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East Asia (14th – mid-15th c.)Politics and state

Northern and Southern Courts

For more than half a century Japan had two imperial courts: the Southern Court of Go-Daigo and his heirs in the mountains of Yoshino, which held the imperial regalia, and the Northern Court in Kyoto, backed by the Ashikaga shoguns. Their war, entangled with feuds among the warrior houses, ended in 1392, when Ashikaga Yoshimitsu persuaded the Southern emperor Go-Kameyama to hand over the regalia.

Date
between 20 September 1336 and 23 January 1337 – 19 November 1392start: exact date unknown: an interval is given; end: exact date · duration: ≈ 56 years
Place
Yoshino, seat of the Southern Courttoday: Yoshino, Nara Prefecture, Japan · East Asia
Participants
Emperor Go-Daigo, Ashikaga (Muromachi) shogunate
Threads
East Asia (14th – mid-15th c.)
Also known as
Nanboku-chō period; Nanbokuchō; Southern Court; Yoshino court; Meitoku Compromise; Kannō disturbance; Период Намбокутё; Южный двор; Северный двор; Смута Канно; Мэйтокуское соглашение; 南北朝時代; 南朝; 北朝; 明徳の和約; 観応の擾乱

After Ashikaga Takauji placed Kōmyō on the throne in September 1336, Go-Daigo escaped from Kyoto in January 1337 and set up his court at Yoshino, declaring that the regalia he had surrendered were false. The loyalists lost their best commanders within a few years, and Go-Daigo died at Yoshino in 1339, but his son Go-Murakami carried on, and Kitabatake Chikafusa, besieged in Hitachi, wrote the Jinnō shōtōki (1338–1341, revised 1343) to prove that the Southern line alone was legitimate. In 1348 the Ashikaga general Kō no Moronao burned Yoshino, and the Southern Court fled to Anō, deeper in the mountains.

The Southern cause survived chiefly through the quarrels of its enemies. In the Kannō disturbance (1350–1352) Takauji’s brother Tadayoshi, and then Takauji himself, went over to the Southern Court; for a few months in 1351–1352 Go-Murakami was recognised as emperor of all Japan, and Southern armies took Kyoto several times, last in 1362. In Kyushu the Southern prince Kaneyoshi held sway in the 1360s, and the new Ming court recognised him as ‘King of Japan’, which is why it rebuffed the envoys of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu in 1374 and 1380. From 1370 Imagawa Ryōshun fought for the shogunate in Kyushu, and by the mid-1380s the island had submitted.

In 1392 Yoshimitsu negotiated an end to the schism: on 19 November the Southern emperor Go-Kameyama came to Kyoto and handed the regalia to the Northern emperor Go-Komatsu, on the promise that the two lines would again alternate on the throne. The promise was broken in 1412, and descendants of the Southern line resisted for decades. Later historians disputed which court had been legitimate; in 1911 an edict of Emperor Meiji declared it to be the Southern one.

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14th century

Sources

  1. Wikipedia (English): Nanboku-chō period
  2. Wikipedia (English): Jinnō Shōtōki
  3. Wikipedia (Russian): Период Намбокутё
  4. Wikipedia (Japanese): 南北朝時代 (日本)
  5. Wikipedia (Japanese): 明徳の和約
  6. Wikipedia (Japanese): 足利義満
  7. Yamamura K. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 3: Medieval Japan. — Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
  8. Wikidata: Q264012