The military establishment system of the Ming Dynasty was the system of guard houses, and the system of military service was the system of military households. These two systems formed the basis of the Ming Dynasty's military power.
This system began to form from the establishment of the Ming Dynasty and continued until the middle of the Ming Dynasty, it supported the early Ming Dynasty Zhu Yuanzhang, Ming Chengzu Zhu Di and other generations of emperors frequent use of troops on a large scale, and played a very important role in the Ming unification war and the war against foreign invasions.
When the Ming Dynasty overthrew the rule of the Yuan Dynasty, the population of the country was about 60 million, and with the continuous development of the agricultural economy and commodity economy, the population also grew rapidly, and by the late Ming Dynasty, the national population had reached about 130 million, and the population had doubled. The continuous growth of the population made the state allocate less and less land to the army, and the phenomenon of land annexation in the middle and late Ming Dynasty existed not only in the civilian landlord class, but also in the local health centers.
The governor of the Weishou was also eager to annex land, resulting in less and less land allocated to military households and an increasingly difficult life. Under such circumstances, a large number of military families had to flee the land and become displaced people. Therefore, in the middle and late Ming Dynasty, the number of military households was greatly reduced, and the combat effectiveness of the army also declined seriously, and the military household system had reached the brink of collapse.
At this time, the Ming government had to adopt a new military service system to replenish the source of soldiers, so the recruitment system came into being. Just like the background mentioned above, the system of conscription did not exist only under the will of the government, but also began to emerge and be put into action between the commanders of local guard posts and the generals.
As we said earlier, the phenomenon of land annexation in the middle and late Ming Dynasty intensified, and the governors and generals of the weishou in various places also accumulated a lot of wealth through land annexation. Stimulated by this wealth, they began to recruit soldiers in large numbers for their own use. They either recruited soldiers who had been lost under the military household system or re-recruited to form their own private armed forces, which formed a family system that played an important role in the middle and late Ming Dynasty.
The army under the jiading system belongs to the private armed forces of the generals, which is different from the regular troops of the state, and it is precisely because it is directly commanded by the generals, military training is directly supervised by the generals, and the grain and salaries are also paid in full and on time, and there is no situation like the withholding of grain and salaries in the regular troops and the laxity of armaments, so the combat effectiveness of the jiading troops is beyond the regular troops.
In the middle and late Ming Dynasty, especially in the later period, the Jiading contingent became the backbone of the Ming Dynasty against the peasant revolt and the Manchu Qing forces. The Qi family army, which is well known to everyone, is a product of the Jiading system, and at the same time, the Guanning Iron Horse, which was famous in the late Ming Dynasty, also continued to grow from the Jiading army.
From the initial weishou military household system, it evolved to the weishou conscription system, and then gradually developed into the army under the family system as the main force, and became the core military force in the late Ming Dynasty. This change is not only a true portrayal of the development and change of military strength of the Ming Dynasty, but also a concentrated embodiment of the economic development and social contradictions and changes of the Ming Dynasty.