Dawn of the Samurai: The Shōgun Triumphant (Part 4)

**Dominic Sandbrook** (0:11)
With her lovely white skin and long hair, Tomoe had enchanting looks. An archer of rare strength, a powerful warrior. And on foot or on horseback, a swordsman to face any demon or god. She was a fighter to stand alone against a thousand. She could ride the wildest horse down the steepest slope. In battle, Kiso clad her in the finest armor, equipped her with a great sword and a mighty bow, and charged her with the attack on the opposing commander. She won such repeated glory that none could stand beside her. So that's one of the most celebrated descriptions of a samurai ever written. It comes from the Tale of the Heike, which introduces the character of Tomoe Gozen, Lady Tomoe, the archetype of a female warrior. So, Tom Holland, who is Tomoe? And what is she doing in battle with Lord Kiso, who is the mighty warlord whose exploits dominated the last episode of this tremendous epic series about the great civil war of the samurai?

**Tom Holland** (1:24)
I think before we come to Tomoe, we should just remind listeners of where we are in the sweeping epic that is the samurai civil war. So, Lord Kiso, mentioned in the passage that you read, he belongs to the Minamoto, who are one of the two great clans in 12th century Japan. And in the previous episode, we heard how he annihilated two armies that had been sent against him by the Tyra, who are the great dynastic rivals of the Minamoto. Kiso advanced on Kyoto, the imperial capital. He expelled the Tyra, and he took it over himself. But in doing this, he provoked the jealousy of his cousin, the scheming and ruthless and politically visionary head of the Minamoto clan, Yoritomo, the warlord of a port very near what today is Tokyo called Kamakura. And Yoritomo, very cross that Kiso, his cousin, is threatening to upstage him, had sent his two younger half brothers to lead a two-pronged attack on Kyoto. And their mission was effectively to destroy Kiso and to bring Kyoto under the control of Yoritomo. And the elder of these two half brothers, a guy called Noriyori, had advanced on Kyoto from the east. And the younger half brother, the very dashing Yoshitsune, had advanced from the south.
And it was Yoshitsune, even more dashing, even more daring, even more charismatic than the great Lord Kiso, who had reached Kyoto first in the late winter of 1184 And we ended our last episode by hearing how his priority when he arrived in Kyoto was to seize control of a key figure in the war. And this was the cloistered emperor, Go Shirakawa, which means he had been emperor. He had abdicated, he was now officially a monk, but effectively he is the head of the imperial family and he's a great schemer. He doesn't command armies himself and so he's always trying to kind of play the various samurai warlords against one another. And he'd been able to do this because although the state is now clearly under the thumb of the samurai dynasties, the first the Tyre and then the Minamoto, the notion of a samurai ruling the empire is still a massive novelty. And so all these various warlords who are marching into Kyoto, trying to seize control of it, trying to proclaim their supremacy over the rule of Japan, they still need the legitimacy that the backing of Go Shirakawa, this cloistered emperor, can provide. And so this was why Kiso, while he had been in command of Kyoto, had been keeping Go Shirakawa effectively under house arrest. And it's why Yoshitsune, by capturing him alive, by seizing him from Kiso's control, can feel that a key objective has been obtained. This was his great mission. He had to seize Kyoto, but he also had to seize Go Shirakawa.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (4:38)
So that's Yoshitsune. But what about Yoshitsune's older brother, Yoritomo, who is effectively the kind of the head, isn't he, of the Minamoto clan?

**Tom Holland** (4:49)
Yeah, and who is still in his capital of Kamakura, which is adjacent to what today is the Great Bay on which Tokyo is built.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (4:59)
Right. So he's been there all this time just waiting for the results, basically, waiting for news.

**Tom Holland** (5:04)
He has no official constitutional position within the state. He is the head of the Minamoto, but that effectively just means that he's a Samurai warlord. But what he can now do, now that Go Shirakawa is in his younger brother's hands, is that he can lean on Go Shirakawa to kind of dress him in the robes of constitutional propriety, to give him an official status within the fabric of the empire. And Yoritomo's growing dominance of Japan can then be presented to the court, to the Japanese people more generally, as something that is much less unsettling than it might otherwise appear. Effectively, his supremacy can be presented as something that has both the blessing and the approval of the imperial palace. And so that was why it was so important for Yoshitsune to get control of the cloistered emperor.