edge of the arts of war themselves, would from time to time bring knights from their provincial estates to the capital to help protect their interests or to overawe their enemies. Sometimes the knights were used to defend the court from the great local monasteries, which often attempted to force their will upon the effete courtiers by a joint display of Buddhist relics and armed might drawn from the warriors of the monastery estates. At other times, the knights were brought in to settle, by a show of force or by actual conflict, factional disputes over the imperial succession and the headship of the Fujiwara family.
In the middle of the twelfth century disputes of the latter type led to fairly large scale clashes between the two strongest warrior cliques of the time in support of two quarreling court factions. The warrior cliques centered around two great provincial families, the Taira and the Minamoto, both of whom claimed descent from cadet branches of the imperial family which, because of declining income, had been forced to seek their fortunes in the provinces. There they had merged with the local aristocrats and had risen to leadership among them because of their prestige as descendants of emperors.
As a result of two small wars in 1156 and 1160, one of the court factions won out over the other. A far more significant outcome was the sudden realization on the part of Taira Kiyomori, leader of the victorious Taira clique of warriors, that he and his band now formed the paramount military force in the land and that the emperor and his court were powerless in his hands. To the consternation of the courtiers, Kiyomori