Matsuto castle
- Built: early Kamakura period
- Destroyed: early Edo period
- Japanese: 松任城 (Matsutou-jou)
Matsutô castle was a fortress located in Kaga province, in what is today the city of Hakusan, in Ishikawa prefecture.
The castle was originally built in the early Kamakura period, by Matsutô Jûrô Norimitsu, whose descendants continued to reside there and to control the surrounding area for a number of generations, lending their family name to the place. The castle fell to the Ikkô-ikki along with the rest of the province in the 1480s. When Shibata Katsuie conquered the province in the name of Oda Nobunaga roughly 100 years later, he placed Tokuyama Norihide in command of Matsutô.
Maeda Toshinaga seized the castle a few years later, in 1583. The territory was valued at 40,000 koku at this time. He remained there for three years, and in 1600, following the battle of Sekigahara, he assigned the castle to the Akaza clan, on the orders of Tokugawa Ieyasu. It was destroyed shortly afterward, when the "one castle per domain" policy was implemented by the shogunate.
Lords of Matsutô
- Matsutô Norimitsu
- Tokuyama Norihide (c. 1570s - 1583)
- Maeda Toshinaga (1583-1586)
- Akaza clan (1600-1615)
References
- Terada Shôichi (ed.) Meijô wo aruku 2: Kanazawa-jô. Tokyo: PHP Kenkyûsho, 2002.
