Chongzhen, the last emperor of the Ming Dynasty, was simply a miracle, having experienced seven plagues in his seventeen years of reign, and almost every two years there was a plague in a place.
Moreover, Xue Baipao believed that these seven plagues were likely to be one.
Take a look at the damage caused by the plague:
For example, when Chongzhen ten years of Tongguan, Zhuyangguan generation caused plague, Li Zicheng led the men and horses to come, there was no one to guard, and easily attacked Tongguan:
Whoever sleeps in the open for ten years is plagued by plague and cannot be convinced, and the thieves are so great that they collapse.
Li Zicheng took Xiongguan and took the plague with him, and two years later his army also caused a plague.
How severe was the plague when it came, ten rooms and nine empty, people died and there was no one who converged, because once a family died, such as a plague in Tianjin in the fifteenth year of Chongzhen, people recorded the tragic situation at that time:
Last year, the plague of the Beijing Division was a masterpiece, the death pillow, the ten rooms and nine empty, and even the household was exhausted, and no one converged.
In the year of Chongzhen's ascension to the throne, a place called Milan in the west was plagued, and this plague killed 280,000 people in four years, known as the Milan plague.
The plague seemed to have nothing to do with Chongzhen.
But the plague in Milan had only passed two years ago, and the plague in the sixth year of Chongzhen began to plague the Chongzhen Dynasty.
Beginning in chongzhen for six years, the plague resembled a ghost.
Chongzhen 6th year, Shanxi: Tianxing plague, dying in the morning. Within a night, the people fled in horror and the city was empty.
Such a high mortality rate should be plague.
Two years later, in the eighth year of Chongzhen, the plague ran to Tongguan in Shaanxi and Zhuyangguan in Henan, and the army of the king arrived at these two Xiongguans, which were unable to resist because of the epidemic.
In the tenth year of Chongzhen, the epidemic once again raged, this time spreading to Shanxi, Shaanxi, Henan and other places: nineteen dead, countless exterminators.
At that time, there was no modern treatment technology, and when it got sick, it could only stand up, and it didn't last long, dying day and night, the death of the family, because no one collected the corpses, these corpses became a new source of plague.
The Black Death, which made Europeans famous and fearful, was caused by the Mongol Golden Horde attacking the Black Sea port city of Kafa, which could not be attacked for a long time, and used a trebuchet to throw the bodies of plague-infected people in the army into the city, resulting in the plague in Kafa City running rampant and defeated without a fight.
In the thirteenth year of Chongzhen, the plague spread to northern China, and in the summer of this year, the plague in the Daimyofu of Hejian Province was rampant, and the harm of the plague was described in a very white word:
Dead eight or nine.
The mortality rate was eighty or ninety percent, horrible.
In the sixteenth year of Chongzhen, the city of Beijing suddenly had an epidemic of knots, a great epidemic in summer and autumn, and the puppets gave birth to a bulge of flesh, and died immediately in a few moments, which was called the knotty plague, and everyone suffered from this fourteenth and fifteenth.
Xue Baipao checked it out, this disease is now called bubonic plague, and the pimple is a swollen lymph node.
Knotty disease has appeared since the plague in the Daming Mansion of Hejian Province in the thirteenth year of Chongzhen, and in the sixteenth year of Chongzhen, it began to break out in the capital.
The plague also spread to Tianjin, which is adjacent to Beijing: the plague spread from heaven to the present (September 15), and the epidemic has been abundant since August (September 15). There are those who die one or two days, there are those who die day and night, there are no less than hundreds of people every day, and even those who do not leave a single person in the whole family, row by door, and none of them are preserved. ”
The plague of the seventeenth year of Chongzhen spread to Lu'an Province, Henan:
The patient dies before the interbundle nucleus of the armpit, or vomits light blood, and is not subject to medicinal bait. Although relatives and friends do not dare to ask for hanging, there are people who have died and no one has been buried."
This plague, from the sixth year of Chongzhen to the seventeenth year of Chongzhen, was intermittent and unbroken, and it ravaged most of the ming dynasty.
An important reason why the plague did not spread everywhere in a short period of time like the Black Death in Europe or the Great Plague in Milan was probably related to the strict household registration system of the Ming Dynasty, which stipulated that the people could only move in a fixed environment and did not allow the people to move around at will, which objectively curbed the spread of the plague.
After the ancient Europeans fell ill, the most powerful means of curing the disease was repentance.
A group of people gathered in the church to confess to God for the mistakes they had made and to ask For God's forgiveness.
Plague this thing likes more people, more people, the plague can find different hosts, breed their own offspring, as long as one of the repentant people carries the plague, soon confess to God that the person who has passed the most will go to see God.
Born in the Chongzhen Dynasty, if you are lucky enough to survive the plague, it doesn't matter, there is also a drought locust plague.
Li Zicheng started in Shaanxi, he raised his arms and shouted, and the responders gathered, why?
See what happened in Shaanxi during the Chongzhen years?
We know that the plague of the sixth year of Chongzhen was endemic in Shaanxi, and in addition to the plague, the place was also plagued by drought: in the first year of Chongzhen, the whole shaanxi sky was as red as blood. Five years of famine, six years of water, seven years of autumn locusts, famine, eight years of September Xixiang drought, slightly yang waterlogging, all the houses are gone. Nine years of drought locusts, ten years of autumn grass, eleven years of summer flying locusts covering the sky... Thirteen years of drought... Fourteen years of drought"
In the seventeenth year of the Chongzhen Dynasty, Shaanxi almost every year flooded and drought, grasshoppers and plagues, disasters and discussions took turns.
In the second year of Chongzhen, in order to save money, the Chongzhen Emperor abolished the station, and Li Zicheng, who lived on the income of the post's microblog, returned to his hometown unemployed, and Li Zicheng, who returned to his hometown, found that his hat was a little green, and the interest rate of the money he owed to the rich man's family was a little high, at this time he had only two choices in front of him, starving to death or resisting.
Starvation is the only thing, resistance may die, may be able to get away with it.
Li Zicheng chose the latter.
The combat effectiveness of Li Zicheng's army was actually very good, and he was beaten several times by Daming with only a few hundred or dozens of people left, and fled into the mountains, but he was like Xiao Qiang, who could not be killed, and soon made a comeback.
Why can he lose many battles and make several comebacks?
Because in addition to natural disasters such as plague and hunger, the people at that time also suffered man-made disasters, and more and more heavy taxes and taxes were suppressed, so that the people who were already in the famine every year had no way to live, on the contrary, they might be able to eat enough food, follow the king and grab some grain to eat, and only wait for death at home.
At that time, the living conditions of the people, Lu Weiqi, a soldier from Henan, once wrote to the Chongzhen Emperor to describe:
For several years, the subjects and villagers have no years and no hardships, no months, no soldiers, and no days and days.
How hard are people's lives?
There are no barking dogs in the village, and there are still knocks on the door of the conscription; the trees have crows, and they sprinkle the blood of the whip. Yellow and red land, the countryside is a few people; white bones and green phosphorus, night and night like smelling ghosts crying.
Droughts and locust plagues have caused people to chew the bark of local grass roots, and the tragedy of changing seeds and eating occurs every day. Many people died and could not be buried, thrown into the wilderness, were eaten by hungry wild dogs vultures, it is said that the eyes of the wild dogs that eat people are red, the dry bones are in the wild, the green scales in the bones fly out in time, at night, in the distance, look at a few phosphorescent flashes, like ghost fire, plus one or two wild dogs barking, with four words can describe the scene:
Living death.
In addition to military disasters, floods and droughts, plagues, the Chongzhen Dynasty was actually earthquake-prone, Chongzhen was emperor for seventeen years, and for ten years there were earthquakes everywhere, from Beijing to Nanjing, from Fujian to Huguang, from Liaodong to Shanxi, and there were earthquakes every year.
Plague, famine, earthquakes, two-front combat burning military expenses, the Chongzhen Emperor's never enough to spend, he wants to be a good emperor too much, but God seems to take him as the protagonist of the bitter love drama, all kinds of disasters and difficulties, all kinds of brains are put on him, to see how much he can bear.
Finally the Chongzhen Emperor collapsed.
On the night of March 18, the seventeenth year of Chongzhen, the Chongzhen Emperor did not sleep all night, and he looked back at the seventeen years of his professional emperor and would summarize it with a popular phrase on the Internet:
I'm too hard ~~
Text: Xue Baipao