JAPAN
nobles or the sovereigns from whom they derived their own wealth, and since they soon learned to employ the shrewd device of combining esoteric and exoteric influences by carrying the holy car of Buddha in their armed processions, their enmity became as formidable as their alliance was valuable. Nothing bears stronger testimony to the religious instincts of the Japanese than the fact that, despite the violent incursions perpetually made by the monks into the domain of politics, from the time of Shirakawa's reign (1073–1087) down to the second half of the sixteenth century, the monasteries almost invariably escaped the destruction that overtook the strongholds of nobles whose cause they espoused. But Nobunaga measured out ruthless justice to these truculent religionists. A soldier before everything, he had no compassion for any obstacle that barred his military path. If he did not shrink from putting his own brother and his wife's father to the sword, neither did he hesitate to deluge a monastery with blood before he reduced it to ashes, or to set up, with imperious inconstancy, his own effigy among the images of the gods whose fanes he had annihilated. Some of the most powerful Buddhist associations had sided with his political enemies, and he determined not only to root them out, but also to destroy permanently their mischievous potentialities.
It was at the moment when this fury against the Buddhist priests had reached destructive heat, that
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