Category Archives: military

by | 9 December 2023 · 5:55 am

Hungary’s Largest Peasant Revolt, 1514

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 59-60:

Finally, in 1514, after Ottoman troop movements into Serbia, the Pope, Leo X, and Tamás Bakócz, the Archbishop of Esztergom, declared a crusade against the Ottomans and money was raised from most of the European capitals to finance an army to halt the Turks’ advance. King Louis II of Hungary [incl. Croatia] raised a force reported to be 40,000-strong, mostly peasants untrained in warfare, under an experienced soldier from the lesser nobility, György Dózsa. He was joined by a number of evangelical priests and friars. Most of the Hungarian barons had no appetite for the campaign, resented the loss of the serfs’ labour on their land at harvest time and were deeply suspicious about permitting a peasant army to roam around Hungary. Rightly so as it turned out.

The majority of the peers in the royal council pressed the archbishop and the Vatican to call off the crusade even before it had properly begun. But Dózsa’s army refused to disband and the crusade against the infidels turned into the biggest peasants’ revolt in Hungarian history.

There had occasionally been eruptions of unrest among peasants, but Hungary’s feudalism was among the most entrenched anywhere. In the sixteenth century, when in most of Western Europe serfdom had all but disappeared, it remained strong in Hungary. Dózsa was a skilful soldier and titular leader of the rebellion. But the real inspiration that under Catholic dogma would condemn the rebels’ souls to eternal perdition were revolutionary priests, the best known of whom was a fiery preacher, Lőrinc Mészáros. After months of savage fighting, burning and looting on the way, Dózsa’s army seized control of the Great Hungarian Plain and a few towns in south-eastern Hungary and in Transylvania. For months they lay siege to Temesvár (present-day Timișoara in Romania), but never managed to capture and hold the town. That was the high point of their success. They were finally beaten in the autumn of 1514 by an army led by János Zápolya, the voivode (chieftain) of Transylvania.

The magnates, safely back in untrammelled power, exacted vicious revenge. Dózsa was hauled to Buda in chains, enthroned on a flaming stake and a red-hot crown was placed on his head – as ‘King’ of the peasants. Several of his leading supporters were forced to eat his roasting flesh before they too were executed, as a warning to any others who might want to ‘destroy the natural order’, as the Archbishop of Esztergom put it. Several of the priests who took part in the rebellion were hanged, including Mészáros.

The direct consequences of Dózsa’s revolt lasted well into the nineteenth century. Extreme measures were taken by the landlords and gentry against the peasantry ‘to punish them for their faithlessness’. They were condemned to ‘perpetual servitude’, banned from any right to migration, any access to legal rights and denied the right to own land. A new tax was imposed of one gold florin, twelve chickens and two geese a year as compensation for the damage the rebellion had caused. Landlords were given the right to claim one day a week’s unpaid labour. Serfdom continued in Hungary until 1848.

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by | 7 December 2023 · 6:01 am

Budapest in 1896

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 12-14:

In 1896 Budapest was the largest city of mills in the world (rivalled at that time only by Minneapolis). Wheat from the great plains of Hungary and other parts of the Balkans was turned into flour in the mills of Budapest. Many of the successful entrepreneurs who began their business lives as grain traders became mill owners and then diversified. Budapest was by far the busiest port on the Danube. The (mostly nationalized) Hungarian river transport company, MFTR, had overtaken the Austrian equivalent more than thirty years earlier and was thriving. A pleasant daily Budapest–Vienna overnight journey on white paddle steamers was highly popular until the 1920s. Trains between the two cities were fast – four and a quarter hours in 1896. In 2022 it was three hours and thirty-five minutes.

Budapest finance caught up and surpassed the growth of agricultural and industrial production. By 1900 Budapest became the banking centre of Central and Eastern Europe. Between 1867, the date of the ‘Compromise’ which created the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, and 1914 the number of Hungarian banks grew from eleven to 160 and their capitalization increased fivefold. A few of them – the First Hungarian Commercial Bank and the Hungarian Credit Bank – rivalled the biggest Viennese and German banks in size and prestige, as their palatial headquarter buildings in downtown Budapest, designed by the most renowned European and Hungarian architects, showed. Their owners, such as the Wolianders, the Wahrmanns, Hatvany-Deutsch and Chorins, joined the European super-rich.

Sixty per cent of the Hungarian manufacturing industry was based in Budapest, from small enterprises to the giant Manfréd Weiss works, which employed more than 5,000 workers by 1913 in a vast factory complex on Csepel Island in the Danube, just north of the city. The factory exported munitions to Spain, Mexico and Britain, whose forces would soon be using them in a war against Austria-Hungary.

Little suggested that the unprecedented boom would not continue. Tekla Szilard, the mother of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leo Szilard, who would later flee Budapest from fascism and work on the Manhattan Project that designed and built the first nuclear bomb, described her mood on her wedding day, 25 April 1897, and ‘the boundless optimism we all feel…The city was growing by leaps and bounds. I felt as though this was my progress…my development.’ But some prescient people were more wary about the pace of change and thought of what was left behind. Krúdy wrote in 1900 about his beloved Budapest: ‘They kept on building every day, palaces topped by towers rising towards the sun; and at night it seemed there were endless burials…of the town’s broken matter, of old people and old houses, of old streets and old customs.’

Within a generation much of this new wealth, optimism and confidence would disappear. In the millennium year Hungary was nearly three times the size it would be just twenty-five years later and its population around 50 per cent higher. Most of present-day Croatia and Slovakia, a third of Romania and a large slice of Serbia were all part of Greater Hungary. It possessed a busy seaport [Trieste] on the Adriatic with a busy merchant navy. Then the disaster of the First World War struck and Zweig’s World of Yesterday came to an end. Hungary has never recovered from the shock.

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by | 5 December 2023 · 7:31 am

The Restoration’s Brutal Repressions

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 334-335:

The success of [Samuel Butler’s] Hudibras reminds us that Restoration culture, in its fun-loving hedonism, was also about the defeat of Puritanism. As much as Charles talked about forgetting the past, there were plenty who were quite willing to rake up the radicalism of the Republic and remind people of the days when Christmas was banned and the theatres were shut, and soldiers stomped up and down the country closing horse races and fining people for their loyalty to the king. Hudibras was a way of crowing about this. The culture war, that we saw at the start of the century in events like the Cartmel wedding, had been won. Puritanism had been cast out. Momus’s day had come and gone. Merry England was back.

But Pepys is a reminder that there was more to it than this. We think of Charles as a ‘Merry Monarch’, given over to celebration and parties, to theatre and pleasures of the flesh. It’s not a false view as such, but it obscures a lot. For Dissenters, especially Quakers, his reign was one of brutal oppression, harder than anything experienced by the Puritans under his father. In its controls on the press, his government tried to stop the mouths of the English people once more.

The legacy of the Republic remained. Puritanism may have been defeated politically, but it lived on in the dissenting tradition which became such an important element to English religion – and indeed eventually political – culture. Meanwhile, the degree to which the constitutional issues of the earlier seventeenth century had been resolved was quite unclear. Technically, now, the vast majority of revenue came from Parliament, though the king might try and circumvent this by seeking other sources. Taxes on trade, for example, specifically the customs and excise, were increasingly lucrative, and yet were subject to less Parliamentary control than direct taxes because they tended to be granted for the life of the monarch.

The idea of a standing army was now, thanks to the Civil Wars and to Cromwell and his Protectorate, even more anathema to English sensibilities. Yet the realities of European geopolitics, in which armies were generally becoming much bigger and more professional, meant that it would be hard to maintain the country’s clout without one. The press and public opinion were not going away. The world of pamphlets and coffeehouse politics was here to stay. Finally, the country’s religion remained unsettled. The apparent supremacy of Anglicanism masked the resilience of Dissent. More to the point, while in exile both Charles and his brother James had been surrounded by Catholic influences. The nightmare scenario, perhaps, was a king trying to use his prerogative powers to promote Catholicism and to build a standing army that he could use to cow opposition, all funded by indirect taxes – or even a pension from a foreign monarch – while Parliament lay sidelined.

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by | 4 December 2023 · 9:54 am

Military and Religious Reconciliation, 1661

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 327-328:

The Army was mostly all pensioned off: a poll tax and a new assessment ordered in the summer saw to that. The king was provided with apparently bounteous revenue of £1.2 million a year from customs and excise, allowing him to retain Monck’s regiment of foot, now named the Coldstream Guards after his base while he waited on the Border the previous year, and still wearing the old red coats of the New Model. The old lands of Crown and Church were clawed back, though often with due compensation given. Meanwhile, Royalists who’d seen their lands confiscated during the last regime had them restored, although the decision to ratify all legal proceedings during the Republic meant that any lands they’d had to sell – for example, to pay the decimation tax – were now probably gone for good. It was a point that generated much bitterness among the old Cavaliers.

Meanwhile, the old episcopal church was reinstated. In the immediate months following the Restoration, many parishes went back to the old liturgy, buying copies of the Book of Common Prayer even though there was widespread expectation that a new version would soon be produced. Returning bishops were cheered and copies of the Solemn League and Covenant, which had been a key reason for their abolition, were enthusiastically burned. The cathedrals were in a parlous state: Durham had seen use as a prison, St Paul’s as a stable and a marketplace. Bishops’ palaces at Chester, Salisbury and Exeter had been converted into (respectively) a gaol, a tavern and a sugar factory. But funds were found, and within a couple of years, the old cathedrals were resplendent once more.

Initially there were moves towards a compromise with Presbyterians, potentially ‘comprehending’ them within the Church of England, i.e. granting enough latitude within official Church practice to allow them to worship within it. But Parliament voted comprehension down. In fact, England was about to take a dramatic swing towards a more restrictive Church. Perhaps this was always going to happen. But partly, too, it was a reaction to the events of January 1661, when, the same month in which the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw were dug up, a quixotic rising by Fifth Monarchists broke out in London, with shouts for ‘King Jesus, and the Heads upon the Gates!’ It was led by one Thomas Venner, and ended in a brief occupation of St Paul’s, a clampdown by the Coldstream Guards and 14 executions. A new round-up of Quakers and other undesirables followed, prompting – incidentally – George Fox to write a stirring tract declaring that his Quakers would utterly renounce war and violence. Given they had made up many of the ranks of the Republic’s army, this was some about-turn, though the principle has since become one that defines the movement.

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by | 3 December 2023 · 5:31 am

Rejoicing and Reprisals, 1660

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 323-325:

The month of May 1660 would be remembered as one of the most joyous in English history. ‘[A]ll the world,’ wrote Pepys, was ‘in a merry mood because of the King’s coming.’ The return of Charles, brought back by Monck’s fleet, was celebrated with maypoles, church bells and bonfires. From his landing at Dover on the 25th to his entrance to London on the 29th, the restored king was met by cheering crowds. Some 120,000 were said to have greeted him at Blackheath. In London, his entourage took seven hours to pass through. The streets became a kaleidoscope of tapestries and flowers; there were fountains flowing with wine. Oliver Cromwell, and his widow Elizabeth, were burned in effigy on a Westminster bonfire. After the austerity of the Puritan republic, it was a time for riotous celebration. According to Marchamont Nedham, seething at what he saw as the credulousness of the people, the return of the king was widely expected to bring ‘peace and no taxes’.

The rejoicing, though, was stained with reprisals. Within a day, the king was forced to issue a proclamation against ‘debauched and profane persons, who, on pretence of regard to the King, revile and threaten others’ (or simply sat in taverns and tippling houses drinking endless healths). Independent congregations suffered abuse, as did those ministers who’d taken the place of clergy ejected by the Republic. Quakers were attacked in at least 15 counties.

…

The immediate priority was a Bill of Indemnity and Oblivion, which sought to draw a line under the previous troubles. But there were debates about how far forgiveness should go. William Prynne, for example, thirsty for revenge, specifically argued that Francis Thorpe, the lawyer whose speech at York had set out the case for the Republic back in 1649, should be executed. Thorpe had already petitioned the king for a pardon on the grounds that he had opposed the regicide, had not bought any Crown lands and had been gentle on the Royalist rebels of 1655. He had allies in the Commons, too, and Prynne’s vindictiveness found little support. In the end, though, some of the more egregious republicans were exempted from pardon, with some 33 men specifically singled out for punishment. The 33 were mostly regicides who had sought to evade capture, particularly those who were not lucky enough to have powerful friends. Eleven were already in custody.

Thus, finally, things were set for the third and final act. After the April elections and the return of the king came the revenge.

In October, during Parliamentary recess, all 11 were tried. Only one witness was considered necessary for each act of supposed treason, but then, with the evidence there in plain sight, maybe such niceties didn’t matter. Six signatories to the death warrant, together with the lawyer John Cooke and the preacher Hugh Peter, suffered hanging, drawing and quartering at Charing Cross (two of Charles’s guards, Daniel Axtell and Francis Hacker, were executed at Tyburn). The butchered men were defiant to the end: one of them even managed to land a punch on his executioner. Thomas Harrison, when the crowd taunted him asking, ‘where is your Good Old Cause now?’ replied it was ‘Here, in my bosom, and I shall seal it with my blood.’ But the jeering crowd had its way, and their remains were duly displayed on the City gates. Such was the smell at Charing Cross that local inhabitants petitioned the king to stop the executions, ‘for the stench of their burnt bowels had so putrefied the air’. When Parliament returned, their fugitive colleagues were subject to Attainder, which meant they lost their property. Then, in January 1661 – on the anniversary of the regicide – the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton and John Bradshaw (the king’s trial judge) were dug up and hanged. John Evelyn thought this was one of the ‘stupendous and inscrutable judgements of God’. Those other republicans who’d been buried at Westminster Abbey were also disinterred on orders of the Dean, and their bodies cast into a nearby pit.

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by | 2 December 2023 · 10:55 am

Re-electing the Monarchy, 1660

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 321-323:

Parliament, a body now much less dominated by republicans, quickly set new elections in motion, selecting a new Council and installing a raft of new militia commissioners in the counties, including none other than Sir George Booth who by that time had been released from the Tower (and, it was to be hoped, had found a razor). Baptists, Fifth Monarchists and Quakers were attacked and plundered in Wales, Bristol and Gloucester. On the 27th, while Pepys was visiting Audley End in Saffron Walden, he was ushered into a cellar where the housekeeper offered him ‘a most admirable drink, a health to the King’. Everywhere the talk was of government by a single person: George Monck, perhaps, or Richard Cromwell, or Charles Stuart.

The last piece of the jigsaw was the army: Monck faced down much of the opposition in a tense meeting on 7 March; some of the key hardliners were cashiered and John Lambert was sent off to the Tower. By this time, Charles Stuart was being openly toasted across town. There was another bonfire and people cried out, ‘God Bless King Charles the Second’. Parliament, meanwhile, on the 16th, finally agreed to dissolve itself.

The stage was set.

The final drama was played out in three acts. The first, in April, came in the form of elections to the new Parliament (technically, because not summoned by royal writ it would be known as a ‘Convention’). In theory, active Royalists were excluded, but no one really cared. There was an avalanche of pamphlets: many pro-Royalist, but some arguing against the restoration of the Stuarts, like Marchamont Nedham’s News from Brussels, which alleged Charles was plotting brutal reprisals on all who’d opposed his father. Then there were the rhymes, scurrilous as ever. They attacked the Rump, bearing titles like Arsy Versy, and they attacked religious ‘fanatics’…. The elections, meanwhile, saw the highest number of prospective candidates so far in English history. Even Lambert managed to stand while still in prison (he lost). The question had become not whether there would be a restoration, but what kind of restoration it would be: at the hustings, the critical issue was whether candidates were in favour of imposing conditions on Charles. The harder line Royalists, i.e. those generally against conditions, tended to win.

By now, Monck and the king were finally in communication. Charles moved his court to the town of Breda near the Dutch coast. The English fleet stood ready off the coast of Kent, the old Cromwellian Edward Montagu in command as General at Sea, Pepys on board as his employee, spending pleasant evenings supping, drinking wine, conversing, playing music and singing songs. Rather embarrassingly, Lambert escaped from the Tower (dressed in woman’s clothes, having swapped places with Joan, the lady who made his bed), and drew some support from disgruntled soldiers and old radicals. It looked as if there could be a general uprising in the army: ‘the agitators and Lambert’s agents are all over England,’ warned one of Monck’s captains, ‘privately creeping amongst us & tempting our men from us’. It was rumoured that 7,000 Quakers and Anabaptists would join. But in the end, humiliation fell on the old army man, who declared for Richard Cromwell, staged a desultory muster on the old battle site of Edgehill and was promptly arrested by the turncoat Richard Ingoldsby. After that there was little trouble from the old republicans….

The new Parliament, complete with a House of Lords, met on 25 April. It was an overwhelmingly Royalist body in what was still, technically, a republic. And so Parliament ushered in the second act: the return of the king. On 1 May, a declaration from Charles was read in Parliament. It had been penned at Breda on 4 April. It offered a pardon for everyone who gave allegiance to the king within 40 days (although Parliament, it allowed, could make exceptions). It promised ‘liberty to tender consciences’, and that Parliament would be allowed to sort out disputes over property created during the revolution. It promised, naturally, that Monck’s army would get their arrears and be retained under the new regime.

That afternoon, Parliament voted that ‘the government is, and ought to be, by King, Lords, and Commons’. They voted, in other words, for the restoration of the Stuarts.

London rejoiced, as did the rest of the country. At last, people thought, the return of the king might bring stability, an end to upheaval. In Boston, Lincolnshire, young men took down the arms of the Republic, had the town beadle whip them, then – taking turns – ‘pissed and shitted on them’. Even in Dorchester, long a Puritan stronghold, the town clerk celebrated the deliverance from a ‘world of confusions’ and ‘unheard of governments’. On 9 May, almost as an afterthought, Richard Cromwell, who was still somehow Chancellor of Oxford University, hung up his robes and disappeared into obscurity.

On the 14th, Monck’s ships were in sight of The Hague, where, in a moment that looked both back to the past and forward to the future, they made rendezvous with Elizabeth, James I’s daughter, once queen of Bohemia, and paid due respects to the nine-year-old William, the late king’s grandson, son of Princess Mary, now Prince of Orange.

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by | 28 November 2023 · 11:27 am

Hiroshima Castle

From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~1850ff:

In 1589 Mori Terumoto began what would be an eight-year project: he built a castle on an island in the delta of the Ota River, calling this part of his domain “Hiroshima,” which means “wide island.” At the beginning of the 17th century, the Mori fief was given to the Asano Clan, who held the castle until 1871. During the Restoration all of the buildings were torn down except the keep.

The castle is noted for the fact that the Emperor Meiji resided there for seven months during the war with China (1894-95). When Japan became involved in the war of 1904-5 with Russia, the castle was used as a troop garrison.

At 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, Hiroshima Castle, along with a large portion of the city, was completely demolished in the historic first atomic attack. Reconstruction of the castle donjon was begun in 1958. It is built on the original foundation and is an exact replica of the former keep in exterior appearance. The structure is five stories, 117 feet high, and is in the style of the early Momoyama period. The donjon houses a museum and a lookout.

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by | 26 November 2023 · 3:30 pm

Hagi Castle in Choshu Domain

From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~1800ff:

Hagi Castle was built between 1604 and 1606 by the Mori Clan, lords of Choshu fief. Before the battle of Sekigahara, the Mori fief was the second largest in all Japan, but after that epic struggle, in which the Mori were on the losing side, their fief was reduced to about one-fourth its original size. Even with this reduction it was still one of the 10 largest in the country. The castle was laid out so that the five-story donjon was situated at the edge of the inner moat. It measured, on the ground floor, 65 feet east to west and 53½ feet north to south. The top floor was 20½ feet by 17½ feet, and the total height was about 47 feet. Fourteen generations of Moris lived in a mansion on the castle grounds, which were practically on an island, with a bay on one side and a river and moat on the others. An observation tower was placed on a hill behind the castle overlooking the sea.

Choshu fief was a hotbed of anti-Tokugawa feeling after Sekigahara. Children were put to bed at night with their feet toward Edo as a form of insult to the shogunate, and they were told never to forget the defeat of their ancestors at Sekigahara. Dislike for the Tokugawas also may have stemmed from Tokugawa disrespect of the Imperial House; the Mori Clan claimed direct lineage to the imperial family and therefore had strong feelings of loyalty toward the emperor.

Hagi was the birthplace of Yoshida Shoin, the imperial patriot who advocated the overthrow of shogunate rule and a return of power to the emperor. At his school in Hagi he preached this philosophy until his death at the hands of the shogunate a few years before the Restoration took place. Many of Shoin’s pupils became leaders of the Restoration era.

The leaders of Choshu were also resentful of the shogun’s relations with foreign countries, and in 1863 their shore batteries fired on an American ship off the Choshu coast and effectively blocked the Shimonoseki Straits to foreign shipping. The following year a combined force of Dutch, American, British, and French warships put an end to the harassment, and Choshu agreed to pay an indemnity. After this incident the Choshu leaders came to friendly terms with the foreigners.

During the revolt against the shogunate, Choshu, along with most of the clans in western Japan, firmly supported the imperial cause. To show their complete loyalty to the emperor, the Choshu leaders were the first to tear down their castle (1874). The samurai were now without employment, but the head of the Mori Clan encouraged them to become peaceful farmers and raise fruit. This enterprise is still carried on today by their descendants.

Only the stone walls of the inner court and the inner moat of the castle remain. The base of the donjon can also be seen, and the huge stones used for pillar supports are still imbedded within the foundation. Steep stone steps running the entire length of several of the inner walls, overlooking the moat, provided a means of rapid troop deployment when immediate defense was imperative.

It is interesting to note that time has not touched Hagi as heavily as it has most other castle towns, and some descendants of samurai families still reside at their ancestral home sites behind old walls in the samurai quarters of the town.

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by | 8 November 2023 · 8:09 am

Osaka: From Castle to Commerce

From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~1017ff:

After 1615, Osaka was no longer an important military center, but became one of the three chief cities under direct control of the shogunate. (Note: The others were Edo and Kyoto.) A 10-year restoration of the castle was begun in 1620, but the donjon was struck by lightning and destroyed in 1665, During the remainder of the feudal period the castle grounds served as the seat of local government and for the garrisoning of troops.

As time went on, Osaka became the most important commercial center in the country. Hideyoshi had encouraged merchants from the fortified city of Sakai to move to Osaka and supply the castle and the town, which was rapidly growing. After Ieyasu took over, more merchants came in from Fushimi. Although the daimyo of the Ou and Kanto districts built warehouses in Edo to store and distribute their revenues of rice, most of the feudal lords converted rice into cash at Osaka. Soon there were some 500 to 600 warehouses in the city which not only processed food, but many other forms of merchandise as well.

During most of the Tokugawa period the city remained a peaceful but busy commercial center. In 1837, however, the peace was broken by a riot led by one Oshio Heihachiro. Many fires were started, and homes and buildings (especially of the rich) were destroyed before troops garrisoned at the castle could bring the situation under control. This riot was an overt expression of national dissatisfaction with the government, a malcontent feeling that eventually led to the downfall of the Tokugawa regime. During the 1850’s and ’60’s the castle was used to receive foreign diplomats when the shogun was in residence there.

In September 1868 part of the castle was burned by Tokugawa troops as they retreated before troops loyal to the emperor during the civil war that brought about the Restoration. In 1931 a donjon of ferro-concrete material was constructed atop the 45-foot foundation of the former keep, and the castle grounds were opened as a public park. During the Pacific War troops were again garrisoned on the castle grounds. Although the new donjon was not touched by the war, four turrets were destroyed. Today the castle grounds are again used as a public park, and the donjon contains exhibits relating to the history of old Osaka including a display of archeological interest and a model of the castle showing what it was like at its prime.

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by | 7 November 2023 · 9:15 am

Azuchi Castle Innovations

From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~830ff:

Azuchi Castle had several distinct features that differentiated it from its predecessors. Its massive proportions and the use of stone as a major building material, as noted in an earlier chapter, were to provide protection from the most destructive firearms available at that time. Other innovations such as the use of high towers and the location of the castle on a hill rather than in mountains with dense vegetation, were also related to a change in the tactics of warfare. These changes made guns an extremely effective defense because the enemy could be seen a long way off and met by gunfire precisely directed from the height of the donjon.

Just as Azuchi Castle was the prototype of the present-day relics of feudal times, the castle town created by [Oda] Nobunaga outside the castle walls was the prototype of a new kind of castle town in general. He had built quarters for his various soldiers and retainers but they were slow to occupy them, and it was two or three years before the town became fairly well settled. (Note: By 1582 the population had reached about 5,000.) At the same time, he made conditions attractive for tradesmen and artisans so that the town would be supplied with the necessary commodities to make it prosper. In 1577 Nobunaga issued a town charter stating that Azuchi was to be a free-market town with no taxes levied on sales or purchases. All merchants traveling along the Nakasendo had to seek lodging in the town when passing through, there were to be no taxes on building or transportation (except in time of war), and in the event of cancellation of debts in the province, debts owed to the town’s residents would not be included. These concessions to tradesmen were made to attract money to the town, but the motive was more political than economic. With free trade, goods flowed from all parts of the country to the population and market centers, thus increasing the wealth of the cities and in turn the lord of the area. At the same time, the roads were improved to facilitate the movement of goods, and in time of war the same roads could be used to move troops. Free-trade practices also attracted skilled artisans whose talents could be used to make the tools of war.

It was during this period that Jesuit missionaries arrived in Japan and received encouragement from Nobunaga, who regarded them as a rival to Buddhism for which he had little use. When Father Gnecchi Organtino and some other priests visited Nobunaga at Azuchi, Nobunaga was so flattered that he offered the Jesuits a building site for both a church and a house; the missionaries were only too happy to accept.

After Akechi Mitsuhide killed Nobunaga at Kyoto on June 21, 1582 he marched to Azuchi, took over the castle, and distributed gifts from Nobunaga’s treasury to likely supporters. (Note: Akechi is said to have treated the missionaries well.) He did no harm to the castle, but Azuchi nevertheless met its downfall shortly thereafter. It is known for certain that the fortress burned to the ground, but by whom is open to controversy. One popular and often repeated story is that Nobunaga’s son, in a fit of rage, grief, or perhaps both, put the castle to the torch. Sansom acknowledges the story, but indicates that looting townspeople probably were responsible for the fire. Still another version says that the tower was destroyed by Nobunaga’s adversaries. In any case, the castle burned, leaving only the stone walls, moats, earthworks, and tower foundation (Fig. 23).

The town of Azuchi is now a country village populated by people (some of whom are direct descendants of Nobunaga) who till the land, fish in Lake Biwa, and are proud of their history. At one time they wanted to rebuild the castle donjon but the idea was abandoned for several reasons including lack of funds. Also, the remains of the castle have been declared a special historical relic, and the Committee for the Preservation of Cultural Assets is reluctant to allow construction of a new donjon because of possible damage to the ruins. In addition there is some question whether reliable plans and drawings exist from which a reasonable facsimile could be built. Proponents of the project claim that drawings of the original castle exist and are the property of a temple at the foot of Azuchiyama, but the only known evidence of drawings is a sketch of the exterior on a scroll hanging in the temple.

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