Just when the great plague of the Black Death was raging throughout Europe, in the land of China, there was a young man who came to the fore, and he was Zhu Yuanzhang, the Ming Taizu who later threatened all of China and established the Ming Dynasty.
As we all know, the Ming Dynasty was a very powerful dynasty, after two hundred and seventy-six years, 16 emperors, the Ming Empire at that time can be said to be the most powerful country in the world, but things must be reversed. In the last years of the Ming Dynasty, famine and plague were rampant, and the last straw that crushed the Ming Dynasty was also the plague, a terrible disease that had been repeated in Europe for more than three hundred years. It has claimed countless lives, and it is now sharpening its knife and heading for Asia. During the Ming Dynasty, there were many wars on the northern border of China, which led some Han Chinese to flee to the Mongolian steppe, and they reclaimed the pasture into farmland, squeezing the living space of rats on the grassland, laying the groundwork for the plague at the end of the Ming Dynasty.
There were many droughts in the last years of the Ming Dynasty, and as many as three major droughts were recorded during the Wanli calendar alone. In addition, the global climate at the end of the Ming Dynasty experienced a period of Xiaoice river, which caused agriculture to suffer a major blow, and a large number of farmland particles were not harvested. Some people took the grain stored in the rat hole for a living, and then some people began to eat rats, and the plague broke out. At the same time, drought and epidemic caused a large number of people to become refugees, and the floating population made the epidemic uncontrollable, the plague first broke out in Shanxi, and then spread to Hebei, Shaanxi and other surrounding provinces, Chongzhen fourteen years, the plague spread to Beijing Damingfu. Coupled with the fact that not a single drop of rain fell in the Daimyo Province that year, the number of people who eventually fell ill and starved to death was as high as 30%.
And just four years before the plague in the capital, that is, in the tenth year of Chongzhen, the plague epidemic spread to Mizhi in Shaanxi, which also caused a large number of people here to fall ill, and the situation was extremely miserable. And a young man here will personally become a gravedigger of the stormy Ming Dynasty, he is Li Zicheng. Due to the chaos and famine, these peasant rebel armies led by him marched all the way to the city of Beijing.
At this time, the Beijing that was waiting for them had become a thousand holes that had been tormented by the plague, and only about 50,000 of the three battalions of troops that had originally guarded the capital had survived the plague, and these remnants of the defeated soldiers had to defend each soldier on average three battlements. And they were all lucky to survive the plague, and there was a huge gap in physical fitness compared with before, according to records, the soldiers guarding the capital at that time sat weakly on the ground, their whips could not be drawn, and they had no will to fight, how could they stop Li Zicheng's peasant rebel army in this situation?
Because of this, Li Zicheng successfully took the city of Beijing and changed the name of the country to Dashun, but Li Zicheng withdrew from Beijing in a hurry the day after he became emperor. Because the Qing army came in, why could Li Zicheng, who could defeat the Ming Dynasty, not be able to defeat the Qing army? In fact, Li Zicheng's rebel army was more like a ragtag group of disaster victims, and the reason they followed Li Zicheng to burn and loot was very simple, that is, to feed the war with war, otherwise they would be starved to death, and Li Zicheng was able to invade Beijing, largely because of the plague, and li Zicheng withdrew from Beijing for the same simple reason, that is, his rebel army also suffered from plague and was difficult to resist in the face of the Qing cavalry.
The question is, the Qing army had close contact with Li Zicheng's army, why didn't they suffer from the plague? Later, people checked the historical records to find that in the great plague in Europe, only the cavalry escaped a disaster, so historians believe that the fleas that may spread the plague do not like the smell of horses, and the Qing army is mainly composed of cavalry, so naturally it will not be infected with plague.