Lords of the sea: Pirates, violence, and exchange in medieval Japan

This dissertation explores how seafarers who appear in historical sources as pirates (kaizoku) dominated the sea-lanes of late medieval Japan (c. 1300-1600). It views premodern Japan from a sea-based, ecological perspective and presents an alternative to land-centered, institutional viewpoints prevalent in historical source materials and modern historiography. Specifically, it focuses on the Seto Inland Sea region and the Noshima, Kurushima, and Innoshima Murakami families.;As a result of the decentralization in the late-medieval period, land-based authorities increasingly relied on those they labeled as 'pirates' to secure the sea-lanes, fight battles, protect ships, hunt 'enemy' shipping, quell 'pirates,' conduct trade, deliver rents, and administer littoral holdings. They institutionally recognized such 'pirates' as warrior elites (samurai). In accepting patronage offers, 'pirates' appropriated land-based discourses of lordship while intentionally retaining a maritime power-base. As a result, this project argues that they thought of themselves as sea lords. To maintain autonomy, sea lords accepted and quit patronage relations with competing land-based sponsors such as warring daimyo and estate proprietors.;Sea lords administered littoral domains through practices of sea tenure. They regulated access to the sea by administering ports, shipyards, and shipping organizations such as those of Shiwaku. By intercepting ships and charging protection-money at toll barriers in chokepoints, they forced recognition of their maritime suzerainty over the sea-lanes. Sea lords also managed spaces of maritime production such as estates (shôen) like Yugeshima. As a result of this occupational diversity, a study of sea-lord domains allows us to incorporate the histories of the wider littoral population and the maritime environment into our understanding of medieval Japan.;Through this thalassocracy, sea lord bands played integral roles in the maritime networks linking Japan and East Asia. They helped engender the transformation from an estate economy to a commercial economy, helped build regional networks such as those focused on the religious and commercial center of Itsukushima, and were crucial elements in the transfer of culture, especially military technology like firearms. Successful prosecution of warfare in Sengoku Japan required securing the services of the sea lords. However, sea-lords' maritime autonomy was fundamentally incompatible with Hideyoshi's ambitions for Japan and sea-lords lost their domains in the re-unified archipelago.