Oda Nobunaga

"[Nobunagas] place in Japanese history might be likened to the places of Thomas Cromwell in English history and Giuseppe Garibaldi in Italian history. Thomas Cromwell… was responsible for bringing about the surrender of the great religious houses to such a degree that by 1540 the monastic institutions had ceased to exist and their properties had been vested in the Crown. Cromwell eradicated the independence of the clergy and brought about their total submission to the king. It might be noted that Nobunaga left the temples in Japan with far more possessions than Cromwell left to the church in England. Giuseppe Garibaldi… brought the Papal States … under the hegemony of the central government and out from under the authority of the pope. Through the 1860s the newly unified Italian state repressed religious houses, confiscated and sold ecclesiastical properties, and seized Rome itself in 1870. Admittedly, Garibaldi's methods for attaining his end were much less violent than those employed by Nobunaga; but Garibaldi and Nobunaga lived in different countries and in different ages, and the military power of the Buddhist temples in sixteenth-century Japan was far greater than that of the Catholic church in nineteenth-century Italy… Both Cromwell and Garibaldi effected changes with respect to the religious institutions in their countries that were similar to those that Nobunaga brought about in Japan, and it is in the company of such people that Nobunaga must be ranked and judged."