and his leading knights settled down in Kyoto and took over control of the court, Kiyomori taking for himself the title of Prime Minister and adopting the old Fujiwara trick of marrying his own daughter to the emperor and putting her son on the throne.
By settling in Kyoto and becoming in effect a new group of courtiers, Kiyomori and his henchmen weakened their hold over the knights of their clique who remained on their estates in the provinces and who tended to resent the position and pretensions of the court aristocracy. Meanwhile the remnants of the Minamoto family slowly recouped their fortune in their old family stronghold in eastern Japan. Eventually the Minamoto felt themselves strong enough again to challenge Taira supremacy, and in a bitterly fought war between 1180 and 1185 they completely crushed the Taira faction. The Taira leaders either were killed or committed suicide, and the new boy emperor who was the grandson of Kiyomori perished with his Taira relatives in the final battle of the war.
Minamoto Yoritomo, the leader of the triumphant Minamoto faction, profiting from the mistakes of the Taira, left Kyoto and the court alone and settled down at the small seaside town of Kamakura, near the estates of his relatives and his partisans in the Kanto region of eastern Japan. In typically Japanese fashion, he decided to permit the emperors and Fujiwara to continue their sham civil government unmolested. He took for himself only the title of Shogun, a term perhaps best translated as “Generalissimo,” and he rewarded his men not with government posts but with the more lucrative positions of estate managers in manors formerly con-