Fresh disputes arose; and lords whom the shogunate could not subdue made war upon each other. To such a condition of terror was the capital reduced that the court nobility fled from it to take refuge with daimyo powerful enough to afford them protection. Robbery became rife throughout the land; and piracy terrorized the seas. The shogunate itself was reduced to the humiliation of paying tribute to China. Agriculture and industry at last ceased to exist outside of the domains of certain powerful lords. Provinces became waste; and famine, earthquake, and pestilence added their horror to the misery of ceaseless war. The poverty prevailing may be best imagined from the fact that when the Emperor known to history as Go-Tsuchi-mikado--one hundred and second of the Sun's Succession --died in the year 1500, his corpse had to be kept at the gates of the palace forty days, because the expenses of the funeral could not be defrayed. Until 1573 the misery continued; and the shogunate meanwhile degenerated into insignificance. Then a strong captain arose and ended the house of Ashikaga, and seized the reins of power. [274] This usurper was Oda Nobunaga; and the usurpation was amply provoked. Had it not occurred, Japan might never have entered upon an era of peace. For there had been no peace since the fifth century. No emperor or regent or shogun had ever been able to impose his rule firmly upon the whole country. Somewhere or other, there were always wars of clan with clan. By the time of the sixteenth century personal safety could be found only under the protection of some military leader, able to exact his own terms for the favour of such protection. The question of the imperial succession,--which had almost wrecked the empire during the fourteenth century,--might be raised again at any time by some reckless faction, with the probable result of ruining civilization, and forcing the nation back to its primitive state of barbarism. Never did the future of Japan appear so dark as at the moment when Oda Nobunaga suddenly found himself the strongest man in the empire, and leader of the most formidable Japanese army that had ever obeyed a single head. This man, a descendant of Shinto priests, was above all things a patriot. He did not seek the title of shogun, and never received it. His hope was to save the country; and he saw that this could be done only by centralizing all feudal power under one control, and strenuously enforcing law. Looking about him for the ways and means of effecting [275] this centralization, he perceived that one of the very first obstacles to be removed was that created by the power of Buddhism militant,--the feudal Buddhism developed under the Hojo regency, and especially represented by the great Shin and Tendai sects. As both had already given aid to his enemies, it was easy to find a cause for quarrel; and he first proceeded against the Tendai. The campaign was conducted with ferocious vigour; the