The book continues with the previous article "Is it shameful to see the wind and make the rudder?" The doers say "no shame" - from the end of the Ming Dynasty to buy cannons and say go away, let's see what role the Portuguese mercenaries play in the plan designed by Xu Guangqi and others.
The frontier crisis of the Ming Dynasty is actually the total return of the frontier crisis of the Central Plains Dynasty in the past two thousand years. From the end of the 16th century, all the problems faced by the Central Plains Dynasty in running the north in history occurred in the Ming Dynasty.
The long-term consequences of the Central Plains Dynasty's "out of the cypress ploughing court" were to clear the way for the rise of the steppe empire
And the Ming Dynasty's response to these crises was also very simple and crude -- combining all the methods used in history and using them again: guarding the Great Wall, hiring soldiers, paying tribute, and opening up quarantine zones.
Of course, the "all methods" here do not include peace and affinity, which is one of the reasons why many people praise "Gangming".
However, the Ming Dynasty's completely inelastic national policy led to a practical consequence - a set of operations, the Ming Dynasty's border defense costs were the highest in the history of the dynasty.
The governance limits of the agrarian empire determined that the extremely prosperous territory of the Yongle Dynasty could only be maintained at a high cost and for a short time
1. Dependent arising
If the goal of the Ming Dynasty is only to maintain confrontation with the grasslands, then this plan is also considered to be passed, there is no hope of pioneering, and it is enough to keep it, that is, the days are tight.
However, the rise of Houjin in the northeast has upset this balance.
Historically, in the situation of the great confrontation between the Central Plains and the grasslands, as long as a third party appeared in the northeast direction, and this third party had the ability to gain a firm foothold in the northeast, then in the end it would be dominated by it, ending the confrontation situation and unifying the world.
The northeast is a transitional zone between the nomadic and agricultural worlds, and the forces developed here are compatible with the two sets of governance logic of the grassland and the central plains
The specific reason is that I wrote in a previous article "Two Thousand Years of Love and Hate: The Steppe Empire and the Central Plains Dynasty, Are They Enemies or Friends?" It is written that it will not be repeated here, and it is enough for everyone to remember the phenomenon of "transition zones".
On the chessboard of the Ming Dynasty, in addition to the transition zone between the middle and grasslands in the northeast, there was also a transition zone between the mainland and the sea - Macao.
In the thirty-second year of Jiajing, the Portuguese bribed ming magistrates, landed in Macao, opened ports, and did business with mainland merchants; from the sixth year of Longqing, the Portuguese began to pay silver to the Ming court, rented and occupied Macao, and built houses to settle.
However, the Portuguese were not satisfied, because the Ming court had always refused formal trade, so that the former could only pay bribes in exchange for the local yamen turning a blind eye and drinking water from the large pools in the interior by a small straw.
In the two hundred years after the discovery of geography, adventurers from Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal and other countries flocked to the Asian ocean
In the dictionary of the Ming Dynasty, the so-called formal trade is only a kind of understanding of tributary trade, and it can only occur between the Ming Dynasty and the vassal states or the Qiang tribes, in other words, between the Ming and the "Yi".
Although the Ming people also called the adventurers from Western Europe hongmao fan, hongmaoyi, and hongyi, in terms of ranking identity, these foreign "Yi" were not yet eligible to pay tribute to the Ming Dynasty.
The Ming Dynasty will eventually pay the price for its stubbornness, but it is not "Hongyi" who takes the lead in attacking, but "Dongyi".
At the level of regional integration, Houjin was no less than Daming, so it was more difficult to deal with than forces such as The Wallachians and tatars
2. Dilemma
From the beginning of Nurhaci's attack on Fushun, the Ming Dynasty realized that the Houjin problem was the number one crisis of the empire and must be suppressed with all its might.
After several confrontations, the Ming Dynasty realized that strategically, its positioning of Houjin was accurate, but tactically, Houjin was a brand new opponent, and with the existing strength of the empire, it might really be impossible to do it.
Under linear thinking, it is easy for people to fall into such a misunderstanding: the Ming Dynasty has a numerical advantage, and if you apply the model of "how many for one", you will definitely be able to eat Houjin, how can you not win?
In the final analysis, war is a contest of organizational strength, and "exchanging lives for sons" is just wishful thinking
In a previous article, "The Sigh of the Ming Dynasty: Firearms Technology Locked by the "Wise Son"", we discussed the cognitive fallacy caused by linear thinking about the firearms technology of the Ming Army, and today, we follow this line of thinking to see how naïve this idea of reducing war to the "pair" of the whole people is in the real world.
The founding of the Ming Dynasty established the guard system. The "Remnants of the Dream of Chunming" records that "at the beginning of the country, there were 491 guards and 3111 institutes", according to the average number of 1120 people in a station and 5600 people in a guard, it is estimated that at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the total strength of the country was 3.1 million.
Under the inflated quantity of the Ming Army, the quality of moisture is also worrying
According to Wu Han's research in the "Reading History Notes", the specific strength of the Ming army in each stage was: 1.2 million before Hongwu 25 years, increased to 1.8 million after Hongwu 26 years, and reached a peak of 2.8 million in the Yongle Dynasty.
In summary, the total national military strength at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty was between 2 million and 3 million, and judging from the total population of the Central Plains at that time of less than 100 million, this volume was indeed terrifying.
What is even more terrifying is that Zhu Yuanzhang said that "it takes no cost to raise millions of soldiers and grain rice for the people."
Daming was the only dynasty that grew up in the peasant revolt and died in the peasant revolt
Later history proved that this slogan was only a "beautiful dream" that Zhu Yuanzhang envisioned based on the relationship between people and land and the economic structure at the beginning of the country, and at the time of Hong Xuan, the military costs of the Ming Dynasty began to rise.
After orthodoxy, the Ming Dynasty's finances were tossed by huge national defense costs, starting from Xuande, the Ming Dynasty officially established a conscription system to forcibly continue the life of the imperial military.
In short, only more than half a century after the founding of the People's Republic of China, Daming fell into the dilemma of "the army is getting weaker and weaker, but the military expenditure is getting higher and higher."
The combat effectiveness of recruitment is indeed higher than that of the guards, but the cost of raising soldiers is also higher
So when it came to the post-blond disaster, how was the military strength of the Ming Dynasty? In the middle of the Wanli Dynasty, that is, in the early 17th century, the report of the Military Department pointed out: "The nine-sided forehead army has 860,000 odds, and it is really no less than 590,000 odds." ”
If you think with linear thinking, even with this 590,000, the 50,000 or 60,000 people who eat it are more than enough, right?
The naivety of linear thinking lies in ignoring the complexity of the real world, where everything has a cost.
In fact, under the constraint of various costs within the system, the maximum strength that the Ming army can mobilize in a decisive battle in the direction of Liaodong is not more than 150,000.
The three offensive battles launched by the Ming army against the Later Jin/Qing, the commanders were Yang Hao, Wang Huazhen, and Hong Chengzuo, and the strength of the troops they commanded never exceeded this number, and in actual combat, the number of troops who could be online at the same time could not reach even half of this number.
What's more, even if the Ming army could mobilize 150,000 people and press it at one time to show a decisive battle with the main force of Houjin, Liaodong did not have a battlefield that could allow these 150,000 people to surround 50,000 people on the other side, one by one.
And even if it is a pair, will the Ming Army be able to ensure that "5 for 1"?
If even the "change of life" cannot be solved, Daming must consider "revolution"
Therefore, whether from the macro program or the micro algorithm, Daming exhausts all traditional solutions and cannot solve the problem of post-gold, but this is a life-and-death problem that must be solved.
Since the traditional solution does not work, please be smart.
But the new scheme is not completely devoid of the shadow of tradition, that is, to fight with yi.
Only this time, the "Yi" is Yangyi, the Portuguese.
At the same time that the Portuguese were thinking of Daming, Daming was also playing the Portuguese's calculations
3. Internal friction
After the Battle of Ningyuan, Xu and others' proposal to "buy Western artillery and recruit Portuguese soldiers" was finally approved.
Having learned the lessons of being restrained by the opposition several times before, Xu Guangqi, Li Zhizao, and others did not dare to delay and immediately arranged for the working group to rush to Macao.
When the working group arrived in Macau, it was very smooth to buy artillery and recruit mercenaries for two reasons:
1. Xu and others were originally members of the church, so the Portuguese side regarded them as their own and responded to their needs;
2. The treatment that Xu and others won at the imperial court was very generous:
Recruit 1 commander (team leader), with an annual salary of 150 taels and a monthly meal allowance of 15 taels;
Recruit 4 gunners (senior engineers), with an annual salary of 100 taels and a monthly food allowance of 10 taels;
Recruit 2 general managers (translators), with an annual salary of 80 taels and a monthly food allowance of 6 taels;
Recruit 13 concurrent companions (assistants), with an annual salary of 40 taels and a monthly meal allowance of 3 taels.
From the "Francon machine" and the falcon to the siege cannon, the firearms technology of East Asia was the bargaining cost of the Portuguese and daming
How generous is this treatment? Comparing the salary level of the Ming army, it is clear: the Ming army has a thousand households, a monthly grain of 16 stones, according to the northern grain price in the Chongzhen years, 1 stone is converted into silver 6 to 9 yuan, on average, equivalent to an annual salary of 144 taels, roughly equivalent to the commander of this group of mercenaries.
However, if the food allowance is also added, the salary of a hired commander is equivalent to 37 stones of monthly grain, which is equivalent to the level of a commander or both commanders of the Ming Army (35 stones) according to the standards listed in the "Wanli Accounting Record".
What is the rank of commander? Zheng Sanpin was a military attaché, commanding a guard, with five or six thousand men and horses.
Even for the lowest-ranking employment and companionship, the Ming Dynasty gave more treatment than a town manager, only slightly lower than a hundred households.
With only local firearms and firearms troops, it was difficult for Daming to gain the upper hand in the battle against Houjin
Such generous treatment naturally attracted people's eyes, but it happened that the costumes of these mercenaries were still extravagant and exaggerated western European style, and the rate of return along the way was extremely high.
In the end, due to various pressures, only the commander and gunner were allowed to go north, and the rest were all sent back to Macau.
Is this scene familiar? Yes, what I wrote in the previous article happened again - the Ming Dynasty was not a homogeneous whole, and the various conservative forces within it were like an excited immune system, keeping a twelve-point alertness to foreign things and always ready to repel.
In the eyes of the opposition, any detail can be used as a pretext and become a handle
4. Struggle
Just as the opposition was about to succeed, the enemy sent xu Guangqi an assist.
At the end of that year, Emperor Taiji led his army around the Ningjin defensive line, took the Mongolian plateau, broke through the Great Wall from Da'ankou, attacked Zunhua, and the soldiers approached Yanjing, Yuan Chonghuan heard the news, and mentioned that nine thousand Liao soldiers urgently entered the defense, which was the change of his own body.
In the Battle of Jiwei, there were Mongol cavalry in the opposing camps
Coincidentally, at this juncture, the artillery team led by the Portuguese officer Gongsha Silao also arrived at the outskirts of Beijing, and when he heard that Zhuozhou was in a hurry, he entered the city to support, set up cannons at the head of the city, and guided the residents to lay out defenses.
A month later, the enemy retreated, Zhuozhou was not attacked, and for a time, Gyeonggi public opinion said that the Western cannon and the Gongsha artillery team saved Zhuozhou.
Chongzhen heard the news, Long Yan was overjoyed, and summoned this "foreign rescue soldier". Gongsha's Xilao was flattered and immediately offered to return to Macau and recruit another three hundred Portuguese soldiers to "follow and pursue deep into the territory of the other country (Later Jin) and restore the territory of the Ming Dynasty."
Although they had not yet fought Directly with HouJin, the Portuguese mercenaries were confident of victory with firearms
Taking advantage of this high public opinion, Xu Guangqi also played a request to "select the pawns, test the cannon ... Go north as soon as possible", and said that "if such a thing is done, it will be a national shame for several years, and it will be snowy for a while."
However, Xu's colleagues did not seem to intend to make him "proud", and just two months after the enemy on the front foot had left, the rear foot army department inspired Xu Guang to send the Portuguese artillery to the towns to serve as instructors and advisers.
Xu Guangqi replied: "There are few people in Zhuyi, and it is inconvenient to allocate them to the border. The Portuguese side proposed to return to Macao to recruit troops first, and was approved.
Who knows, as soon as the Portuguese left Beijing, the opposition in the DPRK and China could not sit still. In May, June, and December of that year, the Ministry of Rites submitted three letters to Lu Zhaolong in succession, and the theme idea was one sentence: "The Tangtang Heavenly Dynasty is proficient in firearms, and there are also people who can learn the ancestors of Qi Jiguang, so why should they teach and perform outside?" ”
In the view of the opposition, the large firearms are "self-contained", and it is very inappropriate to hire foreign religious leaders
Chongzhen replied: "This performance has also been seen, and it is considered at its discretion. The meaning is: "What he said is also reasonable, and all departments should look at it." ”
The style of this reply is very "Chongzhen" - capricious, not taking ideas, not taking responsibility.
The result of the consultations between the departments was the continuation of repatriation.
Thus, history repeats itself a third time: as it was ten years ago, it was still in Jiangxi -- the newly recruited giant artillery team had just arrived in Nanchang, and suddenly received Chongzhen's edict to "stop summoning Portuguese soldiers to Beijing", so 150 Portuguese mercenaries were disbanded on the spot and sent back to Macao, and only the missionary Lu Ruohan and others continued to go north and return to Beijing to resume their lives.
Gongsha Xilao, who had experienced hundreds of battles, eventually died in the Battle of Daming
5. Endgame
Xu Guangqi knew that counting on the imperial court was out of play and could only do it himself, so at his suggestion, Lu Ruohan and Gongsha Xilao and others, with all their belongings, left the capital and went to Dengzhou.
Sun Yuanhua, the governor of Dengzhou, was a student of Xu Guangqi and the most powerful soldier in Xu Guangqi's "church faction", sitting in Jiaodong, across the sea from Liaodong.
Xu Guangqi once proposed in "Qin Fengming's Will to Apply Chen YuJian Shu" that a "modern" force should be established, "with sixteen Western cannons, eighty middle cannons, one hundred eagle guns, and twelve hundred bird guns." He also suggested that Sun Yuanhua should first "train the first and second battalions of the regiment in Dengzhou, gradually expand it, and gradually build fifteen battalions, then victory can be achieved."
The arrival of Gongsha and others has given substantial guidance for the construction of this "modern" force.
In desperation, Xu Guangqi began to be independent of the Ming army system and trained the new army according to his own ideas
Seeing that the training of troops had been effective and the equipment urgently needed to be expanded, Xu once again played the role of requisitioning and recruiting, and Chongzhen ordered the military department to "go to the military department again to participate in the discussion, and first choose the current important matters and tight regulations to discuss and review."
This means: you should discuss it again and pick up the key points and do it quickly.
There are no specific instructions, that is, vague, repeated reminders, let you think for yourself what is the "focus".
Chongzhen's opponent, Huang Taiji, was a diametrically opposed person, he knew very well what he wanted, and he knew what to do, and he had the ability to do it immediately, and he did not give Chongzhen another chance - at the end of 1631, the city of Dalinghe was destroyed, and the last elite army of the Ming army in Liaodong was destroyed.
In the Battle of Dalinghe, Houjin's cannons were already able to suppress the Ming army's firepower in key areas
Sun Yuanhua urgently ordered Kong Youde to lead the newly trained "modern" army out of the customs to rescue (although it was too late), and this army did not live up to what it had learned, and attacked the city with the artillery in its hand - Dengzhou.
In December of the fourth year of Chongzhen, Kong Youde rebelled against Wuqiao, and immediately led his army back to Shandong, and a month later captured Dengzhou.
It is worth mentioning that in the adversity of the mutiny, the Portuguese instructors led by Gongsha became the last guardians of Dengzhou City - Gongsha himself personally climbed to the head of the city, threw bombs at the rebels, the rebels returned fire with bows and arrows, and Gongsha and others died in battle.
Underneath the surface of "greed for money", Portuguese mercenaries had a more paranoid and purer love for the battle itself
6. Speculation
In the eyes of people at that time, whether it was hiring Portuguese soldiers or recruiting "Yi Ding Tu Horse", it was a strategy of "using Yi to defeat Yi" in order to cope with the national defense crisis, but what people at that time did not think was that in the way of generating combat strength, the Portuguese "YangYi" was different from any previous Yi soldiers - this was a force based on rationality and technology as the basis of combat effectiveness.
The Portuguese mercenaries were not physically stronger than the Mongol riders, nor were they necessarily more intelligent than the Jurchen hunters, but their advantages in rationality and technology made them confident in facing the above opponents.
Mercenary Strategy: Abstract the accumulation of experience into an iterative and upgradable expression of knowledge, and then develop rational technology and military science to arm yourself
Scholars point out that Europeans neither invented firearms nor monopolized the right to use them. However, the widespread manufacture, distribution and efforts to improve the lethality of firearms are theirs alone. ——Excerpt from Killing and Culture
From the 16th century onwards, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch adventurers appeared in The Sea of Asia, inevitably colliding with the Ming Dynasty at that time, and the "military science" they brought with them based on reason and technology was also a strange thing to the ancient East.
From today's point of view, the Ming Dynasty in the 17th century did not have the conditions to be compatible with the European military science of the same period, just like when a person who is accustomed to using an abacus suddenly faces a computer, the complex cognitive chain in the middle will make him feel that the abacus is better to use.
The great thing about Xu Guangqi and others is that whether they perceive the existence of broken chains or not, it does not affect their first step - the computer is too difficult, first give him a calculator, let him establish the concept of "instruction input - black box operation - display output", and then gradually unlock the knowledge of logic symbols, circuits and programming in practice, and finally, when this person faces the computer, I believe that he can already skillfully type the keyboard like a bead.
Whether or not the crisis was saved in reality, the pragmatic spirit of Xu Guangqi and others is commendable.
Xu Guangqi: Based on the local, look at the world
So, in the history of the development of firearms, how did the European technology tree grow? We'll continue to explore this in the next issue.