The new power of the Shogunate instituted by Yoritomo was not long before it also became attenuated. In 1198, immediately after the death of its founder, his father-in-law, Hojo Tokimasa, seized the reins of government, and in 1219 the posterity of Yoritomo was already extinct. The supreme authority was by this time definitely vested in the family of the Hojo, whose chief took the title of Shikken, or Regent, and chose and dethroned the Shoguns, usually children, at his pleasure, selecting them either from the Imperial family or from that of the Fujiwaras. The period during which this curious regime lasted is perhaps the most brilliant and the most prosperous in the history of Japan in the Middle Ages; but eventually Japan fell into a sort of feudal anarchy, bearing a close affinity to that which existed in Germany at the same epoch. The power of the Hojos was finally broken in 1334, thanks to the combined action of the feudal lords, aided by a Mikado named Go-Daigo, who happened for once to be possessed of some energy. The executive, however, did not remain long in the hands of this Emperor. His chief lieutenant, Ashikago Takauji, rose up against him, obliged him to flee from his capital, and replaced him by another member of the Imperial family, at the same time electing himself Shogun. From 1337 to 1392 Japan had two rival dynasties of Mikados. Notwithstanding these disturbances, the Court of the Shoguns Ashikagas was very often extremely brilliant, both from the literary and the artistic point of view. During the fifteenth century civil wars raged again, and the authority of both Mikado and Shogun consequently dwindled into insignificance. In the provinces the warriors, known as _samourai_, gradually became hereditary, recognising no authority but that of their feudal lords, the daimios. The country became poor, the population rapidly dwindled, and all the arts except that of the armourer tended to disappear. The opening years of the sixteenth century beheld Japan in a pitiable plight indeed, the population decimated by terrible epidemics and earthquakes, as well as civil wars, and such was her condition that she might have been compared to France after the Hundred Years’, or Germany after the Thirty Years’, War. When St. Francis Xavier visited the country in 1550 he was appalled by its misery. It was a far cry then from the Japan of his days to the Cipango, the golden land of promise so greatly vaunted by Marco Polo three centuries earlier. The feudal system in Japan, however, had been of great use in forming the character of the people; it preserved in them those virile qualities so conspicuously absent among the Chinese.