there were two hundred churches and one hundred and fifty thousand
native Christians. Two daimi[=o]s had confessed their faith, and in the
Mikado's minister, Nobunaga (1534-1582), the foreign priests found a
powerful supporter.[7] This hater and scourge of the Buddhist priesthood
openly welcomed and patronized the Christians, and gave them eligible
sites on which to build dwellings and churches. In every possible way he
employed the new force, which he found pliantly political, as well as
intellectually and morally a choice weapon for humbling the bonzes, whom
he hated as serpents. The Buddhist church militant had become an army
with banners and fortresses. Nobunaga made it the aim of his life to
destroy the military power of the hierarchy, and to humble the priests
for all time. He hoped at least to extract the fangs of what he believed
to be a politico-religious monster, which menaced the life of the
nation. Unfortunately, he was assassinated in 1582. To this day the
memory of Nobunaga is execrated by the Buddhists. They have deified Kato
Kiyomasa and Iyéyas[)u], the persecutors of the Christians. To Nobunaga
they give the title of Bakadono, or Lord Fool.

In 1583, an embassy of four young noblemen was despatched by the
Christian daimi[=o]s of Kiushiu, the second largest island in the
empire, to the Pope to declare themselves spiritual--though as some of
their countrymen suspected, political--vassals of the Holy See. It was
in the three provinces of Bungo, Omura and Arima, that Christianity was
most firmly rooted. After an absence of eight years, in 1590, the envoys
from the oriental to the occidental ends of the earth, returned to
Nagasaki, accompanied by seventeen more Jesuit fathers--an important
addition to the many Portuguese "religious" of that order already in
Japan.

Yet, although there was to be still much missionary activity, though