Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"In the eighth century the Japanese capital at Nara was dominated by its many Buddhist monasteries. To escape the influence of the monks, Emperor Kammu decided to move to a new capital. . . . Kammu decided that the site was ill omened and abandoned construction to start again on a new site in 794. The new capital was called Heian-kyo ('capital of peace and tranquility'), later to become known as Kyoto. It remained the capital of Japan for more than a thousand years until the emperor Meiji moved the court to Tokyo in 1868. . . . Though the old monasteries at Nara were forbidden to relocate, Kammu allowed new monasteries to be founded, and Heian soon became a major religious center. This was the beginning of the Heian period (794-1185), when an exquisitely refined court culture developed and arts flourished, but the emperors became increasingly isolated from the everyday running of the country. . . . By the time Miamoto Yoritomo founded the shogunate (military government) in 1185, the emperors had become powerless figureheads." [1001 Days]