Kariya was a castle town in the Sengoku period, in an area contested between the Imagawa clan, Oda clan and various local warlords, including the Mizuno clan and Matsudaira clan. Tokugawa Ieyasu’s maternal grandfather Mizuno Tadamasa rebuilt Kariya Castle in the mid-16th century. The Mizuno clan shifted allegiances adroitly between the Imagawa clan to Oda Nobunaga and to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who relocated the clan to Ise Province. However, Mizuno Katsunari, the grandson of Tadamasa was allowed to return to the clan's ancestral territories by Ieyasu after the Battle of Sekigahara as "daimyō" of Kariya Domain, a feudal han under the Tokugawa shogunate. The domain was reassigned to numerous clans during the Edo period, but was retained by the Doi clan from 1734 until the Meiji Restoration.