大名
The regional lords who held the land, paid the samurai, and fought the wars.
A daimyo was a lord who controlled a territory large enough to support a private army, and who governed it in his own name. The word combines "great" and "name" — in origin, a great landholder.
If you remember one thing: samurai served, daimyo ruled. Every famous warlord on this site — Oda Nobunaga, Takeda Shingen, Date Masamune — was a daimyo, and the men around them were their retainers.
Before the Onin War, provinces were governed by military governors appointed by the shogun, most of whom lived in Kyoto and left the actual administration to deputies. When central authority collapsed after 1467, those deputies — and sometimes their deputies — kept the provinces for themselves.
The lords who emerged are called sengoku daimyo to distinguish them from the earlier appointed governors. They held their land by force and by local consent rather than by appointment, and they behaved accordingly: writing their own laws, surveying their own land, and making their own foreign policy.
Governing a Sengoku domain was mostly not warfare. The surviving documents are full of:
Three layers of authority coexisted, and only one of them commanded soldiers:
| What they held | Real power in the Sengoku period | |
|---|---|---|
| Emperor | Religious and ceremonial legitimacy; the authority to grant court rank | Almost no material power; extremely useful as a source of legitimacy |
| Shogun | Formal military rule delegated by the emperor | By 1500, effectively none outside Kyoto — see shogun |
| Daimyo | Land, taxes, castles and armies | Everything that mattered on the ground |
A daimyo was himself of the warrior class, so in that sense every daimyo was a samurai. The distinction is one of position: a daimyo held territory and commanded retainers; samurai were the retainers.
The relationship was reciprocal and conditional. A lord who could not protect or reward his retainers lost them, and Sengoku history is full of retainers who transferred allegiance, or who removed their lord and took his place — the pattern called gekokujo.
After Toyotomi Hideyoshi completed the unification in 1590, daimyo stopped being independent. Under Tokugawa Ieyasu and his successors they became domain administrators inside a national system: limited to one castle each, forbidden to marry without permission, required to spend alternate years in Edo, and liable to be transferred or abolished.
The title survived until 1871, when the domains were abolished and replaced by prefectures.
Each of these men ran a territory the size of a small European country.
武田信玄 · 1521–1573
The "Tiger of Kai": feared cavalry commander, rival of Uesugi Kenshin, and the one man Nobunaga did not want to face.
上杉謙信 · 1530–1578
The "Dragon of Echigo", who fought Takeda Shingen five times and claimed to fight for justice rather than land.
北条氏康 · 1515–1571
Held the Kanto plain against Takeda and Uesugi from the strongest castle in Japan.
毛利元就 · 1497–1571
Turned a small Aki house into the ruler of ten provinces, mostly by out-thinking his opponents.
今川義元 · 1519–1560
The most powerful lord on the Tokaido road until Nobunaga killed him at Okehazama.
大友宗麟 · 1530–1587
Kyushu's greatest lord, a Christian convert, and the man whose appeal brought Hideyoshi south.
A daimyo was a territorial lord; samurai were the warriors who served him. All daimyo were of the warrior class, but only a small number of warriors were daimyo.
No. The shogun outranked every daimyo in principle. During the Sengoku period, however, the shogunate had lost the power to enforce that rank.
It varied constantly as houses rose and were destroyed. Under the Tokugawa settlement, the number of recognised domains stabilised at roughly 250 to 300.