Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to examine the historical significance of the decision of Duke Huan of Qi, who exchanged the trust of feudal lords with the land earned by victory of battles. The only thing he gained from the opposite salary was the invisible trust, as Duke Zhuang of Lu and Cao Mo, the looser of the battles were able to regain the land by threatening him.<BR> However, if the biography of Cao Mo in Historian’s Record is not just an interesting action story, we can find a huge historical trend of the Spring and Autumn Period in it. In this paper, we carefully analyze the origins of the data described in biography of Cao Mo and revealed the meaning contained there. In addition, we scrutinize the three covenants held by Duke of Qi in 681 and 679 B.C. recorded in Spring and Autumn to track the process of establishing “the league system led by the Hegemon”.<BR> In my point of view, Duke Huan of Qi was not a successor of the existing power system. He created the power of Hegemon for himself. In other words, it was not that he took a particular position in the existing system, but that he created a new system and operated it on his own.<BR> At this time, the trust was the core material that drives the new and innovative system built by the Duke Huan. In this system, the formation of a legal and contractual relationship was its operating principle, as in former shamanistic and blood-relative societies it was important to form a pseudo- brotherhood by the pledge to share blood of a sacrifice. This study confirmed that trust toward Hegemon was not just a nominal ideology, but the core of the League system led by hegemony. The threat accident in the covenant of Ke was operated as the symbol of propaganda for the credibility of Duke Huan.

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