"The king dies and the son of heaven guards the gate of the kingdom." The rise and fall of a country has a great relationship with two people, one is the people of the country, and the other is the emperor of the dynasty. If you want to create a strong dynasty, then it is not the people who are the barrier to the dynasty.
Instead, the emperor and his courtiers worked together to ensure that the century-old kingdom was no longer a problem. But such a truth is rarely known to the emperors, most of the emperors regard themselves as the center of the world, and everything that happens in the world is considered by the emperor to be related to himself.
As long as you live, there will be a comeback.
The emperors' self-righteousness caused the dynasties they ruled to weaken day by day until they collapsed. Compared with most dynasties, there is a dynasty that lives very strongly, it is not as humble as the Song, it is not as weak as the Qing, it is - the Ming Dynasty.
Zhu Yunjiao would rather give up the throne than to keep the world.
The difficulty of unifying the world
A truth of the world of "long-term unity, long-term unity must be divided" is also a portrayal of the reality of the world. Where there are people, there are contradictions and frictions, and under the catalysis and brewing of many years, many wars and conflicts have broken out between people. The winner is finalized by way of war.
The Battle of Makino, the Battle of the Giant Deer, the Rebellion of the Eight Kings, and the Five Wilds. These are the fierce points of conflict between people, war after war has divided the world, and war after war has made the world unite, whether it is combination or division, it is a hellish goal in the world.
If there are two types of wars between people, there are two kinds of things – external and internal.
The internal battle is very easy to understand, that is, the war between one's own people and one's own brothers is simply one's own people, while externally it is a war between the people of the Central Plains and remote areas.
The general trend of the division of the world is mainly based on conflicts and wars between the Han people, but the Han people and the barbarians in remote areas have also broken out many wars that divide the world in half. The "Wuhu Chaohua" mentioned earlier is the first instance of the Central Plains being occupied by barbarians.
Since then, the barbarians have become one of the candidates for the "orthodoxy" of the Central Plains, and the Central Plains have launched the first "southern crossing of the crown" in history, and the move of the shi clan to the south has laid the foundation for the two divisions of the world, and the great integration of the Central Plains and the barbarians has since begun.
But the great integration of nationalities has always been regarded as a disgrace by the Han people in the Central Plains, for the Han people, barbarians are the unjust side, and integration with it is not the greatest insult to their own nation.
The national question, the class problem, the accumulation of hatred, such a complex collection of things, make the goal of integrating the world much more. But there will always be special cases, the Ming Dynasty was born in the ruins of the living Yuan Dynasty, and the Guozuo lasted for almost three hundred years.
The previous mention of the Hatred and Contradiction of the Han People towards the Barbarians was explained in the Ming Dynasty. The Yuan Dynasty relied on its own absolute force to bring down the world, but this way brought a lot of potential problems to the Yuan Dynasty - racial contradictions.
Since the establishment of the Yuan Dynasty, the issue of racial class has been deteriorating and brewing, until the people of the world no longer want to endure the oppression of the Yuan Dynasty, so the world has set off a wave of anti-Yuan. It's easy to get the tide up, but it's not as easy as it seems to be to calm the tide.
Zhu Yuanzhang took many years of conquest to pacify the world, and in the first year of Hongwu (1368), he established the Ming Dynasty, and in the same year, he conquered most of the capital and completely destroyed the Yuan Dynasty, and the Ming Dynasty appeared in history.
The Ming Dynasty, with its memories of the past, has always been wary of non-Han ethnic groups.
Stick to the society
The establishment of the Ming Dynasty marked the first time that the Central Plains continent was controlled by the Han Chinese, and its achievements in taking the Sixteen Prefectures of Youyun were once humiliated by the fact that the territory had been taken away. Zhu Yuanzhang did not forget the pain of shame after washing away the shame in blood, so since the establishment of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang has exerted increased pressure on the ming dynasty's border sovereignty.
At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang asked Xu Da to conquer the northern territory of the Ming Dynasty, and let Mu Ying and other generals lead 300,000 troops to the southwest of the Ming Dynasty to defend the sovereignty of the border.
Zhu Yuanzhang sent troops to crown the king many times, so that the Ming Dynasty world gradually stabilized, but Zhu Yuanzhang was also increasingly uneasy.
As the number of kings with different surnames increased day by day, Zhu Yuanzhang developed a fearful mentality, so he used the famous "Hu Lan Prison" to kill many of the founding heroes of the past and present, even the military generals who guarded the frontier, of course, Zhu Yuanzhang had his own way back.
After brutally killing the foreign king and the frontier military generals, Zhu Yuanzhang sealed the heirs of his own Zhu family, and all the sons and daughters of the Zhu family who were related to him and had some meritorious deeds were all crowned kings, so as to achieve a situation in which the border was his own family, but he did not know that Zhu Yuanzhang's move was just his own thought.
With the withering of the founding heroes and the transfer of power, most of the elite troops of the Ming Dynasty entered the hands of the king with the same surname, and this phenomenon undoubtedly brought a great threat to the imperial power, for which Zhu Yuanzhang himself did not imagine that he never thought that the Zhu family would have the same room.
In the thirty-first year of Hongwu, that is, in the first year of Jianwen (1399), Zhu Yuanzhang died, and Zhu Yuanzhang's grandson Zhu Yunjiao took the throne. After Zhu Yunjiao ascended the throne, Zhu Yunjiao drastically eliminated the king with the same surname and carried out the measure of cutting the domain, intending to force the brothers and elders of the Zhu family to die one by one.
At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang divided his sons into kings with the same surname, and the king of Qin, the king of Jin, the king of Yan, the king of Dai, the king of Gu, the king of Liao, the king of Ning, the king of Qing, and the king of Su were the nine kings.
They have thousands of soldiers and tens of thousands. Some of these kings with the same surname rely on their power to commit many wrongdoings.
And this point was used by Zhu Yunjiao as a reason, and launched a sweeping slash of the country. Zhu Yun's reason for cutting the domain is very simple:
If the world is uneasy, the princes are safe, but if the princes are uneasy, then who can be at peace?
Such a truth is indeed simple and easy to understand.
But reasonable reasoning does not mean that the king with the same surname will accept it. If his own power was exploited, it was actually acceptable, but Zhu Yunjiao's slashing of the domain caused many Zhu family disciples to die of hatred. How can such a slash make other kings with the same surname believe in the substance of the cut?
As the fourth son of Zhu Yuanzhang, Zhu Di, after the death of the eldest brother, second brother, and third brother, he became the second in line of the imperial power, and the first order did not need to be explained. Zhu Di was extremely ambitious and courageous from an early age, so when he faced the cutting of the domain, he had the idea of usurping the throne.
However, Zhu Di also understood that his power was only in Beijing, and he had to face the entire Ming Dynasty, and according to historical records, Zhu Di had up to 100,000 soldiers, and Zhu Yunjiao controlled at least three times as many soldiers in the whole country as Zhu Di.
Such a gap made Zhu Di dare not act without permission for a long time, until Yao Guangxiao's words determined Zhu Di's determination.
In July of the same year, Zhu Di launched a counterattack against Zhu Yunjiao on the grounds of "Jing Difficulty". Despite the great disparity between the enemy and ourselves, Zhu Di relied on his many years of experience in conquest to defeat Zhu Yunjiao's forces.
In the fourth year of Jianwen (1402), Zhu Di attacked the Jing Division, Zhu Yunjiao disappeared in the fire, and soon after, Zhu Di was proclaimed emperor and called Yongle. The Battle of Jingnan launched by Zhu Di was famously won by less, but what if Zhu Yunjiao's troops increased by another 300,000?
Just as the so-called one force will drop ten meetings, if Zhu Yunjiao's army increases by 300,000, then Zhu Di will inevitably fail miserably, and this hypothesis is actually achievable.
Zhu Yuanzhang left 300,000 soldiers for Zhu Yunjiao before his death, that is, the soldiers led by Mu Ying mentioned earlier.
These 300,000 soldiers were under the sole jurisdiction of the emperor, directly under the emperor, that is, Zhu Yunjiao. And Zhu Yunjiao's reason for not using these 300,000 troops until his death was very simple--the country's land could not be lost. If Zhu Yunjiao had mobilized 300,000 troops to attack Zhu Di, the southwestern Ming Dynasty would have been lost, and the Ming Dynasty would no longer be complete.
brief summary
This was the reason why Zhu Yunjiao did not use 300,000 troops until his death.
"The king dies and the son of heaven guards the gate of the kingdom"
This is the reason why the Ming Dynasty Guozuo can last for nearly three hundred years, the Ming Dynasty contained backbone until its death, and the Chongzhen Emperor killed his family so that the people of the Zhu family did not bow their heads.