Database: Mori Ranmaru

Mori Ranmaru was a young warrior in the service of Oda Nobunaga. Born in 1565, he died at the age of 17 during the Honnō-ji incident (1582) when Akechi Mitsuhide besieged the temple. Before committing suicide, Nobunaga supposedly asked Ranmaru to set fire to the building so that the enemy could not find his body. Ranmaru himself disappeared during the fighting with his two younger brothers who had fought with him. Several chronicles give contradictory accounts of Nobunaga's last moments, so it is difficult to know what really happened.

Ranmaru was a childhood name which remained with him, while Nagasada or Naritoshi are his adult names. He came from a samurai family in Mino Province who entered the service of the Oda in 1542. The Mori distinguished themselves many times in combat and thereby the young Ranmaru entered the service of Nobunaga as a page (koshō) at the age of twelve and worked his way into Nobunaga's inner circle. In 1581, he received a small fief of 500 koku. Following the battle of Tenmokuzan in 1582, which saw the collapse of the Takeda clan, Mori Ranmaru supposedly received a considerable land grant yielding 50,000 koku of rice and the guard of castle Iwamura, a mountain castle in the province of Mino and which Takeda Shingen had once seized. After Ranmaru's death, the castle then passed to Hideyoshi.

The death of the young Ranmaru in the service of his master, who was betrayed by one of his own, struck a chord and Ranmaru was often cited in Edo period warrior literature as an example of loyalty and fidelity, even dying for it.