out of Kyoto and set up puppet Shogun in much the same way that the earlier Shogun had done these same things to the imperial family.
The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries presented a picture of increasing political disruption and confusion, as all central control slowly disappeared. The basic cause for the growing political disunity was that the warrior class had grown so fast during the Kamakura period that a united government based simply on ties of personal loyalty was no longer possible. New forms of political organization were necessary before unity could be restored.
The restoration of unity proved to be a slow process. The first step actually was the creation of new feudal units smaller than the old nation-wide warrior clique. The constables, who in the early feudal age had acted as leaders for the defense of each province, gradually assumed the role of local feudal lords in the late Kamakura period. In the wars that marked the end of the Kamakura regime it became evident that the individual knight felt a primary sense of loyalty to his local lord and not to the Hojo and their puppet Shogun. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the dominant figure in the political system was more and more the feudal lord, not the individual knight, as the land became divided into a large number of virtually independent feudal domains.
As the feudal lord, or Daimyo rose to power, the knight began to sink into insignificance and finally disappeared from the scene. One reason for this was that the old estates gradually lost their identity in the domains of the various Daimyo, and the position of estate