Chapter 1814 Zhang Xianzhong, are you still rebelling?
During the fall and winter of the second year of Chongzhen reign in the Ming Dynasty, a piece of true news that sounded false spread throughout the vast ravines of the northern Shaanxi Plateau in a very short period of time.
This shocking news is that the Ming Dynasty has a little faint king who is brave enough to compete with Lu Bu! Moreover, this "Sai Lu Bu" also has sixty-one brave generals who are "competed against Zhang Liao", "competed against Gao Shun" and "competed against Zang Ba".
to northern Shaanxi. Moreover, on the river beach outside Fugu County, sixty-two men defeated King Fugu’s more than 10,000 rebels, and killed the heroic King Fugu with one arrow. Now they have recaptured Fugu County.
!
This news is really a bolt from the blue for the heroes on the northern Shaanxi Plateau who are gearing up to take advantage of the continuous drought and the people's dire livelihood!
The land in northern Shaanxi is incredible. It is surrounded by four military towns including Yulin Town, Shanxi Town, Ningxia Town, and Guyuan Town. Beyond the border wall of Yulin is the lawless grassland desert. Therefore, the men of northern Shaanxi have developed a bravery.
The culture of fighting ruthlessly, emphasizing martial arts over literature, and advocating martial arts. If the Ming Dynasty court could provide enough wealth to support the brave men of northern Shaanxi, it would allow them to achieve great achievements for the country and themselves. But once the Ming Dynasty
If the imperial court is unable to support this group of brave men, then national disaster is not far away.
Since the end of Wanli, under the double blow of drought in the northwest and war in Liaodong, the finances of the Ming Dynasty have been on the verge of bankruptcy. Moreover, there has also been a huge food supply gap in one province and five towns in Shaanxi. Famine has spread everywhere, and the people and
The dissatisfaction of the soldiers in the five towns with the Ming Dynasty was on the verge of breaking out.
And those Shaanxi warriors who were in the world and suffered hardships, of course also smelled the atmosphere of troubled times.
Troubled times...are the times when heroes show off their talents!
So after Wang Ershou's uprising, the heroes of Shaanxi began to gear up, waiting for the opportunity to fight.
And King Fugu's Heroes' Association became a bellwether to attract the attention of heroes. If the Heroes' Association became a success, the thirty-sixth anti-kings in Shaanxi could work together to rebel against the Ming Dynasty. Then there would still be
The heroes who are watching will not hesitate to raise the flag of righteousness and rise up!
If the hero fails...then everyone will have to wait and see for a while. After all, a hero only has one life.
However, most of the heroes who are already gearing up are convinced that the world is already on the verge of collapse!
Ming Dynasty's energy... is almost exhausted!
With the fall of Liaodong, extreme drought in the northwest, and the weather getting colder every year, could the sky of the Ming Dynasty still survive?
This is simply the death of the Ming Dynasty!
However, the Ming Dynasty, which was about to encounter the collapse of heaven, suddenly attracted a young emperor who was "the best in the world in martial arts".
There was also a great victory in which 62 people broke through 10,000... This really dampened the enthusiasm of Shaanxi heroes for rebellion.
In the west of Yulin Town, in a village under the jurisdiction of Liushujianbao, which is close to the side wall of the Great Wall, the ancestral hall of the village is full of people. Many people have mud on their feet, like
They had just come back from the fields. These people basically looked like farmers, but looking at their figures and looks, they were mostly tough, as if they were from the military. Needless to say, this group of people knew that they were from Yulin.
The military households here have been suppressed.
Yulin is a military town, overseeing the 1,700-mile Great Wall, with 37 castles under its jurisdiction, and its associated piers, warehouses, and passes, too numerous to count.
According to the military garrison system in the early Ming Dynasty, three portions of the sergeants guarded the city and seven portions were used to farm crops. The income from the garrison was used to raise soldiers. The military households who worked as soldiers and farmed the fields were passed down from generation to generation and became soldiers and generals. This is
Although the military system was severely criticized in later generations, it also has its merits.
For example, using land to raise troops can save military expenses. For the early Ming Dynasty when all industries were withered, the positive significance was very great. If Zhu Yuanzhang had to pay and raise troops back then, could the economy of the late Yuan and early Ming Dynasties support an army of one million people? Maybe
They couldn’t even bring out the troops for the Northern Expedition to the Central Plains!
If the hundreds of thousands of troops in the Northern Expedition were not fighting for land, but just for a few military pay, Zhu Yuanzhang would not be able to support them even after scraping all the land in the south of the Yangtze River!
Another example is that using the territory occupied by the guards can establish a solid foundation and save logistics. No matter how unpopular Zhu Yuanzhang is, no one can deny that the empire he has laid is really huge!
The only person who can surpass him in history is probably Li Shimin of the Tang Dynasty. Compared with the Song Dynasty that scholars yearn for, the Ming Dynasty created by Zhu Yuanzhang is much more majestic.
To conquer and occupy such a large territory, what else can we do without relying on military garrison? It is impossible to rely on recruiting soldiers like in the Song Dynasty... Not to mention that the army cannot afford to pay, recruiting soldiers does not care about farming or logistics.
All military supplies had to be handled by the imperial court. Logistics and transportation were exhausting!
Moreover, the recruited soldiers are casual soldiers and do not take root in the frontiers. Even if they can occupy some land, how can they be Hanized? Recruit soldiers to occupy the land, and then recruit people to cultivate the land? How much money does Zhu Yuanzhang have to spend?
Therefore, Zhu Yuanzhang could expel the Yuan Dynasty and restore the Central Plains, expand the territory of the Ming Dynasty to such a large area in his lifetime, and move millions of Han people to take root in border areas, relying on this kind of semi-feudal military garrison.
Later, the continuous shrinking of the Ming Dynasty actually had nothing to do with Zhu Yuanzhang, but was the fault of Zhu Yunqi and Zhu Di. Without the two of them, the nine great barbarian kings alone could have raised hundreds of thousands of cavalry...
The Northern Yuan and Donglu no longer existed in the generation of Zhu Yuanzhang’s grandson.
The suffering of the Jiubian military households was actually the inevitable result of the confinement of the nine great Sai kings who resisted barbarians and the continuous shrinking of the Ming Dynasty. Without the protection of the Sai king, of course the Jiubian military households would have no right to speak. And those without the right to speak
Of course, it was impossible for the military households on the nine borders to expand the border with the support of the whole country. The continuous shrinking of border defenses became the national policy of the Ming Dynasty. As a result of shrinking the borders, the military households lost the opportunity to obtain land through war.
The cake cannot be made bigger, so of course the only thing to do is make a fuss about distribution... It is not surprising that the upper echelons of the army and guards invaded the military villages and oppressed the middle and lower-level military households.
In addition, the Ming Dynasty's policy of shrinking borders did not really reduce the pressure on border defense. Because the more the Ming Dynasty retreated, the more arrogant the enemies became, and the more places needed to be fortified. So the nine borders soon became thirteen towns, at most
There were even sixteen towns.
So many military towns did not have enough land for farming, so they had to rely on the people's grain transportation, which was converted into silver to support them.
For the eastern border towns with convenient transportation, transportation of grain and silver is not a big problem.
But for Shaanxi, which has inconvenient transportation and can only support five towns in one province, it is very difficult. Shaanxi is suffering, and the five towns are suffering even more. The people of Shaanxi are suffering, and the military households in the five towns are suffering even more!
If there is no way out of the suffering, of course we can only hope that the sky will fall and the earth will fall, causing a big commotion.
The leader of the countryside in the Liushujianbao area of Yulin Town, a man named Zhang Xianzhong and his ordinary brothers, were looking forward to the sky day and night.
Yes, that's Zhang Xianzhong, the old man from the West! His life experience is more exciting than that of Li Zicheng at the same time. He was originally a military household in Yulin. He has been in the army for generations, practiced martial arts since childhood, and developed his skills. He also read books when he was a teenager, but he didn't take the exam.
Ability to achieve fame. Later, he joined the army, worked as a policeman in Yan'an Prefecture, was dismissed, and then joined the army. Later, he was almost beheaded for inciting a mutiny! But because he looked very powerful, he was rescued by Chen Hongfan, a general in Yulin Town.
, saved his life and returned home.
How could a person with this kind of experience farm well when he returned home? So he led a group of teenagers from the same village and became bullies running rampant in the village. At the same time, he was also waiting for the opportunity to start a big fight.
However, Yulin is a military town after all. Unlike Yan'an Prefecture and Qingyang Prefecture next door, the Ming Dynasty still had a lot of military force here.
If Yan'an Prefecture and Qingyang Prefecture were in trouble and Yulin's army did not march out to quell the rebellion, Zhang Xianzhong would be killed if he dared to jump out and rebel.
So when the thirty-six heroes met in Fugu, he was missing.
But he still sent a younger brother named Sun Kewang to check the wind direction in Fugu. If there was really something he could do, he would roll up his sleeves and go for it.
But Sun Kewang, who just came back today, brought Zhang Xianzhong very terrible news.
After listening to Sun Kewang's embellished statement, Zhang Xianzhong's yellow face had twisted into a ball, "Damn it, this Ming Dynasty Xiaohunjun is really powerful, he looks like he can fight even more than Lao Zhang... this
Chapter completed!