Yoritomo raises the eastern war banner

1180

Hearing that a Taira edict had been issued for his execution, the young Minamoto clan-head, exiled to the Izu Peninsula since his father's defeat twenty years earlier, rallied eastern warriors to his cause and established a base at Kamakura. The Genpei War had begun. Yoritomo's genius lay not in battlefield tactics but in political organization; from Kamakura he built the administrative machinery of the future shogunate.