Japanese Warrior Monks AD 949-1603 (Turnbull)

Stephen Turnbull's history of Japan's warrior monk traditions, published by Osprey Publishing in 2003, covering the Sohei of the older Buddhist establishments and the later Ikko-ikki leagues of Jodo Shinshu believers who fought Oda Nobunaga through the 1570s. Turnbull, a specialist historian of Japanese military history, draws on Japanese chronicle and campaign accounts to describe Nobunaga's three sieges of the Ikko-ikki fortress complex at Nagashima between 1571 and 1574, culminating in the mass killing of the complex's remaining defenders and civilians by fire after the final 1574 siege. Its strength is a specialist military historian's detailed, illustrated campaign account grounded in named primary chronicles. Its limit is that, published in an accessible illustrated series aimed at a general military history readership rather than a footnoted academic monograph, it does not carry the full source apparatus of a university press study.