before he was able to abdicate in favor of his young son Toba; so when Toba was coronated, Shirakawa continued to serve as Cloistered Emperor.
* Both the Hogen Incident and the Heiji Disturbance, three years later, were named after the eras in which they occurred. In Japan, a new era was often declared when a new emperor was crowned (the Hogen Era began with the coronation of Go-Shirakawa; the Heiji Era began with Emperor Nijo), but a catastrophe, triumph, or new discovery might also be marked with a new era name.
Chapter Ten
Death of an Army
On the Korean peninsula between 1146 and 1197,
the king scorns the army,
the army overthrows the king,
and both army and king submit to private power
ON THE PENINSULA east of China and west of Japan, a single king ruled over a single people. For over two centuries, Goryeo had been united under the same dynasty. Its people spoke the same language, worshipped in the same Buddhist temples, followed the same laws.*
10.1 Goryeo
This did not translate into a peaceful existence.
In the early decades of the twelfth century, two major rebellions had rocked the palace; the first led by the king’s own father-in-law, the second by a rebellious Buddhist monk who raised an army from his followers and labeled it the “Heaven-Sent Force of Loyalty and Righteousness.” Both revolts had been put down by the reigning monarch, King Injong; but they had risen out of a deep discontent that Injong did nothing to address.1
Unified though it was, Goryeo was heavily scored by internal divisions. The old families, those that could trace their lineage back to the days before unification, married among themselves, held their country estates apart, and filled most of the offices of civil government: an aristocrat could always be known, remarked the twelfth-century poet Yi Kyu-bo, by “the official tablet stuck in his girdle.”2
Military officers, on the other hand, were relegated to the lowest possible appointments. The army had served the throne loyally in putting down rebellions, and a standing force was needed to protect the northern border against wandering nomadic invaders; but the aristocracy was unwilling to allow soldiers to gain any more power. Injong’s officials had even decided to do away with the exams that allowed military men to qualify for important civil posts. There was no longer any way for a soldier to rise through the ranks and gain power at court.3
Nor were soldiers the only victims of aristocratic ambition. Since the beginning of the century, the spread of great private estates—enlarged both by royal presents and by out-and-out confiscation of the fields of the poor—had displaced more and more of Goryeo’s peasants; too many now wandered through the countryside, giving up farming for a life of banditry.4
When Injong died in 1146, his oldest son Uijong was crowned in his place: the eighteenth king of his line, heir to an uneasy kingdom. Tact and wisdom were required, but Uijong had neither. His father and mother had openly preferred their second son, Uijong’s younger brother Kyong; they thought Uijong to be a trifler, with no skill for governing. Their low opinion seems to have been shared by contemporary historians. Uijong, the chronicles tell us, was more interested in building gorgeous gardens and writing poetry than in governing. He “partied with his favorite civilian officials,” says the contemporary history Goryeosa, “exchanging poems and forgetting the time.” “With palace attendants, he got drunk daily and enjoyed himself,” another account complains.5
Uijong was only nineteen at the time of his accession, and fully aware of his family’s dislike. In 1151, after six years on the throne, he seized on a baseless court rumor that his younger brother Kyong was planning treason, and used it as an excuse to strip Prince Kyong of his titles and remove his closest friends from their official positions. Kyong had remained popular, especially with his mother’s family, and Uijong was afraid of a coup. Six years later, still worried about Kyong’s prominence, Uijong banished Kyong and his cronies from the capital city of Kaesong completely.6
At this, Kyong and his companions disappear from the chronicles. But their reflections can be seen, insubstantial as mirrored ghosts, in the events of the next decades.
Disrespect of Goryeo’s officers and scorn for their men grew more extreme. Uijong, posturing as a man of culture and peace, encouraged the disregard. Ignoring military campaigns, he built Buddhist temples and gave them names like “Tranquillity” and “Joyful Pleasure.” He dug lily ponds, traveled from one beauty spot to another, and gave alms to the poor. Meanwhile, he ordered soldiers to dig ditches and build walls for public projects and forced officers to act as ceremonial bodyguards to civil officials. Enlisted men found their salaries unexpectedly docked, or promised land tracts suddenly reassigned. On royal expeditions, military men were allowed to wait, cold and hungry, until civilians were well fed.7
In 1167, at a royal feast, a young man named Kim Ton-jung (the unruly son of the Royal Diarist Kim Bu-sik, mastermind of the official history known as the Samguk Sagi) acted out his king’s disdain by playing a practical joke on the king’s Chief of General Staff, the army officer Jeong Jung-bu. A career soldier of sixty-one, General Jeong Jung-bu was a dangerous and experienced fighter, nearly seven feet tall. Kim Ton-jung, flown with wine, set the general’s long grey beard on fire with a candle. Jeong Jung-bu was incensed, but his king was merely entertained, as Kim Ton-jung must have guessed he would be.8
General Jeong Jung-bu, as it happened, was related by marriage to two of the banished friends of Prince Kyong; two of the younger officers under his personal command, Senior Captains Yi Ko and Yi Uibang, were from the same clan as another of the exiles. After the raucous dinner party of 1167, unhappiness over Uijong’s high-handedness, simmering along in an unfocused diffusion beneath the surface, began to coalesce into a solid core of resentment around these three.
Three years later, the resentment erupted.
Civilian and military officials had gathered for a memorial service, during which the gap between them grew painfully clear: “Now the civilian officials are haughty, drunk, and full,” one of Jeong Jung-bu’s officers complained to him, “but the military officials are hungry and troubled. How long can we endure this?” Jeong Jung-bu, still smarting over Kim Ton-jung’s insult, agreed. “And thus,” the Goryeosa concludes, “they began to plot a coup.”9
Their opportunity came quickly. The next day, the king staged a boxing competition, offering generous prizes for the winner. During one of the matches, a civilian official named Han Roe mocked the losing officer, finally pushing him down on the ground to demonstrate his weakness. “The king and his officials applauded and laughed heartily,” the Goryeosa explains.
This was the match that lit a very short fuse. At twilight on that same day, Jeong Jung-bu led his co-conspirators in an attack on the palace gates. The guards, surprised, were no match for the rebels, who poured i
nto the palace shouting, “Death to all who wear the civil official headdress!” and massacring the civilian officials. Han Roe hid under the king’s bed but was dragged out and knifed to death outside the king’s quarters. In the bloodbath, Kim Ton-jung also died.10
When it was over, an entire layer of Goryeo’s government had been wiped out: “Their corpses were piled as high as a mountain,” the Goryeosa says. Uijong survived by handing over all power to Jeong Jung-bu and his fellow officers, who spared his life but exiled him to isolated Koje Island, off the southern coast. In his place, the conspirators crowned his younger brother Myeongjong. Nearly forty, weak and accommodating, Myeongjong would sit on the Goryeo throne for twenty-seven years, wielding no power whatsoever.11
Through disregarding its soldiers, pushing them down and away, Goryeo had fallen under a military rule that would last nearly a century.
It was not a peaceful regime. For one thing, General Jeong Jung-bu had rivals. His younger allies, Yi Ko and Yi Uibang, helped him to form the Council of Generals, a group of officers who took over the job of governing that had once been held by the civilian State Council. And Yi Ko, Yi Uibang, and every officer on the Council of Generals—the Chungbang—wanted a share of their leader’s power.
For another, the exiled Uijong had supporters. He had not treated his army well, but he had been a faithful observer of Buddhist principles and a generous builder of temples; he had attempted to lower taxes; he had given alms to the poor.12
In 1173, an officer named Kim Bo-dang, stationed in the northeast of the country, managed to round up a substantial counterforce of soldiers and civilians who were still loyal to the deposed king. Kim Bo-dang had no personal connections in the Council of Generals, and although he was an army man, he had been demoted after General Jung-bu’s government came to power. He had been better off under the old regime.
The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople Page 8