西魏・北周の二十四軍と「府兵制」

Abstract

The fubing system that was a driving force in the creation of Sui and Tang dynasties is generally thought to have begun with the twenty-four army system of the Western Wei, and its military power too have been composed of local militias of Han people in Western Wei and Northern Zhou during which the influx of warriors of the northern Xianbei peoples were not numerous. Nonetheless, the term fubing zhi, the fubing system, is not found in contemporary sources, and was invented in a later period. Tracing the fubing system back to the Western Wei is also nothing more than a distortion created by later hands. The local military organizations that comprised the military force of the twenty-four army system were both chronologically, geographically, and ethnically extremely diverse, and the local Han militias of Guanlong 關隴 were no more than one part of it. In the Western Wei and Northern Zhou levies of military service were generally imposed on households, but they resorted to having the local gentry organize military bands and thereby continued the selection and implementation of a method of operating as a pseudo-tribal militia. In addition the existence of a unique system of groups of close advisers, called qinxhin 親信 and kuzhen 庫眞, whose lineages could be traced to the inner officers of Northern Wei court, made it possible to control the vast military organization that was the twenty-four army system. Judging from these special characteristics, the twenty-four-army system can be understood as a pseudo-tribal militia system that was supported by the traditions of the Xianbei. In this regard, it should be positioned in the historical context as a military system located precisely within the lineage of the nomadic military systems such as the twenty-four chiefs of the Xiongnu and of the Mongol thousand-household system. The imperial edict of the tenth year of Kaihuang, which was promulgated the year after Sui destroyed the Chen, has been taken as revolutionary in creating the ground-breaking fubing system, but in actuality, the purpose of the edict was the transfer and settling of military groups who had served for years in Guanzhong, and their essential character as pseudo-Xiangbei tribal militia was maintained thereafter. A common element underlay both the purpose of the imperial edict of the tenth year of the Kaihuang reign and the Northern-Wei policy of dismantling the tribe-centered state, and in order to decipher this reality, one must seek a point of view from which both can be mutually examined and compared.