Chiba

The Chiba were a gōzoku, or local landed power, and samurai family of the Bōsō Peninsula, descended from the Kanmu branch of the Taira clan. In 1126 Taira no Tsuneshige moved his seat to Inohana in Shimōsa Province, the site of later Chiba Castle, and took the name Chiba.

His son Tsunetane sheltered the fugitive Minamoto no Yoritomo after his defeat by the Taira and advised him to make Kamakura his base, becoming one of the founders of the Kamakura shogunate. Under the shogunate the Chiba head served as hereditary shugo governor of Shimōsa.

In the fourteenth century Emperor Go-Daigo recognized Chiba Sadatane as the leading daimyō of the Kantō region. The family survived the medieval wars as provincial lords of Shimōsa but was ultimately dispossessed by Toyotomi Hideyoshi's conquest of the Kantō in the 1590s.