Kyoto Devastated in Onin War

1467

The first year of the Onin War reduced much of Kyoto to smoking ashes and rubble. Rival armies of the Hosokawa and Yamana clans built crude fortifications across the imperial capital's elegant streets, burned ancient temples and aristocratic mansions, and turned centuries of accumulated cultural refinement to charcoal. The delicate world of court poetry and Noh drama survived only in provincial refuges, carried there by fleeing monks and displaced courtiers.