one among these central economic and political units. It exercised a theoretical rule over a shadow government, but in reality it controlled only its own estates and lived on the income from them, and not from government taxes. In time, even control over its own private affairs was lost, as one of the court families, the Fujiwara, gradually won complete mastery over the imperial family by intrigue and skillful political manipulations.
The Fujiwara were a prolific family of many branches, descended from a courtier who had taken the lead in the pro-Chinese coup d’état of 645. The family had come to control many estates throughout the land and thus enjoyed an income probably greater than that of any other family, not excluding the imperial family itself. Its method of winning unchallenged dominance at the capital was to gain direct control over the imperial family through intermarriage. A daughter of the head of the family would be married to a young emperor, and the emperor, bored with the endless ceremonies required by his double role as secular and religious leader, would be easily persuaded to abdicate and retire to a simpler, freer life as soon as the son the Fujiwara girl had borne him was old enough to sit through these ceremonies in his place. This would leave a Fujiwara girl as empress dowager, and her father, the powerful head of a large and rich court family, as the grandfather of the new child emperor.
By such tactics the Fujiwara gained complete control over the imperial family during the middle decades of the ninth century. From that time on, it became cus-