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At the age of sixteen he was employed by a Buddhist priest to assist in distributing amulets, and by the agency of this priest he obtained an introduction to Matsushita Yukitsuna, commandant of the castle of Kuno at Hamamatsu, in Totomi province. This Matsushita was a vassal of Imagawa Yoshimoto.
But when the Imagawa suffered defeat in the battle of Okehazama, at the hands of Oda Nobunaga, Ieyasu allied himself with the latter. In 1570, he removed to Hamamatsu, having subjugated the provinces of Mikawa and Totomi. He was forty years old at the time of Nobunaga's murder, and it has been shown above that he espoused the cause of the Oda family in the campaign of Komak-yama.
The course of subsequent events seems to prove that Ieyasu, in taking the field on this occasion, aimed simply at asserting his own potentiality and had no thought of plunging the empire into a new civil war. In March, 1584, he set out from Hamamatsu and joined Nobukatsu at Kiyosu, in Owari. The scheme of campaign was extensive.
In November, 1572, Shingen led a large force and seized two of the Tokugawa castles, menacing the third and most important at Hamamatsu, where Ieyasu himself was in command. Nobunaga thereupon despatched an army to succour his ally, and in January, 1573, a series of bloody engagements took place outside Hamamatsu.
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