Xiao Yan (萧延), courtesy name Shuda ,小字練兒,南蘭陵人,is said to have been after Xiao He in the Han Dynasty.
After Emperor Wu of Liang succeeded to the throne, he gave his Qi He Emperor the title of King of Baling. At that time, the clan of the State of Qi did not need Xiao Yan to destroy it at all, because Emperor Ming of Qi and the Marquis of Dongxiao basically killed the descendants of Qi Gaozu and Emperor Wu of Qi.
Before Xiao Yan became emperor, he first killed the brothers of Xiao Baoxuan, the king of Xiangdong, in the name of Qi and Emperor Xiao Baorong, and later killed the remaining sons of Emperor Qiming. Because he was in his prime when he was founded, he did not need to have the sense of urgency of "thinning the western mountains" like Liu Yu and Xiao Daocheng, and at first he really wanted to raise the abdicated teenager Qi Hedi in Nanhai County.
His high-ranking strategist Shen Yue advised him to "not seek false fame and suffer real misfortunes." Therefore, Xiao Yan sent his close confidant Zheng Boyu to Guyi and gave Qi Hedi, who was only fifteen years old, a large piece of raw gold, forcing him to swallow and commit suicide. Although Emperor Qi He, who was already in the "Zen position", was young and his style did not diminish, Lang Yan said: "I don't need gold when I die, and alcohol is enough." ”
When Zheng Boya saw that the deposed emperor was so "cooperative", he was also very happy, so he brought a large altar of fine wine. The young man looked pleasant, drank heavily in large bowls, and soon became intoxicated and unconscious. Zheng Bofeng stepped forward and strangled the fifteen-year-old boy to death.
Although he killed a clan member of Emperor Qi Ming, Xiao Yan was not too cruel to the former imperial family. More than ten of Xiao Zike's brothers, a branch of Xiao Daocheng's lineage, were all given the title of idle officials and lived well. In fact, Xiao Yan and the Southern Dynasty Qi State were still the same sect, but the clan was slightly neglected.
According to generations, Xiao Yan's father Xiao Shunzhi was the younger brother of Xiao Daocheng, the Emperor of Qigao. In the Southern Qi era, Xiao Yan himself was also one of the "Eight Friends of the Western Residence" of Xiao Ziliang, the King of Jinling, and his literary accomplishment did have the style of everyone (the other seven were Fan Yun, Xiao Chen, Ren Fang, Wang Rong, Xie Shuo, Shen Yue, and Lu Qian). These people, at that time, "the great track of Li Biaowen", and the poetry created the "Yongming Body", a model of the Southern Dynasty generation, and they were only eight fighters. In terms of martial arts, Xiao Yansheng was also a military genius, and even the famous Northern Wei Emperor Xiaowen said: "Xiao Yan is good at using troops, do not fight with the front." ”
However, in his later years, Xiao Yan was dimwitted and cowardly, seeing Hou Jingjie's victory, the old man in his eighties had lost all his spirits, and he was no longer the Xiao Yan who had angered Xiangyang in the past.
In terms of internal affairs, Xiao Yan on the one hand issued various edicts to the high gate of the Youxian shi clan, verify the spectrum, and strictly prevent attacks; on the other hand, he always reused the scholars of the Han su background, whether it was Fan Yun, Shen Yue, Xu Mian in the early days, or Zhu Yi, Yu Yao, and others in the middle and late period, even chen Qingzhi, the general who led seven thousand soldiers to run rampant in Wei Province, was also from the Han people. Therefore, in terms of employing people, Xiao Yan, who was an early emperor, should be a very skilled politician.
Externally, in 506, Xiao Yan declared himself emperor a few years later, and sent his sixth brother Xiao Hong, the king of Linchuan, to confront Northern Wei in Huainan, where the Liang army was well-equipped and prosperous, and the Northern Dynasties believed that they had not seen it in hundreds of decades. As for Xiao Hong, he was "eight feet long, with beautiful eyebrows, wide and thick", but he was a complete layman in battle, and he collapsed in a war.
In 507, the Liang Dynasty general Liang Jingzong and others defeated the Wei army at Zhongli, killing more than 100,000 Wei soldiers (mostly drowning) and capturing more than 50,000. Moreover, the "fire attack plan" in this campaign was directly instructed by Xiao Yan, which shows how the military genius of this emperor in his prime was.
In the seventh year of Emperor Wu of Liang (526), the territory of Northern Wei was full of flames, the soldiers of the six towns rose and fell, the Ge Rong rebellion was said to be a million outside, Erzhu Rong was in power in the inner dynasty, and the Liang Dynasty took the opportunity to expand north.
In 527, the Liang general Chen Qingzhi defeated the Wei army at Woyang. In 529, Chen Qingzhi, in the name of sending the "King of Wei" Yuan Hao, led 7,000 men from Qixian County to Luoyang, where he fought forty-seven battles and captured a total of thirty-two cities. For more than a hundred years, the Southern Army was able to invade Luoyang, which was simply an unheard of miracle.
At the critical moment, Xiao Yan hesitated and failed to send a large army to continue to penetrate deep into wei to meet him, and Yuan Hao established himself as emperor. Soon, both Yuan Hao and Chen Qingzhi were defeated by Erzhu Rong's army, Yuan Hao was killed, and Chen Qingzhi fled back to Jiankang alone.
As a result, Xiao Liang's huge military victory was really short-lived.
Originally, after Gao Huan forced Emperor Xiaowu of Northern Wei to leave, Northern Wei split into Eastern and Western Wei. In order to contain The Western Wei, the Eastern Wei side took the initiative to show favor to the Liang Dynasty, and the two sides exchanged constant envoys. However, after Gao Huan's death, Hou Jing rebelled against Eastern Wei, and Xiao Yan actually accepted this person, which not only destroyed the long-standing "friendly" relationship with Eastern Wei, but also sounded his own death knell.
The gradual decline of several dynasties in the Southern Dynasty, in fact, like the Rebellion of the Northern Wei Dynasty, was caused by the continuous decline of military status. Since the Wei and Jin dynasties, the "warrior families" and "soldier households" have been inherited from generation to generation, and they have inherited from father to son, not only shouldering heavy military service, but also renting the government's land, paying all kinds of harsh taxes and miscellaneous taxes, and living in extreme hardship, even inferior to slaves.
As a result of the ongoing war, not only did the source of soldiers become less and less, but also the number of people who secretly sneaked up and hidden for their own interests was also increasing. In order to conscript troops, the Government of the Southern Dynasty had to think of a new way to requisition "exposed households" and "service gates" from the rural self-cultivating peasants; because the main general was greedy, withheld grain and military salaries, the peasants and soldiers fled, and the punishment was heavy and heavy, resulting in many rural self-cultivating peasants going bankrupt and losing their families one after another.
In this way, the vicious circle has caused a series of consequences such as economic weakness, privatization of public land, serious land annexation, and increasing miscellaneous adjustments other than rent adjustment. Eventually, the morale of the Southern Dynasty was getting lower and lower, and its combat effectiveness was getting worse and worse.
By the end of Emperor Wu of Liang's life, "everyone was tired of suffering, and the family was confused", and social contradictions were unprecedentedly fierce.
The most important thing is that Xiao Yan, the Emperor of Liangwu, has always been fascinated by Buddhism and is the most famous representative figure of the "Yu Buddha" emperor. In the last years of his reign, Jiankang "had more than 500 Buddhist temples, and they were extremely poor and magnificent." There are more than 100,000 monks and nuns, and their assets are abundant. The county is incomparable." Therefore, the "Four Hundred and Eighty Temples of the Southern Dynasty" rendered by the poet is not exaggerated at all.
Xiao Yan's "Yu Buddha" not only often preached the interpretation of the scriptures himself, but what was even more excessive was that he had also "sacrificed himself" three times and entered the monastery as a "temple slave", and moreover, he had "sacrificed himself" longer and longer each time. The emperor "sacrificed himself", the ministers had to pool money and wealth for him to "redeem himself", and "redeemed" the emperor three times, spending a total of 300 million yuan, which was actually Xiao Yan's disguised wealth for the Buddhist temple.
The popularity of Buddhism not only made the people of the Southern Dynasty more "benevolent and cowardly", but also a large number of men became monks in order to evade military service, which made the national strength of the Liang Dynasty, which was already poor and weak, even worse.
In the era of confrontation between the north and the south, the enemy was strong, the Liang Dynasty was so happy with the Buddha, so admiring the xuanxuan, so extravagant, the lower classes of the people tossed through the ravines, and they did not want to live, and the whole country could be said to be rotten from the inside out. Yu Xin's statement that "in the past fifty years, JiangBiao has been fine" means that there was no excessive mutual killing within the ruling class of the Liang Dynasty, and there was actually a huge crisis under the prosperity and glitz.
(Source 丨 "Mei Yi Says the History of Chinese Heroes" Author 丨 Mei Yi Tiandi Publishing House 丨 Publishing)
Editor: Yin Hua Responsible Editor: Dong Xiaoyue Review: He Jian