Dominic Sandbrook

So he becomes his samurai.

That's what samurai means, retainer.

Well, he is a guy called Minamoto no Yoshitsune.

And we actually met him in our previous episode in which listeners may remember we were describing the outbreak of the great war between the Taira clan and the Minamoto clan.

So the Taira have control over Kyoto, the great imperial capital.

They have the imperial family under their thumb.

And they had expelled the Minamoto pretty much from the kind of civilized center of Japan.

And they've all been dispersed to the barbarous northeastern stretches of Japan.

Yoshitsune is a member of this clan, hence Minamoto no Yoshitsune.

This is the background for the fleeting appearance, as we said, of Yoshitsune in our previous episode.

He was the baby who had been folded in the cloak of his mother,

the concubine Tokiwa as she attempted to escape Kyoto in a snowstorm.

Tokiwa had become the concubine of Kiyomori, who was the most powerful man in Japan, the leader of the Taira clan, and so therefore the inveterate enemy of the rival Minamoto clan.

Yoshitsune's father, Yoshitomo, had been the head of the Minamoto clan.

And Yoshitomo had been killed in his bath.

He'd been trying to get away, ended up murdered by a supposed friend.

Kiyomori had only spared Yoshitsune out of affection for his mother because Tokiwa ends up as Kiyomori's concubine.

And so Yoshitsune had been brought up in complete ignorance of his father's identity.

He did not know that he was the son of this great Minamoto lord.

He had no idea about that.