Oda Nobunaga had a big smile on his face as he sat across from the two men.
They arrived from Iga Province, a place that continued to be huge pain in his rear armor.
Iga had been on his naughty list ever since his son Nobukatsu attempted the first invasion
of the province.
The invasion had gone the way of my love life.
So when two Iga men knocked on his door, he gladly welcomed them in for some traitor tea
and double-crosser crumpets.
They offered themselves up as guides for his armies in case he ever wanted to invade their
homeland.
Of course, Nobunaga got all hot and bothered at the word “invade” and decided to launch
a second invasion of Iga.
He didn’t actually lead the armies for the campaign, but he did plan it.
Now he knew of Iga’s battlefield prowess and didn’t want to take any chances.
This time, he enlisted 6 armies and attacked Iga from all sides.
He could do this because by this point in history, Nobunaga controlled everything around
Iga Province.
His son Nobukatsu led one of these armies.
He also included Koka men, former allies of Iga.
The number of men for this campaign was almost 4 times the number of men in Nobukatsu’s
previous invasion.
Yes, let’s see those bastards get out of this.
Now the Iga had one thing going for them, their spy network was basically Skynet.
They found out about the invasion.
They found out about the massive Oda armies.
And they found out they were screwed.
Iga’s own forces totalled a quarter of the Oda’s at most, and they couldn’t split
it up 6 ways to defend against all 6 attack routes.
The situation was as dire as House Stark’s sigil.
Nobunaga’s armies immediately employed a scorched earth strategy.
Woe is you if you lived along the path of one of his armies.
As they marched, they torched everything along the way.
Entire villages, holy shrines and temples, pokemon gyms, it didn’t matter.
It wasn’t out of spite, there was a method to the cruelty.
Iga guerilla tactics devastated Nobukatsu in the first invasion, Nobunaga wasn’t gonna
let it happen again.
Burning everything to the ground gave the Iga warriors nowhere to hide, nowhere to plan
ambushes from.
Heartbreaking stories spread like whipped butter on toast as the people of Iga fought
against the inevitable.
There were stories of women and children fleeing and getting slaughtered, of people lamenting
over their sacred shrines and temples being reduced to ashes.
The Oda forces even put to the torch Iga’s main Shinto shrine.
One region lined up the heads of 100 Iga samurai who fought against the armies of Darth Nobunaga,
to honor them.
Look, when I die, you guys don’t really have to do that, it’s not necessary.
Instead, I want my skull to be cleaned, crushed into powder, split into lines, and given to
Dr. Karl Friday to snort.
*sniff* ah yeah.
Sorry, Dr. Friday.
There were stories of samurai killing their wives and children before going off to war,
so that they could fight without having to worry that their families would be captured.
Now that was kind of putting the cart before the horse because, like, what if you win?
But that gives us an idea of how desperate and hopeless the people of Iga felt.
Let’s talk about the two major battles of the war.
The first was the siege of Hijiyama.
On one of the Oda’s binge-burnings, surviving warriors of several villages united and crammed
themselves into a castle on a hill called Hijiyama.
The Iga defenders were outnumbered 30 to 1, but they didn’t fight like it.
The Oda pushed up the hill at night.
Demonstrating that famous Iga battlefield prowess, the defenders set up an ambush and waited.
Gun shots burst out through holes in the castle wall.
Iga men pushed boulders and trees, yes TREES, down at the assaulters.
At this point, the Oda soldiers had marched a long way.
They were tired, and the resistance was so intense that they retreated back to camp.
After repelling the attack from the far larger army, the Iga stayed cooped up within the
safety of their castle.
NOT!
That’s not how they roll.
At night, Iga warriors snuck out of the castle.
In darkness, they tiptoed to the Oda camp from three different directions.
At the time of attack, they lit their torches and went all Seven Samurai on the Oda troops.
Bewildered, the Oda fired arrows in all directions.
Apparently, strong winds blew out the torches and the two sides fought mostly in darkness.
It was said that the Iga warriors had passwords to identify themselves in the darkness, but
the Oda did not, and killed many of their own in the confusion.
Alas, these night raids were like trying to finish a bowl of rice by eating one grain
at a time, remember they were outnumbered 30 to 1.
The siege eventually took its toll.
Finally, the 30,000 Oda men marched up the hill for a final assault.
Upon reaching the castle, they set fire to it.
It was a dry and windy day, and Hijiyama Castle was mostly wood, so the entire place went
poof into flames, ending the siege.
Oda, one.
Iga, zero.
The other major battle was at a mountain fortress called Kashiwara Castle.
Nobukatsu led this siege.
After a direct attack failed, Nobukatsu decided to starve them out.
The Iga defenders had some tricks up their wide swinging sleeves.
Three Iga men snuck out from the castle and slipped through the Oda line.
One night, the Oda army saw hundreds of points of light off in the distance, torches from
a huge approaching Iga army.
The Oda troops panicked, but one of their generals recognized the ruse.
He had read about another general in history using the same trick and calmed everyone down.
See why you gotta learn your history?
What happened was the Iga men who snuck out visited surrounding villages and convinced
people to create hundreds of torches to try and scare off the Oda.
A for effort, guys.
The Iga also regularly sent out men to set fires and do ambushes, hoping to cause paranoia
and confusion.
But they were outnumbered and food was running low.
In the end, they decided to do a good ole suicide charge and be done with it.
Luckily, it didn’t come to that.
Nobukatsu enlisted the help of some big-shot negotiator, who actually negotiated a peace
agreement.
The Iga defenders would give up in exchange for their safety.
Didn’t expect THAT plot twist, did ya?
The leader of the castle defense force came out to meet Nobukatsu and handed over his
son as hostage.
Nobukatsu gave him a good yelling, calling the people of Iga
“frogs in a well who know nothing of the great ocean.”
Poetic.
Then he accepted the peace agreement.
Oda, 1264.
Iga, 0.
Thus ended the second Iga invasion.
In the aftermath, whole villages and shrines and temples lay in ash, but Nobunaga treated
the survivors mercifully.
In a surprising feat of self control for Nobunaga, he did not call for the killing of the Iga
leaders.
All kinds of twists today innit?
He split up Iga Province and gave the pieces to his son Nobukatsu and his brother Nobukane.
So there did continue to be local acts of rebellion in Iga, you get the feeling these
Iga warriors were not the type to lie down quietly, but all in all, like their former
Koka allies, the people of Iga lost their independence under Nobunaga’s sword.
This is the end of our series on Nobunaga and the country samurai, hope you liked.
And if you want to read about it in more detail, I have a link below to Stephen Turnbull’s
book, Ninja: Unmasking the Myth, where he talks about this and other ninja-related stuff.
Also, I recently updated the perks for my Patreon, patrons can vote on future topics
and download art from the videos, check it out!
I wanna thank the new patron this week, Mrscds...I think?
Alright guys, much love and spread the knowledge!