Li Zicheng was a relatively typical leader of the feudal peasant army, he was initially a small clerk in the Ming Dynasty post, and then because of the financial constraints at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the imperial court carried out the reform of state institutions and laid off employees on a large scale, and as a result, the innocent Li Zicheng lost his job, and later he joined the army, and then the army could not afford to pay the military, and Li Zicheng, who was cornered, launched a mutiny and opened the road to conquest of the world.
Although Li Zicheng had no culture, but he came from the bottom, he knew that with the help of the people's hearts and minds, his sentence "Juntian exemption" cast him with millions of troops, and eventually destroyed Daming, Li Zicheng was a rich emperor in the capital for 42 days, and the actions of this period of time in Beijing also determined the decline of the Dashun regime.
After Li Zicheng entered Beijing, in summary, he did two things.
The first thing was to make a mess of the capital.
In 1644, Li Zicheng's dream of the Forbidden City became a treasure in the bag, the peasant army that entered the city was disorderly, the rebel army raped and plundered and led to the loss of control of the order in the city, and Li Zicheng and other senior generals did not control the situation in time, but indulged in wine in the palace, gradually corrupted by the rich material life, and gradually forgot the rules and goals of the rebel army.
When Li Zicheng allowed the army to act recklessly in the city, he took all-out looting and extortion against the surrendered Ming Dynasty officials, and although he obtained a lot of gold and silver wealth from it, named for social purposes, most of them actually went into the pockets of senior generals, and Li Zicheng's violent actions in the capital greatly lost the popular base of the rebel army.
The second thing was to go to war with Wu Sangui.
Although the capital was taken, but the remnants of Liaodong Wu Sangui's forces still threatened the rule of the Dashun regime, so Li Zicheng Zhao'an did not succeed and decided to personally lead a 100,000-strong army to Shanhaiguan to recruit Wu Sangui, Wu Sangui naturally could not defeat Li Zicheng when the grain road was cut off by the Shun army, after weighing, Wu Sangui surrendered to the Qing Dynasty regent Dolgun, with the help of the Qing army, the two armies joined forces to defeat Li Zicheng, Li Zicheng lost most of his soldiers and horses, and the emperor fled to the capital.
After returning to the Forbidden City, li Zicheng, who had been defeated in battle, realized the strength of the Qing army and the shortage of food and grass for his soldiers, horses, and grass, and boldly decided to abandon the Forbidden City, which was difficult to hold, and withdraw to the rich and dangerous Guanzhong Plain in order to make a comeback. But unfortunately, he was eventually defeated by the Qing army, and Li Zifei also died.
In the 42 days that Li Zicheng entered Beijing, the reason why he lost the world was that he failed to fulfill his promise to the rebels and the people and lost the foundation of the masses. Second, Wu Sangui, who did not unite well to guard the border pass, attracted the Qing army to enter the pass, and naturally lost the military under the two-front operation. Third, the contradictions within the peasant army were not well coordinated, and Li Zicheng was good at killing the ministers, which led to the dispersion of people's hearts, and in the end he did not end up well.