ABSTRACT
By the middle of the Heian period, the imperial court, outwardly at least, maintained neither an army nor a police force of its own, depending instead on private forces directed by private warriors for its martial dirty work. Such warriors—known as bushi, tsuwamono, musha, mononofu, and other terms at various times in their history, but most popularly as the samurai—began to dominate the political and economic landscape by the early 1200s, and ruled outright from the late fourteenth to the late nineteenth century. The expansive social and political changes taking shape during the Heian period spawned intensifying competition among the premier noble houses of the court, which in turn led to a private market for military resources, arising in parallel to the one generated by evolving government military policies. Warriors began forming gangs by the middle of the ninth century—perhaps even earlier—and by the third decade of the tenth century, private military networks of substantial scale had begun to appear.
