The Clock Set Back: Japan And Hungary
Have you considered that Japan is Hungary in a hat?
It occasionally strikes me that Japan and Hungary are basically the same country in the sixteenth century. It is true that they’re at opposite ends of Eurasia, Japan is an island and Hungary is landlocked, they speak different languages and worship different gods and by the time the comparison to Hungary is applicable in Japan, Hungary has stopped existing, but these are minor details.
In the twelfth century, Japan was clearly utopia on Earth. A Chinese-model bureaucratic state, ruled by an Emperor whose family had (men said) ruled for 1700 years, presided over by an aristocratic, cultured elite of well-educated families who composed poetry and shot bows and wrote fiction. It was a place of peace and culture and civilization; they patronized Buddhism, practiced formal etiquette, and wrote a novel that is still read today. (For fun, not just by historians.)
The world caught up, though as the world always catches up. The Emperors had built a cult of invincibility around themselves with which to pacify the nation. His Imperial Majesty was the child of Amaterasu the sun-goddess, came from his role as the bridge between heaven and earth. Who could challenge the divine? Who could think to usurp the blood of a god? No one could, clearly, and so the Emperor could not be overthrown.
But this could be a trap as much as a strength. The Emperor had to reign. But the Emperor did not have to rule. It was the sacred duty of the Emperor, to carry out an endless list of rituals to make the state right with heaven, and these jobs he could not delegate. Control of armies, the disbursement of funds, the appointment of ministers - all those he could. More and more the Emperors, outmaneuvered by more canny politicians, focused on the jobs only they could do; more and more the Emperor’s chief minister took power - and the chief minister, unlike the Emperor, had no shield of divinity. Sometimes the Emperor’s chief minister was a ‘retired Emperor’ who had passed his title down to a controllable son while he held actual power, sometimes it was the head of the civilized, cultivated Fujiwara clan, sometimes it was a feudal warlord.
As time passed, though, the warlords grew in strength; while five thousand civilized, cultivated men and women devoted their time to the development of artistic culture, ignoring their responsibilities to instead create glorious works of art, five million laborers sweated and starved. In times like these, there’s always opportunities for ambitious men. Rebellion came and the warlords won as the warlords always won, and the Heian era was replaced by a new era, one where power belonged not to the Emperor, but to the ‘commander-in-chief of the expeditionary forces against the barbarians,’ or Shogun for short.
This didn’t mean the end of the beauty or the glory. The Shogun attended to affairs of state, and so the Emperor could continue his pursuit of elaborate art and culture. What ended the beauty and the glory was when the Emperor decided he should go back to ruling and began to plot to usurp the Shogun, and from there it was all downhill. When the blood dried and the smoke cleared there was still an Emperor (but he was of no relevance to anyone) and still a Shogun (now enjoying all the art and culture).
History repeated itself as history repeats itself, and in the fifteenth century the Shogun got too distracted by art and culture to do a good job, and then things went to hell. Historians debate just what the cause of the Onin War was - succession crisis, extreme incompetence, conflict between two different parties over a regency - but whatever it was it spiraled completely out of control and the Shogun was helpless to stop it. Within a generation the country was divided between hundreds of warlords. The Shogun was reduced to a titular ruler at best, kept in Kyoto and paid a salary by whoever the man with an army in Kyoto happened to be in exchange for legitimizing his rule. What goes around...
In the fifteenth century, Hungary was doing great. The king of Hungary was chosen by the nobility, and after one brief experiment with a Polish king and another with an Austrian, the Hungarians had elected a native king of their own, a fourteen-year-old named Matthew. The boy was the son of Janos Hunyadi, the great war hero who had defeated the Ottoman Turks at Belgrade, and he had an uncle who was an experienced statesman to whom he would presumably listen. He’d marry the daughter of his main Hungarian rival, and so a civil war would be averted and the country could return to business as usual.
The fourteen-year-old nodded, agreed to the terms of taking the crown, appointed his uncle Regent and then - with his uncle’s enthusiastic support - did whatever he wanted to. Matthias Corvinus, known by later generations as “the Just,” was the first king of the Renaissance and got his strategic plans out of Caesar’s Gallic Wars. With the full enthusiasm of a teenager who thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room, Matthias built a massive library, recruited a personally loyal bureaucracy and raised taxes which he used to found a new all-professional military force - the Black Army. It was Europe’s first wholly professional state army, founded rather along the model of Caesar’s legions except with lots and lots of guns, and it would be an inspiration to rulers everywhere. The traditional Hungarian troops had been, as in the rest of Europe, feudal knights, peasant levies and bands of hired mercenaries and they had fought at about the same level as most of Hungary’s neighbors, but military reform was sweeping the continent, the Ottoman threat was growing in the east, and Matthias Corvinus was convinced an all-professional army was the way to go.
Unlike most teenagers who think they’re the smartest guy in the room, Matthias Corvinus was right. On the military front, he beat all of his neighbors; on the home front, he ended the tax exemptions of the nobility, founded a supreme court as a check on the powers of the barons and sponsored humanist scholars to join him at his court in Budapest. (The scholars were probably the cause of the name “Corvinus,” which came from an attempt to connect himself to an ancient Roman family through the thinnest of excuses, though I like to think it’s the same phenomenon that makes so many teenagers call themselves Raven.) By the end of his reign he controlled Moravia (half of modern Czechia), Vienna (and most of eastern Austria) and more Balkan fortresses than he’d started with and had won one of the century’s only European victories against the Ottomans. He had succeeded at every task of a ruler, except for the most important: Matthias Corvinus’s only son was illegitimate. He had no heir.
Japan had started the fifteenth century reliant on the Man On Horseback With Bow1 approach to warfare, which was sufficient to deal with their local opposition.2 The collapse of the state into warlordism may have been bad for the elites in Kyoto, the peasantry on the ground or the Chinese next door,3 but it was great for military historians. Japan had given up on its occasional attempts to conquer Korea hundreds of years before, and it hadn’t had any serious military opposition since. Now Japan had itself as opposition and every valley and mountain was another opportunity for military experimentation, warrior monks and peasant leagues4 mixing with feudal warlords in an endless series of skirmishes and battles as every warlord tried to find a newer, better way to overcome his rivals. Expensive horse archers could be beaten with cheap massed infantry archers recruited from the peasantry, but those could be scattered by the same horsemen charging with spears. The way to block that was a solid block of men with long spears, peasants of course, and then the last element was added to the design when a Chinese ship crashed on the coast containing Portuguese sailors with arquebuses, the same firearm the Black Army had used so effectively. The Japanese reverse-engineered the devices, devised improvements to them, and embraced them as a new weapon of war.
The man who brought this system to perfection was Oda Nobunaga, the first of the Three Unifiers of Japan. Like Matthias Corvinus, he had been a teenager who thought he was smarter than everyone else. Unlike Matthias Corvinus, he didn’t respect anything, ignoring all tradition to the point of getting drunk with tavern toughs and dancing on tables in woman’s clothing, driving his family advisors to despair (and, in one case, suicide) with his unwillingness to take anything seriously. He took war seriously, though. It was Nobunaga who approximately doubled the length of his spears to full pikes and Nobunaga who was perfectly happy to tolerate Christianity in exchange for Christian gunnery instructors to help drill his musketmen, for it was Nobunaga who saw the true potential of the arquebus to transform warfare. Those of you who know European history (or have read 1632) may notice that this was approximately the military doctrine - huge blocks of pikemen and arquebusiers - that would dominate European warfare from the sixteenth century to the invention of the musket.
The tactics that worked at one end of Eurasia worked at the other, and before long the Oda clan held Kyoto and with it control of Emperor and Shogun. The new military system worked horrifyingly well; in Nobunaga’s war with the Takeda, well known as the finest cavalry in Japan, Nobunaga simply shot them down with relay fire5 from behind field fortifications. Not even his assassination could stop the unification of Japan; his successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, was a man who could talk anyone into anything, and before long he was ruler of Japan, the machinery of conquest Nobunaga had built rolling onwards under a new man’s hand.
In Hungary, the barons looked at each other (metaphorically) over the cooling body of Matthias Corvinus (still metaphorically), and said (this is still a figure of speech) “We are never doing that again.” Who, exactly, had been taxed to pay for the Black Army, the Bibliotheca Corvinus, the expanded bureaucracy? Still mostly the peasantry, really, but also them! They elected the King of Bohemia as the new King of Hungary on the implicit condition that he should never do anything, and he kept this agreement. Dobzse László (”Laszlo OK,” because he always said ‘OK’6 whenever his advisors asked him for something) distributed the crown lands among his noblemen, disbanded the Black Army and put down the mutineers who refused to accept dismissal. What Matthias had done, Laszlo had undone; when the peasants rebelled against his policies they were massacred (with some difficulty, given the weakness of the new Hungarian army) and serfdom was not merely tightened but actively turned into slavery. The Hungarian government set the clock back, and the nation followed.
The border forts could, of course, be left to themselves.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi had a problem. The problem was how to make sure that his intended heir didn’t go the way of Nobunaga’s and end up killed by some schemer like Hideyoshi himself. Hideyoshi had been a beneficiary of the new order; born a peasant, he had no claim to power except competence, which had made him one of Nobunaga’s chief ministers. An elaborate series of backstabs had left Nobunaga’s sons dead and Hideyoshi military dictator of Japan, yes - but while his silver tongue would keep him in power until the day he died, he knew his heirs would be no more secure in their position than Nobunaga’s had been. Everything he had rested on the foundation of men with guns and swords and spears, and in the age of chaos succession wasn’t about blood nearly so much as it was about keeping them happy.
There were two traditional solutions to the problem of too large an army. The Hungarian nobility had tried one: disband the extra troops, and put down the revolt when they don’t take it quietly. Hideyoshi tried the other: Find something to do with them. He started by finishing unifying Japan, and then turned his attention to an invasion of China via Korea. Invading China - the biggest, richest, strongest country on the planet - was obviously doomed even without adding the Korean army into the mix, but given the sheer ability of the army Hideyoshi led it might not have been quite impossible?
... If he could do it with just his army. He needed a navy, too, and while his army might have been the world’s best his navy wasn’t. In spite of the blatant ineptitude of most of the Korean high command (one of their admirals scuttled his entire fleet when he saw the Japanese coming, twice) the Korean navy was wildly superior to the Japanese, and when the Japanese supply lines were cut by Korean naval victories7, it didn’t matter how many battles on land the Japanese won. With a hostile countryside all around them and no more supplies coming from home, cold, hunger and guerilla warfare did what the regular Korean army couldn’t, and after an intervention by the Chinese sealed the deal the battered remnants of Hideyoshi’s expeditionary force limped home.
Hideyoshi wasn’t alive to see the end of the war, old age having caught up to him, but the defeat still served his purposes perfectly well. He’d sent his least trusted troops in first, and the Korean winter had disbanded them for him. Other policies intended to reestablish and maintain order rounded out his career, most famously the “sword hunts” by which he attempted to confiscate weapons from the peasantry and the banning of Christianity as foreign propaganda, but his death at the climax of the war meant that the throne passed to a five-year-old and the throne wasn’t secure enough for that. When the dust settled it was Tokugawa Ieyasu who held power, the five-year-old remaining a puppet until such time as a puppet was no longer useful, and Ieyasu looked at the situation the same way Hideyoshi had: How do I keep power?
The border defenses of Hungary could not be left to themselves. The new Ottoman sultan was Suleiman the Magnificent, whose first priority was to take the city of Belgrade, that same city which Matthias Corvinus’s father had made his name defending. By that time Lazlo was dead and his son King Louis was still a child and the Hungarian nobility were more concerned with squabbles over precedence than fortress maintenance, so after only a short siege Belgrade fell; the relief army took two years to organize, during which, somehow, nobody considered the matter of provisioning it, and it fell apart immediately for lack of provisions.
The battle that tested the new Hungarian state was fought five years after the fall of Belgrade. The Ottoman armies marched north, horse archers from Crimea and heavy cavalry from the heartland of Anatolia and the famous janissary corps marching to battle with their swords and arquebuses. The Hungarian noblemen called for help from their neighbors and raised their banners and levies of unhappy commoners and hired mercenaries and put on their knightly armor - then rushed ahead before their forces could all assemble, meeting the Turks in a field by a small town called Mohacs. The Ottomans had better troops and twice as many of them and six times as many cannons, and yet when the Hungarian knights charged the Turkish center full-on for a moment it looked as if they might sweep them away. But they’d rushed ahead of their own infantry, the Ottoman flanks closed in on the exposed force, and very few Hungarians left the field save as Ottoman prisoners. The young king Louis was found dead after the battle, having fallen in a bog and drowned while trying to flee the field.
And that was that for Hungary.
Ieyasu’s plan built on Hideyoshi’s and expanded it. The sword hunts would continue; all weapons belonging to non-samurai would be confiscated. Only the Shogun would be allowed oceangoing ships; only the samurai would be allowed weapons. Trade meant the spread of new technologies and new ideas and so it had to be curtailed; only the Dutch could be trusted not to spread foreign propaganda8 and so only they could be trusted to trade, and only with the Shogun. Christianity would be persecuted9. But to this old plan he added one more innovation all his own, and that was the system of alternate attendance. Each daimyo would spend half of his time in Ieyasu’s new capital of Edo, to pay his respects to the Shogun and be accessible for consultation; each daimyo’s wife and eldest son would spend all their time in Edo. Since the majority of military power belonged to Ieyasu and his allies, the daimyos went along with this.
Finally he wrote an elaborate manual for his descendants, giving them advice on how to hold power. Perhaps the most famous passage reads: If fellows of the lower orders go beyond what is proper toward samurai, or if any sub-feudatory samurai is remiss toward a direct retainer, there is no objection to cutting such a one down.
That was the system Tokugawa Ieyasu built, the most perfect, dreadful, impressive feudal tyranny the world had ever seen. It would last for two hundred and fifty years.
Hungary was destroyed at Mohacs. The Ottomans went west; the Austrians went east, their archduke pressing a claim as heir through his wife, Louis’s sister. The most powerful remaining Hungarian nobleman swore fealty to Suleiman as his vassal and the country was torn between the two warring sides. For the next century and more they would fight their battles on Hungarian soil, depopulating the nation with consequences for the Balkans that continue to this very day. Barring a few failed revolts, Hungary would not be independent again until after the first World War.
Japan, meanwhile, got about two hundred and fifty years of peace under a stable Tokugawa shogunate before Admiral Perry came knocking. If it doesn’t hold the world record for Time In A Feudal Monarchy Without Civil Wars I have found nothing that can beat it.
The point, I hope is clear. Both of them decided to pursue the interests of the people in power over the interests of the state - Japan the samurai in general but also Tokugawa Ieyasu and his descendants in particular, Hungary its nobility. The difference is that Japan could do it and Hungary couldn’t. When Hungary disbanded its army and the apparatus to pay for it, it had hostile neighbors. Japan didn’t. Hungary was in Europe, and Europe in the sixteenth century was a pressure cooker of military evolution, with new developments in administration, drill, finance, and gunnery producing constant innovation in war, forcing every state to keep up or be ground under. Burgundy, Bohemia and Granada had all, like Hungary, fallen behind and been absorbed into larger empires, and by 1800 Poland, Venice and a dozen other smaller states would join them. Japan had no neighbors but Korea and Ming China, and both were inwardly-focused countries with no particular interest in overseas expansion. If Hungary wanted to survive, it had to maximize military capacity. Japan didn’t have to! The Tokugawa were free to sacrifice their military potential for the next two hundred and fifty years to focus on internal stability. It wasn’t until steamships shrunk the oceans of the world that Japan found itself endangered by powerful states in the form of European imperialists and so was forced to evolve to survive, to adopt the most modern military and economic policies or go the way of Hungary.
So that’s my position on historical determinism. What’s yours?
They weren’t steppe nomads, so it didn’t work nearly as well for them as it did for the Mongols.
The Ainu and Emishi, who had been there before the prehistoric migration of the ancestors of the Japanese, but who were not as good at the Japanese at fighting wars.
Who wanted there to be some government of Japan capable of stopping Japanese piracy against their subjects.
The famous Ikko-Ikki, who deserve at least one full article to themselves, which they are not going to get.
The man in front fires, passes the gun for reloads to someone else, gets a new gun…
Or “King Very Well,” Rex Bene.
By one of the other Korean admirals, Yi Sun-sin, greatest national hero in Korea’s history.
For whatever reason, the Catholics were much more interested in conversion than the Protestant Dutch.
The last gasp of the age of war was a Christian peasant rebellion, as former peasant soldiers who had fought in Nobunaga and Hideyoshi’s campaigns refused to abjure their faith.
[before Admiral Perry came knocking]
You know, this is a story I'd really be interested in reading if you're ever interested in going deeper. I have of course heard of Admiral Perry and the black ships, but usually it gets the yadda-yadda treatment. Perry bombarded a city and Japan changed their entire foreign policy. Ho-hum.
I've never read a good explanation for why this had such a big impact. Certainly in modern times launching an air raid on a nation rarely convinces them to change longstanding policies. Usually they just get mad. If shogunate had told Perry to screw off, what would he have done next?