This paper examines the formation of socioeconomic networks across geographic, social, and temporal boundaries in sixteenth-century Japan. Low-ranking nobles in Kyoto conspired with their peers to produce forgeries of imperial documents and artisanal histories in order to establish connections with provincial metal caster associations. First, it lays out the social and political networks initiated by courtiers in Kyoto, whose connections to their neighborhood members, the imperial Bureau of Archives, and powerful warriors enabled them to produce and disseminate forged documents. It then assesses the geographic lengths these individuals traveled to negotiate directly with warriors and caster organizations in the provinces. Finally, it considers the significance of these forgeries to metal casters themselves and their autonomy in socioeconomic networks. The legacies asserted in these documents reveal configurations of power in medieval Japan that are more complex, egalitarian, and in many ways traditional than have been asserted in conventional elite-centered interpretations of the sixteenth-century.