THE MILITARY EPOCH
priests combined against the foreign faith, and its chief patron, the great Ouchi clan, was overthrown.
Oda Nobunaga had now asserted his superiority to nearly all rivals in arms. He was ably assisted by Hashiba Hideyoshi, one of the great men of the world, not of Japan only. Nobunaga's career was a series of brilliant victories, but to describe it in any detail would require an array of names and an analysis of clan relations intolerably confusing to a foreign reader. Among the enemies he had to encounter were the monks of Hiyei-zan and Hongwan-ji, and while, on the one hand, he destroyed these great monasteries and put many of their inmates to the sword, on the other, he assumed towards Christianity an attitude of political friendship rather than of conscientious approval. His protection of the alien creed has been variously interpreted, but there cannot be much doubt that though he allowed his son to embrace the Roman Catholic doctrine, and though Christianity, under the ægis of his favour, obtained some twenty thousand converts in Kyōtō alone, he cared little for it at heart, and saw in it mainly a weapon for diminishing the dangerous and turbulent strength which the Buddhist priests had long possessed. Nobunaga has been compared to Cromwell, but his disposition was permeated by a vein of general bonhomie foreign to the character of the great Puritan. His method of reform was as thorough
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