Generals and Scholars: Military Rule in Medieval Korea

268 Pages·2000·0.908 MB·English

by  Edward Shultz

Generals and Scholars

Generals and
Scholars
Military Rule in Medieval Korea
Edward J. Shultz
University of Hawai‘i Press
Honolulu
© 2000 University of Hawai‘i Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shultz, Edward J.
Generals and scholars : military rule in medieval Korea /
Edward J. Shultz.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–8248–2188–2 (cloth : alk. paper) —
ISBN 0–8248–2324–9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Korea—Politics and government—935–1392. 2. Military
government—Korea—History—To 1500. 3. Korea—History,
Military. I. Title.
DS912.35 .S54 2000
952.9'01—dc21 00–021878
University ofHawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free
paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Council on Library Resources.
Designed by Kenneth Miyamoto
Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction 1
1 The Military Coup 9
2 Myo˘ngjong’s Reign 28
3 The Ch’oe House: Military Institutions 54
4 Civil Structure and Personnel: Ch’oe Ch’ungho˘n
and Ch’oe U 70
5 Civil Structure and Personnel: Ch’oe Hang and
Ch’oeU˘i 94
6 Peasants and Lowborns 110
7 Buddhism under the Military 131
8 Land and Other Economic Issues 148
9 The Ch’oe Dilemma 165
Appendixes 191
Notes 209
Bibliography 241
Index 251
v

PREFACE
In the autumn of 1170 a small group of military officers rose in
revolt, detained King U˘ijong (r.1146–1170), and murdered a num-
ber 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’ungho˘n (1149–1219) in 1196. General Ch’oe and his descen-
dants ruled the kingdom as military dictators until 1258, when civil-
ianofficers negotiatedapeace with the Mongols andrestored author-
ity 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 Koryo˘ dynasty has
attracted little attention among scholars. In fact, the entire Koryo˘
period (918–1392), sequestered between the dramatic founding
kingdoms of Koguryo˘, Paekche, and Silla and the five-hundred-year-
long Choso˘n 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 Kory˘osa (History of Koryo˘) and the Kory˘osa cho˘ryo (Essentials
of Koryo˘ history) are the two key primary sources for Koryo˘ in gen-
vii
viii Preface
eral and the military period in particular. Both histories were written
during the first century of the Choso˘n kingdom based on records
passed down from Koryo˘. Choso˘n scholars, anxious to substantiate
the legitimacy of their dynasty, presented Koryo˘ 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. Civil-
ians ceded all power to military officers who ruled through might
and fear. The king was a dolt who surrounded himself with syco-
phants 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
Choso˘n 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 (Compre-
hensive 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, rebel-
lion, and seduction. Begrudgingly he called Ch’oe Ch’ungho˘n 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’ungho˘n’s
son and successor, fared no better. Hulbert described him as “steal-
ing 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 differ-
ent. 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 fewer than ten pages to
the military period. Like earlier historians, Hatada recounted the
massacre of civilians during the initial coup and the continuing
slaughter that accompanied Ch’oe Ch’ungho˘n’s rise to power. But
along with this now-hackneyed tale Hatada discussed the new insti-
tutions and analyzed the changes then occurring. He concluded:
“Thus we see that the Ch’oe family, martial though they were, were
bureaucrats of the old order, not medieval warriors.”3 In this way
Hatada cautiously moved beyond the negative description of the
early histories and examined the military leaders in a new light. In
his brief presentation of this period he advanced both analysis and
interpretation and offered a slightly altered view of the generals.
The 1960s saw several treatments in Korean historical surveys that
provided a basis for understanding the dynamics of the military era
—Kim Sanggi’s Koryo˘ sidaesa (History of the Koryo˘ period), for
example, and Yi Pyo˘ngdo’s Chungsep’y˘on in the seven-volume Han-
guksa (Korean history: Middle ages). Yi Pyo˘ngdo devoted more than
seventy-five pages to the military period and detailed the institu-
tional innovations of the military. In 1961 Yi Kibaek published the
college history Kuksa sillon (New history of Korea), which became
the basis for his subsequently republished popular college texts. In
these histories he committed an entire chapter to military rule. Not
satisfied with just recalling the events of the period, he put the key
issues within a historical context in an effort to understand the gen-
erals’ actions and the conditions that drove them to revolt both in
1170 and in 1196.4
Since the early 1970s a number of articles and monographs have
further illuminated various aspects of the era. In 1971, Pyo˘n T’aeso˘p
laid the foundations for future scholarship with his definitive study
of Koryo˘ institutional history. In this work, drawing on his earlier
articles, Pyo˘n closely examined the social and political status of mil-
itary and civil officials. A decade and a half later Kim Tangt’aek, first
in a doctoral dissertation and then in a book, investigated the mili-
tary period as a coherent whole, applying more analysis to individu-
als and institutions than had been presented heretofore in Korean.
In 1990 Min Pyo˘ngha, building on his earlier work, essentially repub-
lished his research in a volume titled Kory˘o musin ch˘onggwo˘n yo˘ngu (A