Battle of Sekigahara

September 15, 1600

On a fog-drenched plain in central Japan, seventy thousand samurai clashed for six hours until Tokugawa Ieyasu's patient cavalry shattered the loyalist coalition of Ishida Mitsunari. The sword strokes decided two and a half centuries of peace. A shogunate was born, and Kyoto's flickering imperial court became largely decorative, its emperor reduced to ritual and poetry.