Tōtōmi was one of the original provinces of Japan established in the
Nara period under the
Taihō Code. The original capital of the province was located in what is now
Iwata, and was named Mitsuke – a name which survived into modern times as
Mitsuke-juku, a
post station on the
Tōkaidō. Under the
Engishiki classification system, Tōtōmi was ranked as a "superior country" (上国) in terms of importance, and one of the 16 "middle countries" (中国) in terms of distance from the capital. During the early
Muromachi period, Tōtōmi was ruled nominally by the
Imagawa clan before coming under control of the
Shiba clan. However, by the
Sengoku period, the Imagawa recovered Tōtōmi and effectively annexed it to Suruga Province. After the defeat of the Imagawa at the
Battle of Okehazama, Tōtōmi was divided between the powerful warlords
Takeda Shingen of
Kai and
Tokugawa Ieyasu of Mikawa. To consolidate his new holdings, Tokugawa Ieyasu constructed
Hamamatsu Castle, which effectively became the capital of the province, although parts of Tōtōmi continued to be contested between the Tokugawa and Takeda until Shingen's death. After the
Battle of Odawara and the rise to power of
Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Tokugawa Ieyasu was forced to trade his domains in the
Tōkai region for the
Kantō region instead. Hamamatsu was relinquished to the
Horii clan and subsidiary
Kakegawa Castle to
Yamauchi Kazutoyo. After the establishment of the
Tokugawa shogunate, the Tokugawa recovered their lost territories, and reassigned Tōtōmi to various
fudai daimyōs. During the Edo period, the
Tōkaidō road from
Edo to
Kyoto passed through Tōtōmi, with
post stations at several locations. For defensive purposes, the
Tokugawa shogunate forbid the construction of bridges on the major rivers (such as at the
Tenryū River), which further led to town development on the major river crossings. At the end of the Tokugawa shogunate, Tōtōmi Province was divided among several
feudal domains, which 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, and the existing
daimyōs in Tōtōmi were reassigned to other territories, mostly in
Kazusa Province After the
abolition of the han system in 1871 by the new
Meiji government, during the first wave of prefectural mergers (第1次府県統合
daiichiji fu/ken tōgō), the new prefectures in Tōtōmi were merged into
Hamamatsu Prefecture, with enclaves of other prefectures/exclaves in other provinces being removed, so that Hamamatsu and Tōtōmi became basically contiguous. On August 21, 1876, Hamamatsu was merged into
Shizuoka Prefecture, which by that time comprised all of Suruga and
Izu provinces, to form an enlarged Shizuoka Prefecture; it reached practically its present-day extent in 1878 when a part of Izu Province, namely the Izu Islands, were transferred from Shizuoka to Tokyo. Many former
samurai of the feudal domains in Tōtōmi, now unemployed due to the sudden end to feudalism, were settled in the
Makinohara region, where they developed the
green tea industry. With the coming of the
Tōkaidō Main Line railway, Hamamatsu developed rapidly into a major commercial and industrial center, especially in connection with the cotton and silk-spinning industries. ==Districts under the Ritsuryō system==