Editor's note: The TV series "Daming Fenghua" is on fire, and in the first few episodes, Zhu Zhanji, who is still the emperor's grandson, shows wisdom and sophistication, appears in the name of the good saint sun, and behaves with ease in front of the ambitious second uncle Zhu Gaoxu and the third uncle Zhu Gaoxuan. Historically, Zhu Zhanji secured the throne by thwarting Zhu Gaoxu's rebellion, but he dug a large pit in the arrangement of the northern defensive line, and the Ming army was completely destroyed at the Battle of Tumu Fort.
The strategic transformation of the Ming Dynasty border and the layout of Xuanfu
After the death of Emperor Ming Taizong Zhu Di, the Ming border troops stationed on the border with the empire gradually lost their initiative due to the decline in combat effectiveness, and under the time of Emperor Xuanzong Zhu Zhanji, the Ming Dynasty gradually began to build a border defense system in the north. However, at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the inward migration of the Mountain Guard (i.e., Daning and Kaiping) was not a permanent abandonment, but an opportunity to take it back.
This strategy did not exist after the Yongle year, as early as the early years of Hongwu Changyuchun attacked Shangdu Kaiping, Quanning and other places after the strategic abandonment, and in the following years the Shanhou lands changed hands between the Northern Yuan and the Ming Dynasty. Finally, after Li Wenzhong occupied Kaiping, he changed his position to Kaiping Province and moved inland to the south of Yanshan. It was not until the twentieth year of Hongwu that the Ming army began to set up guards here in order to defeat the Nahachu who occupied the northeast. In the 29th year of Hongwu, the Ming Dynasty set up a Kaiping Wei garrison in Shangdu. It was the usual means of the Ming Dynasty to find an opportunity to take it back after strategic internal relocation, but after the Yongle Year, as the Ming army did not return to the tiger and wolf division in the early years of the Dynasty, the lands after the internal relocation could not be taken back. However, the rulers were still hindsight about this point, and although the good saint Zhu Zhanji was willing to give up on Annam, his attitude towards Mongolia was always more important. Therefore, during Zhu Zhanji's reign, he inspected the border four times and overhauled the border fort.
Zhu Zhanji's layout of the Xuanfu area was based on the fact that the Ming army had a certain field combat capability, radiating xuanfu as the center to radiate all parts south of Yanshan, and defending the Beijing division. Zhu Zhanji still saw very far-reaching views on some issues, and he felt that the various guards were not subordinate to each other, and once something happened, they would be broken by each one, so he chose to set up a capital in Xuanfu to unify the dispatch of all the guards in Xuanfu Town. Perhaps Zhu Zhanji overestimated the combat effectiveness of the Ming army after his death and underestimated the strength of the Mongols, Zhu Zhanji laid out the capital division and the premise of guangjian military forts based on the ability of the Ming army to support each other in field battles, with Xuanfu Town as the main building, while defending can take into account future attacks. Therefore, he did not attach importance to the connection between the various health centers and military forts.
At that time, there were few piers and other connections between various military strongholds in the deep area of the entire Xuanfu Town, which established good conditions for the future Mongols to drive. Moreover, before orthodoxy, the Mongols were also mainly harassing the border, and the more stressful ones were also in the Liaodong region, on the contrary, the Xuanfu area was easy to ignore. Zhu Zhanji was naturally very satisfied with his arrangement of Xuanfu, and when Zhu Zhanji inspected here, he was also very satisfied: "Shixuanfu is the northern gate of the imperial court, and Xue Lu, the Marquis of Yangwu, and Tan Guang, the governor of Yangwu, have successively guarded it, and they are the most important on all sides..."
The initial collapse of the guardhouse system: the decline in combat effectiveness brought about by the warrior Tuntian? Zhu Zhanji's overall failure of the Xuanfu layout after his death was, in the final analysis, the combat effectiveness of the Ming army began to fail during the Xuande period, and his arrangement naturally did not have much effect. The sharp decline in the combat effectiveness of the Ming army occurred during the Xuande period of Zhu Zhanji's reign, and it was also at this time that the Weishu system on which the Ming Dynasty relied on its foundation began to collapse.
In the early years of the Ming Dynasty, the actual number of soldiers and horses was not as many as the soldiers and horses on the books, and the Weishou system was based on the Dusi-Wei-Suo, and the Weishou army was divided into the Tun Army and the Defenders, the Tun Army specialized in agricultural production, and the defenders practiced to resist the enemy. Generally, this proportion varies between the interior and the border. In the interior, most of them are one-tenths of the two-tenths of the exercises, eight or nine-tenths of the tuntian, while in the border areas, it is three-fourths of the tenths of the exercises, and six-tenths of the ten tuntians. Among them, the proportion varies from place to place, so the soldiers and horses on the books of the Ming Dynasty do not represent real soldiers, and the soldiers must be greatly discounted on the basis of the original.
The Ming Dynasty's weishou system, which was dominated by Tuntian, was originally intended to be promoted throughout the country during the Hongwu period to reduce the burden of the state on military salaries while maintaining a large army. However, such a policy was seriously damaged during the Xuande years. During the Xuande years, the phenomenon of encroaching on military tuns intensified within the borders of Daming, whether on the border or in the interior, due to the continuous encroachment of officers, powerful and powerful, and xungui, the Tun army was unable to supply and chose to flee, and the situation in Tuntian fell off a cliff. This situation is even more serious at the border, and the non-commissioned officers in charge of training are less responsible for supplying and fleeing, which also leads to the complete collapse of the proportion of war tuns that should have been, there are fewer soldiers and more soldiers, and the helpless soldiers have to participate in the work of farming in addition to training, and they cannot concentrate on training, and the combat effectiveness of the Ming army will naturally come down.
The imbalance in the proportion of war camps led to the flight of non-commissioned officers. In Liu Dingzhi's "Record of No Tai", it is recorded that there were 500,000 soldiers and horses participating in the battle at Tumu Fort, but in fact, this is only a figure on the book, in addition to the above-mentioned Tun soldiers, the soldiers and horses of the Beijing camp began to be short of troops during the Xuande period. In the Orthodox Decade (1445), Ye Sheng, who was a member of the Imperial Household Bureau, later wrote in the "Diary of Shuidong" that on the eve of tumu fort, the capital of the five armies and the Jinyi wei were nearly half absent. Although in the Beijing camp, although some of the Beijing troops need to go to the border garrison, it is undeniable that fleeing is also the reason for the serious shortage of the number of people in the Beijing camp. At this time, the three major battalions of the Ming Army not only had no combat effectiveness, but even lost their superiority in numbers.
Tumu Fort was defeated: Xuanfu's weak defenses and the decline of the Ming army Ming Ting and Ye Xian broke with ye first, and also defeated the Ming army on the border. The young emperor Zhu Qizhen hastily led the army in Beijing that was not strong in combat strength and was not large in number. When the pro-conscription army entered Datong, it was heard that the Wala army had retreated to Saiwai as much as possible, and the Ming army returned from the Xuanfu area, but was also led by the army to raid, the Ming army was defeated, and the emperor Zhu Qizhen was captured.
Although the Battle of Tumubao is depicted in just a few lines, the defeat of this battle is almost a concentrated manifestation of the simultaneous failure of the Ming dynasty's defense system and military system. When the Ming army arrived in Datong to prepare for retreat, in fact, it was already clear that the intention of the Walla army to encircle and return to the Xuanfu area instead of ZijingGuan was that Emperor Zhu Qizhen still had the advantage of taking advantage of the mountainous nature of the Xuanfu area and the characteristics of the cavalry field to defeat the Wallachian army in the field battle, and no matter how bad it was, it could also retreat completely. However, due to the fact that the Xuanfu area had not been built into a military town with a complete defensive system, when the Wala army was asking for it in Dushi, Yunzhou, Yongning and other places on Xuanfu North Road, the pro-conquest army was unknown. Taking advantage of the Ming Dynasty's lag in the transmission of information in the Xuanfu area, the Wala army quickly cut off the Sanggan River, the water source of the Ming army's pro-conquest army, and first joined forces with the Arazhiyuan army to completely defeat the pro-conquest army.
If the Ming army is still strong in combat and has a sufficient number of troops, it is still possible to achieve the goal of blocking the large army along the way in the towns of Datong and Xuanfu, supporting the Ming army's pro-conquest army, and then thwarting the joint siege of Wallachia. However, at the time of the Battle of Tumubao, the Ming army could neither fight the enemy in the field nor the tactics of the sea of people, coupled with the defense system in the Xuanfu area that overestimated the combat effectiveness of the Ming army, the defeat of this battle was almost inevitable.
This article is the original manuscript of the Cold Weapons Research Institute. The original outline of the editor-in-chief and the author of Xiangqiao Basil shall not be reproduced by any media or public account without written authorization, and the offender will be investigated for legal responsibility.