Europe and the End of Medieval Japan

Japan’s transition from medieval to early modern occurred at the time of an emerging global Europe. In the 1540s European traders and missionaries began a century of dynamic cultural and economic interaction with the Japanese Islands. In the midst of civil war, over 300,000 Japanese converted to Christianity and Japan became an influential location in the Counter-Reformation’s reinvention of Christianity as the first global religion. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, unificat