Records of Suruga during the
Heian period are sparse, but during the
Kamakura period, Suruga was under direct control of the
Hōjō clan. With the development of the
Kamakura shogunate came increased traffic on the
Tōkaidō road connecting
Kamakura with
Kyoto. The province came under the control of the
Imagawa clan from the early
Muromachi period through much of the
Sengoku period. The Imagawa made efforts to introduce the customs and rituals of the
kuge aristocracy to their capital. However, after
Imagawa Yoshimoto was defeated by
Oda Nobunaga at the
Battle of Okehazama, the province taken by
Takeda Shingen of Kai. The Takeda were in turn defeated by
Tokugawa Ieyasu, who was already master of
Mikawa and Tōtōmi. After the
Siege of Odawara (1590),
Toyotomi Hideyoshi forced the Tokugawa to exchange their domains for the provinces of the
Kantō region, and reassigned
Sunpu Castle to one of his retainers,
Nakamura Kazuichi. However, after the defeat of
Ishida Mitsunari at the
Battle of Sekigahara, Tokugawa Ieyasu recovered his former domains, and made
Sunpu Castle his home after he formally retired from the position of
Shōgun.
Early modern period During the
Edo period, Suruga prospered due to its location on the Tōkaidō, and numerous
post towns developed. For defensive purposes, the
Tokugawa shogunate forbade the construction of bridges on the major rivers of Suruga Province (such as at the
Ōi River), which further led to town development on the major river crossings. During this period, the major urban center of
Sunpu remained a
tenryō territory, administered directly the Shōgun by the
Sunpu jōdai, and several smaller
feudal domains were assigned to close
fudai retainers. Following the defeat of the Tokugawa shogunate during the
Boshin War of the
Meiji Restoration, the last Tokugawa
shōgun,
Tokugawa Yoshinobu returned to Suruga in 1868 to rule the short-lived
Shizuoka Domain until the
abolition of the han system in 1871 by the new
Meiji government. Suruga was subsequently merged with the neighboring provinces of Tōtōmi and Izu (less the
Izu Islands) to form modern
Shizuoka Prefecture. At the same time, the province continued to exist for some purposes. For example, Suruga is explicitly recognized in treaties in 1894 (a) between Japan and the
United States and (b) between Japan and the
United Kingdom. In the mid-19th century, Suruga was one of the most frequently mapped provinces in Japan. ==Historical districts==