The History of the Renaissance World (12 page)

Philosophers coped with the loss of the north in another way; instead of protesting, they searched for a new kind of peace with the status quo.

Traditional Confucianism had directed its followers towards the orderly performance of duties and rituals as the path to virtue: “It is by the rules of propriety that the character is established,” Confucius himself was reported to have said. Confucian academies taught the rules of order, the duties of each man in his place and station, the importance of ceremony. They had long been used to train and prepare state officials, and as a tool for statecraft, Confucianism had never progressed very far in tackling more abstract ideas.
*

8.1
Ink Plum Blossoms,
by Wang Yansou of the Song dynasty.
Credit: © Smithsonian, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

Now the philosopher Zhu Xi began to transform Confucianism from a tool of the impotent state into a philosophy for every man. He brought to Confucianism a consideration of ultimate reality; he taught and spoke of the relationship between the
essence
of material things (the
li
) and their physical existence (the
qi
).
Li
in itself does not have form that can be touched;
qi
gives shape to
li
, but at the same time obscures it. The essence, the
li
, of every human being is essentially good; that goodness shines through when the
qi
is refined, polished, brought to the place where it is transparent. And that polishing and refinement is achieved not by faithful service to the government but through private contemplation and individual education: in Zhu Xi’s own phrases, “quiet sitting” and “pursuing inquiry and study.”
⁵

“Start with an open mind,” the sage told a student who was struggling to find the truth, “then read one theory. Read one view before reading another. After you have read them again and again, what is right and wrong, useful and useless, will become apparent of itself.” Far to the west, Peter Abelard was making the same argument for dialectical inquiry: “No theory is so false,” he wrote, in the
Collationes
, “that it does not contain some element of truth; no dispute is so trivial that it does not possess something that can be learned.” Abelard’s argument was sired by Aristotle, born of an intellectual preoccupation; Zhu Xi’s, produced by more political factors. Neo-Confucianism was an adaptation of the state religion to a time when the state was frozen in place; and it spread throughout the Southern Song, becoming, perhaps, the dominant way in which the Song now understood the world.
⁶

Meanwhile, the Jin were also adapting to their new condition. Jurchen tribal ways, best suited to wandering warriors, were less than useful in running a massive complicated state filled with conquered peoples and ancient cities. To keep their new empire together, the Jin modeled themselves, more and more, on the defeated enemy to the south.

In 1149, one of Akuta’s grandsons led a palace revolt against the reigning Jin emperor (an unpopular drunkard growing increasingly paranoid and vicious) and seized the throne for himself. The Jin chronicles refuse to grant him an imperial name; he remains known, simply, as Prince Hailing.

Hailing was a lover of Song culture: a student of the Song lyric poems known as
ci
, an aspiring poet himself, an enthusiastic tea drinker and chess player. As soon as power was in his hands, he abolished the old honorary titles still held by the heads of the Jurchen clans, and began the decadelong process of moving the capital of the Jin out of the far northern city of Shang-ching, centered in the old Jurchen homeland, down into the cradle of ancient China: to the old city of Yanjing, which he renamed Zhongdu, the “Central Capital.” He wrapped up the move by leveling the old Jurchen tribal headquarters in Shang-ching, wiping out the past.
⁷

Remaking the Jin government in the image of the Song was not enough; he wanted not merely to be
like
the Song but to possess them. In 1159, with the move to Zhongdu almost complete, he began to prepare for a massive invasion: lining up half a million horses, drafting both Jurchen and Chinese into new regiments, assembling a fleet of barges to use as warships on the Yangtze. Anyone who criticized his plans, or questioned the wisdom of the invasion, was murdered.
⁸

The invasion began in September of 1161 and was one-sided almost from the first battle. Hailing’s patched-together sea force was outmanned and outfought by the Song navy, with its fleet of small fast attack ships and massive (up to 360 feet in length), iron-hulled, paddle-wheel war galleys, propelled by the leg power of scores of Song seamen. The Song terrified the opposition by hurling “thunderclap bombs,” gunpowder and metal pellets encased in a paper and bamboo envelope, onto the Jin boats, where they exploded in a shower of projectiles and flame.
⁹

After a particularly unsuccessful encounter on the Yangtze near Nanjing, in early December, Hailing withdrew to plan a new assault. But his sweeping changes, his brutal repression of dissenters, and his incompetence as an admiral were too much; his own generals murdered him, in camp, on December 15. His cousin Shizong took control of the Jin and immediately opened peace talks with the Song.
¹⁰

But the invasion had strengthened the prowar faction at the Song court; and instead of making peace, Gaozong finally agreed to step down in favor of his adopted son Xiaozong. Xiaozong, then thirty-five, made reluctant preparations for war, and in 1163 the Song counterattack began. But as the Song divisions began to cross over into Jin territory, the new Jin ruler sent a hundred thousand men in response, and the Song were immediately driven back.

It was increasingly clear, even to the war-minded, that neither empire would make headway against the other. In 1165, the two emperors signed the Longxing Peace Accord, setting the border between the nations at the Huai river.
¹¹

8.1 The Song and Jin at Peace

The uneasy truce would last for decades; but regret lingered. “In death I know well enough all things end in emptiness,” wrote Lu Yu, on his deathbed,

still I grieve that I never saw the Nine Provinces made one.

On the day the king’s armies march north to take the heartland,

at the family sacrifice don’t forget to let your father know.
¹²

*
Lin’an was renamed Hangzhou after the Mongol invasion of 1276; many later accounts use this name for the Southern Song years as well.

*
See Bauer,
The History of the Ancient World
, pp. 494–498.

Chapter Nine

The Heiji Disturbance

Between 1142 and 1159,
the emperors of Japan battle with the Fujiwara clan for power,
and the Taira and Minamoto join the fight

I
N 1142,
a three-year-old boy was crowned emperor of Japan.

His name was Konoe, and no one expected him to actually
rule
; two retired emperors were already battling over that privilege. In fact, Japan was suffering from an embarrassment of emperors.

B
Y THE ELEVENTH CENTURY
, members of the ambitious and powerful Fujiwara clan had dug themselves firmly into top positions in the Japanese government. Generation after generation, imperial princes had married Fujiwara brides. Fujiwara ministers of state, usually close male relations of the reigning empress, dominated weak or young rulers. Emperor after emperor was crowned and then retreated behind the scenes to pursue poetry and luxurious living, political ceremony and religious ritual.
*

In 1068, the emperor Go-Sanjo—a younger half brother, unexpectedly crowned after the premature death of his older sibling—had broken the pattern.

Unlike the string of emperors who came before, Go-Sanjo did not have a Fujiwara mother. And resentment of the Fujiwara ministers—who had, more often than not, ruled Japan as though the entire country were a private estate intended for their pleasure—had been gathering for decades. “Emperor Go-Sanjo’s reign came at the time of a sharp turn into the Final Age,” explains the thirteenth-century Japanese history known as the
Gukansho
. “[He] had come to think and feel that people would no longer be at peace . . . if Regents and Chancellors continued to dominate the state, and if Emperors concerned themselves only with that which was elegant.”
¹

The Fujiwara clan was not the only threat to Japan’s peace. Over the previous century, noble families throughout the large central island of Honshu had been building private power. Both the Minamoto clan in the northeast and the Taira to the southwest had accumulated personal armies, granting land to local soldiers in exchange for military service: these warriors, bound by ties of loyalty to their landlords, were the
samurai
.
*

By the time of Go-Sanjo’s coronation, local samurai militias had grown to rival any force that could be mustered by the emperor’s decree. And another host of warriors could join the game at any moment. Since the tenth century, the wealthy Buddhist monasteries in the cities of Kyoto and Nara had suffered from the attacks of local warlords looking to fill their pockets. In reaction, the monasteries had begun to recruit monks from the ranks of Japanese mercenaries and convicted criminals: the
sohei
, or warrior monks, chosen for the monastic life solely because they were good with their weapons.
²

This was a potent mix of sword-happy men, and the emperor Go-Sanjo had to proceed carefully with his reforms. He started out by establishing a brand-new government department, called the Records Office, that required all landholders to register proof that they owned their land; this was supposed to quell the Fujiwara tendency to use public land for the recruitment of private soldiers. (The
Gukansho
remarks that the “entire country” had begun to seem like the estate of the Fujiwara chancellor.) He promoted a score of Minamoto officials into higher positions at court. And he did his best to organize a line of succession that would place sons of non-Fujiwara mothers on the throne. His own empress, mother of his oldest son, Imperial Prince Shirakawa, was Fujiwara, but from a much less notable branch of the family; his second son was the child of one of his lesser wives, a Minamoto daughter.
³