Honnō-ji Incident

Before dawn in Kyoto

In 1582 Akechi Mitsuhide was ordered west with roughly 13,000 troops to reinforce Hashiba Hideyoshi against the Mōri. Instead he took that mobilized force into the capital and, before dawn, attacked his own lord, Oda Nobunaga, at Honnō-ji.

The contemporary date was the second day of the sixth month of Tenshō 10; 21 June 1582 is its modern Western-calendar rendering. Nobunaga was staying at the temple with only a small household retinue while the main Oda armies were deployed elsewhere.

What the Shinchō Kōki says happened inside

The Shinchō Kōki has Nobunaga shooting several arrows, fighting on with a spear, taking a spear wound to the elbow, then withdrawing into his residence, having the building set alight, and killing himself. His page Mori Ranmaru, who identified the attackers as Akechi troops in that narrative, died defending him.

The chronicle is an indispensable early record based on Ōta Gyūichi's notes, but its reconstruction of Nobunaga's final moments cannot be independently confirmed. No remains and no incontrovertible eyewitness description of the suicide survive.

The heir dies the same morning

Mitsuhide's forces then turned on Nobunaga's eldest son and designated successor, Oda Nobutada, who had withdrawn from Myōkaku-ji to Nijō. Overwhelmed there, Nobutada committed suicide.

Within hours the coup had killed both the Oda regime's leader and its principal adult successor, and Mitsuhide held the initiative around Kyoto.

Mitsuhide left no securely established explanation for the revolt; grudge, ambition, imperial-court, Shikoku-policy and wider-conspiracy theories all remain unproved.