Generals and Scholars: Military Rule in Medieval Korea

Preface

vii In the autumn of 1170 a small group of military officers rose in revolt, detained King Ŭijong (r. 1146–1170), and murdered a number of civilian officials. Over the next two decades the kingdom imploded as military officers conspired against each other at the top and unrest among peasants, slaves, and monks rocked the people below. A degree of stability returned with the rise of General Ch’oe Ch’unghŏn (1149–1219) in 1196. General Ch’oe and his descendants ruled the kingdom as military dictators until 1258, when civilian officers negotiated a peace with the Mongols and restored authority to the king. In the twelve years from 1258 until 1270, when the court finally fell under complete Mongol domination, power shifted among several aspiring dictators. This military phase in the middle of the Koryŏ dynasty has attracted little attention among scholars. In fact, the entire Koryŏ period (918–1392), sequestered between the dramatic founding kingdoms of Koguryŏ, Paekche, and Silla and the five-hundred-yearlong Chosŏn dynasty, has received only passing scholarly attention. The military era in particular is nearly forgotten because it was deemed an anomaly: compared with a millennium of civil rule, the century of military domination was considered an exception to the norm and thus unworthy of serious study. Apart from studies on a few military leaders who were dynastic founders or who subdued invading marauders, Korean scholars have focused on the civil elites. The Koryŏsa (History of Koryŏ) and the Koryŏsa chŏryo (Essentials of Koryŏ history) are the two key primary sources for Koryŏ in genPREFACE viii Preface eral and the military period in particular. Both histories were written during the first century of the Chosŏn kingdom based on records passed down from Koryŏ. Chosŏn scholars, anxious to substantiate the legitimacy of their dynasty, presented Koryŏ history in a highly critical light and especially singled out the military period as a time of failure: to study the military era, they argued, was to investigate a society that had collapsed. Corruption and degeneration marked the age as murderous generals took over the kingdom illegally. Civilians ceded all power to military officers who ruled through might and fear. The king was a dolt who surrounded himself with sycophants and men of base origin. The compilers of these histories were Confucian scholars who, in their esteem for the legitimacy of dynastic authority, depicted the military era as a dark age. Military figures were dismissed as “rebellious subjects” and their biographies were relegated to the end of the dynastic histories.1 This negative interpretation of the military period persisted well into the twentieth century. When the first Western historians of Korea wrote their initial monographs on Korea’s past, they relied on Chosŏn sources and merely reiterated the views cited here. Homer Hulbert in recording his eight-hundred-page History of Korea (1905) relied heavily on the fifteenth-century Tongguk T’onggam (Comprehensive mirror of the Eastern Kingdom), a history that embodied the Confucian historiographic tradition. Hulbert devoted a scant twenty pages to the military period—and much of that focused on the Mongol invasions of the peninsula. When he addressed military rule, he recounted little more than a litany of murder, arson, rebellion , and seduction. Begrudgingly he called Ch’oe Ch’unghŏn a reformer on one page but then quickly noted that he was seduced by “ambition and power.” Ch’oe U (d. 1249), Ch’oe Ch’unghŏn’s son and successor, fared no better. Hulbert described him as “stealing houses and lands from wherewith to build himself a princely mansion, two hundred paces long.” James Scarth Gale, writing at the start of the twentieth century and using similar sources, provided just a few pages on the military and his descriptions were no different . He depicted the Ch’oe family as a “giant vampire” battening on Korea. He added: “To recite all their crimes would fill a volume. There were two brothers and a son, all equally bad.” Gale concluded that Ch’oe and his followers turned Korea into a “den of thieves.”2 During the 1950s, the first winds of change appeared. In 1951, at Preface ix the height of the Korean War, Hatada Takashi, a Japanese scholar, attempted to give an overview of Korean history: Chösen-shi (History of Korea) was a general survey that allocated...