Li Zicheng's rebel army was an important armed force at the end of the Ming Dynasty, and at the time of the Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty, Li Zicheng's rebel army, as the most powerful peasant rebel army, actually influenced the direction of Chinese history.
Li Zicheng started as a commoner, and in more than ten years of ups and downs, his team grew from scratch, from weak to strong, and finally overthrew the Ming Empire and fought fiercely with the manchu Qing Eight Banner Army.
So, what is the combat effectiveness of Li Zicheng's rebel army? Why could an army of "mud-legged people" defeat the professional Ming Dynasty border army, and how could it fight against the mighty Eight Banners Army?
Today we're going to talk about it.
The peasant rebel army at the end of the Ming Dynasty was originally composed of displaced people from the Shanxi region of Shaanxi Province, and they had a complex composition, ranging from bankrupt displaced people to good men in the green forest who occupied the mountains as kings, and a group of people who were desperate Ming Dynasty border troops.
The Ming Dynasty implemented a strict "household registration" system, and since Zhu Yuanzhang began, it was stipulated that a family's ancestors must also do what industry their descendants must do, except for a few people, most people have inherited their family industry from generation to generation.
At that time, the military was a relatively professional industry, and fighting a war was a technical job that was difficult for laymen to grasp.
In the last years of the Ming Dynasty, political corruption and financial crisis even the highly professional group of soldiers could not afford to feed.
The professional soldiers joined the peasant rebel army, which greatly improved the combat effectiveness of the rebel army, and Li Zicheng was initially a member of this army.
The rebel army initially encircled the displaced people, although they were numerous, but they were all untrained, hungry civilians, and they had to drag their families and mouths, and many of them were old, weak, sick and disabled.
The rebel army initially had no armor, no horses, no food, and a variety of weapons, most of which were dilapidated.
Li Zicheng and others rose and fell in the tide of uprisings, fighting with the officers and soldiers for many years.
Initially they were not opponents of the regular army of the Ming Dynasty, but as the war continued, the rebel army became more and more experienced in fighting, captured more and more, and the combat effectiveness of the troops became stronger and stronger.
By the middle of the Chongzhen period, Li Zicheng could even command the army alone to defeat the GuanNing army that had entered the Pass to "suppress bandits", and its combat effectiveness could not be underestimated.
In order to quell the rebel army, the Ming Dynasty mobilized almost all the elite troops that could be mobilized, including Hong Chengyu, Sun Chuanting, and Lu Xiangsheng, except for the main force of the Guanning Army that resisted the Manchu Qing in Liaodong, and the rest of the Ming army field troops to deal with Li Zicheng.
Li Zicheng was still not an opponent of the elite border army of the Ming Dynasty at this time, he was defeated and fled into Shangluo Mountain with only 18 horses.
However, a year after this great defeat, Li Zicheng made a comeback, because the decay of the Ming Dynasty provided a steady stream of soldiers for the rebel army, and millions of displaced people were the foundation of the rebel army.
Li Zicheng had been out of Luoshan for twelve years, and this time Li Zicheng's rebel army, with thousands of "veterans" as the team, quickly recruited tens of thousands of displaced people, who turned to the Central Plains, defeated the Ming officials, attacked Luoyang kaifeng and other important towns, and captured and killed the Ming dynasty generals.
Even Sun Chuanting, the last main force of the Ming Dynasty at that time, was defeated by Li Zicheng in the field battle.
With the collapse of the last fighting legion of the Ming Dynasty in Guannei, the strength of the rebel army also reached its peak.
Li Zicheng established the Dashun regime in Xi'an at the beginning of the seventeenth year of Chongzhen, and at this time the rebel army consisted of more than 100,000 people, including well-equipped cavalry, infantry with rich combat experience, muskets, and chariots.
They took veterans who had been fighting the Ming army for a long time as the backbone, and absorbed the surrendered Regular Army of the Ming Dynasty.
The entire team is equipped with generals, strong soldiers and horses, and high morale.
The history books record that Li Zicheng's rebel cavalry Xiao Yong was known for its "three walls", ten thousand horses swirling and fighting, clashing back and forth, and there were spearmen like a forest, and the defense formation formed by heavy infantry was very strong.
In April of the seventeenth year of Chongzhen, Li Zicheng attacked Beijing, and the border troops along the Great Wall of the Ming Dynasty, except for a few cities such as Ningwu, most of the other Ming troops returned to the wind.
After Li Zicheng occupied Beijing, tens of thousands of Ming border troops surrendered alone, all of whom were professional soldiers, and although they were forced to surrender because of the political corruption of the Ming Dynasty, their combat ability was still good, and their participation strengthened the strength of the rebel army. At this time, the rebel army was the second most powerful armed force after the Manchu Qing Eight Banner Army.
Later, Li Zicheng attacked Wu Sangui at Shanhaiguan, Li Zicheng took 70,000 or 80,000 people, and Wu Sangui 50,000 Guanning troops, and as a result, in two days, the Guanning army would collapse, and if it were not for the arrival of the Eight Banner Army led by Dolgun, Wu Sangui's entire army would have been destroyed.
It should be known that the Guanning Army was the most effective field regiment in the last years of the Ming Dynasty, but they could only fight for two days in the face of the Dashun Army.
The backbone of Li Zicheng's rebel army was both Ming Dynasty soldiers and veterans of the uprising, and this group of people was not worse than the Manchu Qing Eight Banner Army. However, they were not numerous, and their equipment was quite inferior to that of the elite Eight Banner Army. Especially the strength of the artillery, the Eight Banner Army crushed the rebel army.
In the Battle of a Stone, the rebel army, after two days of fierce fighting with Wu Sangui's Guanning Army, suddenly encountered a surprise attack by the Eight Banner Army, exhausted and caught off guard, and the rebel army was defeated in one battle.
In the ensuing battle, the rebel army suffered heavy losses during the retreat, returning to Xi'an to recover its vitality, but was chased and beaten by the Eight Banner Army, and those old parts of the Ming army that surrendered, seeing that the momentum was not good, turned their guns to the rebel army.
In the end, Li Zicheng's rebel army was killed by the combined stranglehold of the Manchurian military aristocracy and the Han landlord bureaucracy and failed.