Realistic though these advisers and their lords were in their thinking, they did not dare to trample openly on the old tradition.  The emperor might in practice be a completely powerless figurehead, but he belonged nevertheless, according to tradition, to a family of divine origin, which had obtained its office not merely by the exercise of force but through a “divine mandate”.  Accordingly, if one of the feudal lords thought of putting forward a claim to the imperial throne, he felt compelled to demonstrate that his family was just as much of divine origin as the emperor’s, and perhaps of remoter origin.  In this matter the travelling “scholars” rendered valuable service as manufacturers of genealogical trees.  Each of the old noble families already had its family tree, as an indispensable requisite for the sacrifices to ancestors.  But in some cases this tree began as a branch of that of the imperial family:  this was the case of the feudal lords who were of imperial descent and whose ancestors had been granted fiefs after the conquest of the country.  Others, however, had for their first ancestor a local deity long worshipped in the family’s home country, such as the ancient agrarian god Huang Ti, or the bovine god Shen Nung.  Here the “scholars” stepped in, turning the local deities into human beings and “emperors”.  This suddenly gave the noble family concerned an imperial origin.  Finally, order was brought into this collection of ancient emperors.  They were arranged and connected with each other in “dynasties” or in some other “historical” form.  Thus at a stroke Huang Ti, who about 450 B.C. had been a local god in the region of southern Shansi, became the forefather of almost all the noble families, including that of the imperial house of the Chou.  Needless to say, there would be discrepancies between the family trees constructed by the various scholars for their lords, and later, when this problem had lost its political importance, the commentators laboured for centuries on the elaboration of an impeccable system of “ancient emperors”—­and to this day there are sinologists who continue to present these humanized gods as historical personalities.

In the earlier wars fought between the nobles they were themselves the actual combatants, accompanied only by their retinue.  As the struggles for power grew in severity, each noble hired such mercenaries as he could, for instance the landless nobles just mentioned.  Very soon it became the custom to arm peasants and send them to the wars.  This substantially increased the armies.  The numbers of soldiers who were killed in particular battles may have been greatly exaggerated (in a single battle in 260 B.C., for instance, the number who lost their lives was put at 450,000, a quite impossible figure); but there must have been armies of several thousand men, perhaps as many as 10,000.  The population had grown considerably by that time.