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Volume 3 Chapter 2 Part 1

Chapter 2 : Sakai, the free city of gold

The city of Sakai received its name simply because of its location between Settsu, Izumi and Kawachi. The ruling class in Sakai was not made up of warriors, but rather rich merchants calling themselves 「Kaigi Gunshū 」.

10 years ago, the missionary Francisco Xavier stayed in the house of Hibiya, a merchant of Sakai, when he first came to Japan. After that, missionaries who came to Sakai all wrote 「Sakai is a free trading city comparable to Venice」.

In the Sengoku era where warriors fight over everything, Sakai was one of the few precious neutral territoryies, and the thing that enabled this neutrality was its financial strength, which is to say, the power of money that the city of Sakai made for itself.

Relying on the sea for trading, Sakai was like the mythical golden city that the famous explorer Marco Polo wrote about