Your grandfather is a soldier, your father is a soldier, you yourself are a soldier, your son is a soldier, your son's son is a soldier, your son's son is still a soldier... It is for military households.
You become a soldier, when you encounter a war, you go to the battlefield, you cultivate the land without the war, and if you work hard to plant the field, it doesn't count, and in the end you don't have your share... It is for the military tun.
The so-called reason why Zhu Yuanzhang dared to blow the cowhide of "I raise millions of soldiers and do not cost the people a grain of rice" is that this system of military households and military tuns, that is, the system of guard houses.
Zhu Yuanzhang thought very ideally, your family has been a soldier for generations, our Zhu family is not short of soldiers, and your family can also be arranged? What is the arrangement? Of course, it is farming, and the grain grown is used to supply the army, so that you have a full bite to eat! It can really be said that one person is a soldier, and the whole family is affected.
It sounds nice to say that it does not cost the people a meter and a drop, but are not the people in charge of the military tuns the people? It is simply deprived of the identity of the people.
In fact, this system looks very good at first, after all, you can feed so many armies without the money of the "people", but you let people become soldiers, and let people farm, and people themselves can't get half the benefits, who will be willing to give you a military household? Therefore, the Ming Dynasty had many "deserters" who evaded the obligations of military households.
Not to mention the combat effectiveness of the army, busy farming, where is the time to train your military skills?
The army's grain and salary were deducted layer by layer, and finally there was very little money in the hands of the low-level soldiers, or there was simply no copper plate, so the military households could only find other things to do, who still had time to train! The leaders of the hundred household officials and thousand household officials of the health center did not have the heart to take care of it, and they did not have the energy to manage it, because they had no money.
What is even more ridiculous is that in the later period, many military households were directly used as free labor.
Zhu Yuanzhang's period was fine, after all, the army had just finished fighting, and all kinds of physical skills were still there, and the combat skills were still there, so Tuntian did not have much negative impact on the combat effectiveness of the army.
This is also the reason why Zhu Yuanzhang dared to boast that he did not spend a grain of rice to raise millions of soldiers, and if he was put in the position of Chongzhen at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty's weishu system had long become the shortcoming of the Ming Dynasty.
The erosion of the guard house system led to the fact that at the end of the Ming Dynasty, there were already very few guards who could actually be used, except for the "deserters", the guards had to engage in other trades because of the reasons for being withheld from military pay, or they were enslaved by their superiors, so the number of soldiers was simply not enough.
Of course, the reason for the insufficient number of soldiers is that in addition to the reasons of the military households themselves, the leaders at higher levels deliberately do not replenish the number of soldiers in order to eat empty pay.
Therefore, in the Chongzhen period, in order to have an army available, the imperial court could only adopt the conscription system, in fact, the Ming Dynasty has been using this method since the middle of the century.
But the army recruited by the conscription system has to eat, right? Got paid too, right? Because they were no longer military households, the money to support them had to be paid by the imperial court.
Can Chongzhen come up with so much money? He couldn't get it, which was why he couldn't afford to pay the military.
As an emperor who rules thousands of miles, why is Chongzhen so "poor" that he can't come up with money? This has to do with his personal abilities.
His ability is indeed very mediocre, the only advantage is diligence, but unfortunately no matter how diligent and fast can not solve the problem, because some things really can not be solved by diligence, such as governing the country.
Not to mention Chongzhen's way of checks and balances, nor does it say that he knows how to use people, only his method of "fishing for money", does he know how to make money? He really didn't understand, first, he didn't understand how to make money— developing the economy, and second, he didn't know how to use or didn't dare to use Wei Zhongxian to amass wealth, so he should be said to be the poorest emperor of the Ariake generation.
How poor is Chongzhen? Poor enough to borrow money from the officials in the court, Chongzhen regarded them as humerus, and they would not fail to borrow, right? Of course, they don't borrow it, they are even more greedy than Wei Zhongxian, Wei Zhongxian is greedy, and he also knows to take out a part of the greed for the imperial court, so there is money to fight during the apocalypse years.
However, after the Donglin Party became large, it not only abolished some of the taxes set up to amass wealth during Wei Zhongxian's reign, but instead frantically amassed wealth for itself, resulting in the phenomenon that officials and even landlords had money, but Chongzhen and the Ming Dynasty had no money.
What makes people cry and laugh even more is that Chongzhen is still reluctant to attack the Donglin Party and the civilian official clique, and the Ming Dynasty has no money, so what will it take to fight?
Chongzhen didn't have any money, and he still doubted this general at every turn, and killed the general, which made the people in the army panic and had no intention of fighting for the Ming Dynasty.
From this point of view, the army at the end of the Ming Dynasty also hated the Zhu family, so after the surrender, one was to please the new master and show loyalty to the new master; the other was that he wanted to take revenge on Chongzhen.
In short, the key reason why Chongzhen could not take out money to raise the army was that he would not make money, would not make money, could not borrow money from the civilian official clique, could not borrow money and did not dare to attack them, and finally forced himself into a dead end.
Chongzhen was reluctant and did not dare to attack the civilian official clique, and Li Zicheng, who later invaded the capital, did not be polite with them, and plundered fiercely, earning a lot of money.
Chongzhen's ability is mediocre, not enough to keep the success, let alone open up, and in the chaotic world, it is even more impossible to keep the success, so he can only be a king of the subjugated country, and then play a little clever, and use the phrase "all the ministers are mistaken" to shirk responsibility.