Anarchy engendered peace at least. At the end of the Ashikaga Shogunate the minor territorial lords, who had sprung up out of the impotency of the Shogun, were swallowed up one after another by the more powerful ones. The rights of manorial holders, that is to say, of court-nobles, shrines, and temples, over estates legally their own, though long since fallen into a condition of semi-desuetude, were active, sensitive, yet powerful enough in the middle of the period to withstand the attempted encroachments of those territorial lords, who were _de jure_ only managers of the estates entrusted to their care; but those rights began in course of time to lose their enforcing power, and were finally set at naught by the all-powerful military magnates. The link between the estates and their proprietors was thus virtually cut off, and each territory, which was in truth an agglomeration of several estates, came to stand as one body under the rule of a military lord, without any reservation to his right. In other words, each territory became a domain of a lord pure and simple, and it may be best explained by imagining a quasi-sovereign state in Europe formed by joining together a certain number of ecclesiastical domains, the lands of which were contiguous. It is true that the size of such territories varied, ranging from one so big as to contain several provinces down to petty ones comprising only a few villages; their boundaries, too, shifted from time to time. Notwithstanding this diversity in size and the inconstancy of the frontier-lines, these territories were similar to one another in their main nature, no more complicated by intricate manorial systems. If, therefore, there appeared at once some irresistible necessity for national unification or some great historical figure, whose ability was equal to the task of achieving the work, Japan could now be made a solid national state far more easily than at any earlier period.