Ficino, Marsilio Civil war ended in 1392, and, even though some order was restored, Japan was less unified By the mid15th century, social and political unrest led to the Onin War in Japan The period after the Onin War is considered the beginning of the “warring states” period in Japanese history, a time when the Ashikaga Shogunate was destroyed and a new group of feudal magistrates emerged from the local warrior class Domains fell into the hands of feudal lords, known as daimyo, who used force and their loyal vassals to maintain their power, enforcing land taxes to keep the peasantry under much stricter control By 1500 the country was divided into the hands of roughly 300 daimyo By the 1560s many of the more powerful daimyo sought power beyond their realms and some even hoped to control all of Japan Unification, however, was largely the work of three men, sometimes called “the great unifiers,” Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu Nobunaga seized Kyoto in 1568, allegedly in support of the last Ashikaga shogun; crushed the power of the lesser lords in central Japan; and destroyed the Buddhist monasteries Nobunaga was assassinated in 1590 and power fell into the hands of his most able general, Hideyoshi By 1590 Hideyoshi established control over the entire realm Hideyoshi never took the title of shogun but did assume high positions in imperial government Hideyoshi monopolized foreign trade, had land surveyed, and confiscated weapons from the peasant class These actions further divided the samurai and peasant classes while increasing Hideyoshi’s military might In 1592 he set out to conquer Korea, a first step toward world conquest, which for him essentially meant China However Chinese armies in northern Korea stopped the Japanese, and they were forced to withdraw after Hideyoshi’s death in 1592 Hideyoshi did not leave an heir, and power shifted to the victor of the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu Ieyasu took the title of shogun and moved his residence from Kyoto to Edo (modern Tokyo) He closed the country to foreigners and for more than 250 years, Japan remained in seclusion from the rest of the world While feudalism in Japan began later than in Europe, its demise was much more recent In 1600 when Tokugawa Ieyasu took power, Japan entered the period of rule known as “centralized feudalism.” In this system, the Tokugawa Shogunate ruled Japan but gave relative autonomy to his vassal daimyo in exchange for loyalty Tokugawa rule continued in Japan until 1868, when the Meiji Restoration ended feudal rule, abolished the warrior class, and opened Japan to the rest of the world See also feudalism: Europe; Taira-Minamoto wars 121 Further reading: Duus, Peter Feudalism in Japan New York: McGraw-Hill Inc., 1993; Friday, Karl F Samurai Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan New York: Routledge, 2004; Norman, Herbert E Ando Shoeki and the Anatomy of Japanese Feudalism Washington, D.C.: University Publications of America, 1979; O’Neill, Tom “Samurai: Japan’s Way of the Warrior.” National Geographic (December 2003); Reischauer, Edwin O The Japanese Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977 Ethan Savage and Mohammad Gharipour Ficino, Marsilio (1433–1499) Italian Neoplatonist philosopher Marsilio Ficino was an important Italian Neoplatonist philosopher during the Renaissance and the mainstay of the so-called Florentine Platonic Academy, a circle of philosophers around him His father was Cosimo de’ Medici’s personal physician, but few details are known of Ficino’s early life He was trained in medicine and began study of Greek around 1456; these years in Florence were marked by the appearance of Greek philosophers who fled the Ottoman advances and reintroduced Plato and Greek literature to Italy Exposure to such intellectuals may have fostered in Ficino a desire to synthesize Christianity and Greek philosophy In 1463 Cosimo gave Ficino a villa, where he planned to translate Plato’s dialogues into Latin but also translated the Corpus Hermeticum (a mélange of texts attributed to the Egyptian magus Hermes Tresmegistus) In 1469 he completed a commentary on Plato’s Symposium which he called De amore, a text at the basis of most subsequent Renaissance theorizing on the theme of love Ficino was ordained in 1473 His most important work, the Theologia Platonica, pursues the goal of uniting Platonism with Christianity as heavily influenced by Plotinus, who Ficino felt was Plato’s most important interpreter Ficino published his Plato edition in 1484 after Cosimo’s death; it relies on the version of Leonardo Bruni In 1487 Ficino was named a canon of Florence cathedral, but his orthodoxy was called into question by the 1489 publication of his De triplici vita, a treatise on the maintenance of human health rich in astrological and pseudomagical speculation Threatened with investigation from the curia, he argued disingenuously but successfully that this work represented ancient views and not his own His ideas thus probably seem more heterodox from our perspective than they did in his own day, a period of intellectual foment in