Background
Tokimune Hōjō was born on 5 June 1251 in Japan. He was the eldest son of Hojo Tokiyori.
北条 時宗
Tokimune Hōjō was born on 5 June 1251 in Japan. He was the eldest son of Hojo Tokiyori.
In 1268 he became the eighth shikken, or regent, of the Kamakura shogunate. Around this time envoys began to come to Japan from the Mongol, or Yuan, dynasty of China demanding that Japan acknowledge itself a tributary state of Yuan.
Yuan at this time was under the rulership of Kublai Khan, the fifth of the Mongol emperors and grandson of Genghis Khan, the founder of the dynasty. Later, in 1271, he adopted Yuan as the official name of his dynasty, and in 1279 conquered the Southern Sung and united all of China under his rule.
In 1259 Kublai, as part of his campaign to subjugate all of Asia, had forced the Korean state of Koryo to become a tributary, and now he prepared to use it as a base for an attack on Japan should the Japanese refuse to acknowledge his authority. When the Mongol envoys came with their demands, Tokimune refused to heed them, instead beginning preparations to defend the country against attack.