Editor's note: Discussions of the annihilation of 20,000 Spanish troops often circulated on the Internet, which originated in 1586, when the leaders of the Spanish colonies in Manila, philippines, held a manila conference and jointly wrote to King Philip II of Spain, hoping to send 25,000 troops to destroy the Ming Dynasty. So, if this fantasy really began to be implemented, would the Ming Dynasty perish sooner?
It should be pointed out that in the Manila program, the Spanish army was only 10,000 to 12,000, in addition to uniting the Portuguese, recruiting and hiring southeast Asian natives, the program also planned to hire 5,000 to 6,000 Japanese soldiers, which meant that the Spaniards had a good evaluation of the Japanese combat literacy.
King Philip II of Spain was once confident in conquering Daming
In 1588, Philip II established a special committee in Madrid to review plans for an attack on China. It was only because of Spain's heavy defeat at the Battle of Gravollina in the same year that the Armada suffered heavy losses, and the matter was not resolved. In this regard, some historical nihilists will surely shout that the British have saved Daming. However, did the European colonists in the late 16th and early 17th centuries really have that much advantage over the Ming army? We must note that many of the colonists' achievements in the Age of Discovery were full of boasting. Just a few examples.
▲ Battle of Cagayan
At the Battle of Cagayan in 1582, the Spaniards faced the Japanese Wokou in Cagayan Bay, Luzon, claiming to have defeated more than a thousand Wokou with 40 men. Since the Ming Dynasty once had 53 examples of Wokou rushing to the city of Nanjing, some people thought that the Spaniards could ride a thousand against the Ming army. But in fact, according to scholars, the Wokou in the Battle of Cagayan had one flat-bottomed galleon and 18 sampans. The Sampan of the Wokou was a very small vessel that could carry only a number of soldiers under ten men, and in fact it was possible that each sampan had an average of only five or six men. When the number of full counts is full, the number of Wokou is also up to more than 200 people. In addition to the 40 regular troops, the Spaniards had more sailors than this, perhaps hundreds, and the balance of strength between the two sides was not very different. As a result of the battle, the Spaniards suffered 20 casualties, and the captain of the Galen ship, Pero Lucas, was also killed by the Wokou, who lost less than half, which can only be said to be a crushing victory.
In terms of the situation at the Battle of Cagayan, it is no wonder that the Spaniards had a high opinion of the Japanese ronin and were ready to unite with the Japanese to attack Daming. They should have made a big deviation in collecting intelligence, only collecting the situation in which the guards in the southern part of the Ming Dynasty of Jiajing Dynasty were once abandoned and were like no man's land by the Wukou, and did not pay attention to how the Ming army Qi Jiguang, Yu Dayu, and other troops suppressed the Wukou, which was a serious underestimation of the combat effectiveness of the Ming army.
▲ The Inca warriors also killed hundreds of Spaniards
In fact, the Spanish record was very poor even in the Americas, relying not only on the large indigenous allies but also repeatedly defeated. In 1536, the Spanish puppet emperor Manco Yupanchi, who had been supported by the Inca Empire, rebelled, and his brother Kizo Yupanchi attacked the Spaniard stronghold of Lima, and at one point marched forward, eliminating about five hundred Spanish conquistadors and thousands of Native Allies of Spaniards. Later, the Incas retreated to Ollantaytambo and Bilcabamba, defeated the Spaniards several more attacks, and even began to learn from the Spaniards' cavalry and firearms, which they persisted for 36 years before they were completely wiped out.
The Spaniards were like this, what about the Portuguese, who claimed to have a god-like fighting power in the early days of the Great Navigation Era? In the Battle of Radzido in 1606, the Dutch and johor Sultanate jointly attacked the Portuguese, in the naval battle the Portuguese defeated the Dutch fleet, but in the land battle, the Johor, who was the indigenous people of Indonesia, fought a 1:1 exchange ratio with the Portuguese, losing hundreds of people, and the Johor had to retreat because of the defeat of the Dutch.
Portuguese militia in the Far East in the early 17th century
In the defense of Guilin in the history of the Southern Ming Dynasty, the three hundred Portuguese mercenaries who claimed to be gods played a very limited role, but only successfully defended a section of the city wall. They were recruited from among the Portuguese residents of Macau, and most of them were of low quality, inferior to the regular Portuguese army or elite adventurers. The Ming army was able to win mainly by the struggle of Jiao Lian's troops.
If we take into account that in the Qing-Burma War in the 18th century, although the Burmese army relied on the flintlock guns imported from the West to inflict great casualties on the Qing army, because of the chronic disease of low frontal confrontation ability, it could not take advantage of fighting with the Qing army in the wilderness, and could only use the chest wall and fortifications to shoot and injure the Qing army, so the strategic purpose of completely annihilating the Qing army could not be achieved in the great battle with Fu Hengbu, so that the Qing army was able to withdraw after losing half of its troops. So how much effect Europe's slight firearm superiority over the Far East in the 16th and 17th centuries could have been, was a huge question mark.
▲ The Qing cavalry in the Qing-Burmese War still posed a great threat to the Burmese army with more advanced firearms
Naturally, the quality of melee combat between the Spaniards and the Portuguese was far from comparable to that of the inferior Indochina army, the Spanish sword and shield infantry and the Portuguese elite adventurers were well-known in Europe, and they also had Spanish phalanxes, but their delivery ability was limited. If Spain's plan to destroy the Ming Dynasty was really launched, it was likely that Spain, Portugal and Japan's Toyotomi Hideyoshi would form a coalition to attack Daming with Korea as a springboard. I have no doubt that the Ming Dynasty at that time was still able to defeat the enemy, but things should be more interesting.
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