The splendid civilization of the Song Dynasty also seems to be unable to escape the fate of the raging war. As soon as the Southern Song Dynasty took a breather from the smoke of the Song-Jin War, it ushered in a civil strife with turmoil in the hearts of the military. In order to revitalize the military prestige of the imperial court, Zhao Gaozong of the Song Dynasty made drastic measures to rectify military affairs, but he did not know that this decision triggered a mutiny in the Huaixi army. Tens of thousands of soldiers deviated from the scriptures and defected to the puppet regime of the Jin State, which instantly emptied the Yangtze River defense line of the Southern Song Dynasty. At this time of crisis, there was a change of power within the Jin state, and two new powerful ministers sent troops to retake Kaifeng and put down the rebellion. What kind of far-reaching impact will this series of military changes have on the Southern Song Dynasty? What twists and turns are hidden in the fog of history?
In the spring of the seventh year of Shaoxing, the Song and Jin countries temporarily stopped fighting for nearly ten years. The Southern Song Dynasty finally had a respite and began to reorganize its military affairs, hoping to rebuild a powerful army. Song Gaozong Zhao Gou decided to comprehensively reorganize the garrison troops along the Yangtze River, and the first to dismantle was the army under the command of Liu Guangshi, the general of Huaixi Town Guard.
Liu Guangshi was originally a famous general in the Southern Song Dynasty, but he showed cowardice in many Song-Jin confrontations. He supported his own troops and repeatedly built the terrifying exploits of escaping, which affected many theaters of the Southern Song Dynasty. To make matters worse, Liu Guangshi has been wantonly amassing wealth for a long time, fishing with all his might, displacing the people in the north bank of the Yangtze River, and making it difficult for them to make a living. Song Gaozong Zhao Gou believed that only by cutting the grass and eradicating the roots, and first eradicating Liu Guangshi's "cancer", could the accumulated shortcomings of the Song army be completely eradicated.
In order to avoid causing turmoil in the hearts of the army, the Song court adopted gradual measures. First, Liu Guangshi was replaced, and then Lu Zhi, the senator of the capital, was sent to receive the Huaixi army, and at the same time promoted Wang De to the new commander in the army. However, this compromise has led to a burn.
Li Qiong, another commander in the Huaixi Army, was indignant when he saw that Wang De had been promoted alone. He held a grudge and was arrogant, and even took the lead in raising the pole, leading more than 40,000 officers and soldiers to mutiny, and coercing 60,000 people from Huaixi to take refuge in the Jin State.
This arrogant rebel army eventually surrendered to the Great Qi Dynasty, a puppet regime supported by the Jin State in the gap between Song and Jin. Daqi is in the feudal capital, and its southern wing is the Huaixi region. The sudden defection of the Huaixi Army caused a huge gap in the Yangtze River defense line of the Southern Song Dynasty to appear in an instant, the Huaixi frontier was completely destroyed, and a corner of the Jiangbei fell into a vacuum, making the Huaidong Army even more disconnected when it reported the arrival of the army. As a result, the Song army, which was already outnumbered, fell into an even more crisis-ridden situation.
After the death of Jin Taizong, the power of the Jin government and the opposition began to shuffle. Wanyan Zonghan, an important minister who originally supported the puppet Daqi regime of the Jin State, was defeated in the new round of power change, and finally died of depression. The decline of Wanyan Zonghan meant that the Great Qi regime had lost its biggest backer in the Jin State.
The two emerging ministers, Wan Yan Chang and Wan Yan Zongbi, took this opportunity to rise rapidly and start a new round of wrestling between the government and the opposition. They fought against each other, forming-for-tat militants and anti-war factions within the Jin State.
Wan Yanchang advocated using diplomatic means to reach a settlement with the Southern Song Dynasty; Wanyan Zongbi vigorously advocated launching an offensive to eradicate the foundation of the Southern Song Dynasty in one fell swoop. The two fought with each other in the DPRK and China, and they refused to give in to each other. However, they all agreed on one issue—they both hated the Great Qi Dynasty, a buffer regime between the Jin and Southern Song dynasties.
When they learned that the 40,000 rebels in Huaixi had defected to the Great Qi Dynasty, Wan Yan Chang and Wan Yan Zongbi were immediately disturbed. They were deeply afraid that if they joined forces with the Great Qi to go south, it would be enough to severely damage the rule of the Jin State in the Central Plains; Conversely, if the rebels move north, they will also directly threaten the Jin warlords in Hebei and Henan. Therefore, the pacification of this rebel force has undoubtedly become a top priority for the two men.
In November of the seventh year of Shaoxing, Wanyan Chang and Wanyan Zongbi waved their troops south, and sent generals to approach Kaifeng in the name of the southern expedition. When they arrived in Wucheng, they lured Liu Lin, the heir of the Great Qi Dynasty, to come on the pretext of discussing military affairs. Unexpectedly, as soon as Liu Lin appeared, Wan Yanchang captured him on the spot, completely cutting off the control of the Great Qi Dynasty over the army.
The next day, the two quickly approached Kaifeng again. Under the pretext of the military parade, they forcibly embraced Liu Yu, the puppet emperor of the Great Qi, out of the city, which not only completely ended Liu Yu's imperial career, but also demoted him to the king of Shu, and lost a real power since then.
At the same time as the power struggle between the Jin government and the opposition, new turbulent factors were also brewing in the northwest border region. An army led by Yang Shizhen, a small chieftain of the northwestern people, is gradually emerging as a new military force.
Yang Shizhen was originally just a small barbarian chieftain, relying on a brutal and fierce style, and gradually expanded his warlord territory from the hinterland of the desert. He armed himself with heavy troops, and used the ruthless method of "sweeping away all the remnants" to coerce and surrender the tribes in the Hetao area, or completely wipe them out.
In the seventh year of Shaoxing, Yang Shizhen has included all the Hetao area into his own bag. At this time, his iron hooves were trodding through the big desert and the small desert, intending to further expand his power to the entire Hexi Corridor. He was arrogant and even delusional that one day he would be able to unify the vast territory of the entire western part of the desert.
Yang Shizhen was originally from the Fan clan, but he was born to love Huayi civilization and was obsessed with reading and practicing martial arts. He gathered a lot of Han Chinese who traveled to study to plan for his army, and accepted a group of old generals from the Jin State and incorporated them into the pro-army. In this way, although Yang Shizhen is a member of Fanbang, his army contains two forces: Han and Fanren.
He held the incomparable cavalry on the battlefield, dominating the land of the Hetao, and annexed the heroes of the battlefield on all sides. In the eighth year of Shaoxing, Yang Shizhen threatened to move the capital to Shazhou, and boasted that he wanted to create a "great desert kingdom". This greatly panicked the Jin dynasty, fearing that it really had the ambition to destroy Jin and restore the Han dynasty.
Just when the Jin Dynasty was fighting endlessly and the Southern Song Dynasty was advancing step by step, a new military pattern of confrontation between Yang Shizhen and the Jin State was suddenly formed in the northwest border, which undoubtedly made matters worse for the Jin State. Although Jin Guo temporarily relied on his superb riding and archery skills to deter the emerging Yang Shizhen in the desert, he could not attack for a long time, and the two sides fell into a protracted stalemate. Yang Shizhen's new army nail is enough to make the Jinren Mongolia iron cavalry who has been singing all the way for hundreds of years chaotic.
The change of power within the Jin State and the rise of new warlords in the northwestern frontier undoubtedly brought a rare respite to the Southern Song Dynasty. The Song court never gave up its ambition to retake the Central Plains, but was temporarily in a predicament of passive response.
The Jin domestic fighting was fierce, and the two forces of Wanyan Chang and Wanyan Zongbi were on equal footing, consuming a lot of energy from each other. They had no time to take into account the plan to go south to conquer the Southern Song Dynasty, so they had to temporarily shelve their military operations against the Southern Song Dynasty.
Song Gaozong Zhao Gou keenly grasped this opportunity. Although the Huaixi Army has defected, it has not yet completely broken up, and if the Song court can take the initiative to attack and turn the tide of the war, there may still be a chance to turn around. So, Zhao Gou ordered Yue Fei, a famous general of the Song Dynasty and a fifty-year-old at the time, to rectify the border defense and gather a large army in Caizhou.
Yue Fei knew very well that this situation was crucial for the Song court to turn things around. He traveled day and night, and within three months, he gathered more than 80,000 elite people in Caizhou. This is a well-trained elite army, brave and good at fighting, full of fighting against the Jin people.
At the same time, another army of the Southern Song Dynasty was also actively preparing for war. Song Yansi, Fu Xing and others mobilized military horses in Hunan, Zhejiang and other roads, and only after Yue Fei flew out of Sichuan to fight, they could advance in three ways and go straight to the Central Plains.
In contrast, Wan Yan Chang and Wan Yan Zongbi, the upstarts of the Jin Kingdom, have no time to separate. They had to guard against a possible resurgence of rebels in Kaifeng, while continuing to send large armies north to confront Yang Shizhen on the northwestern border. With internal and external troubles, the military strength of the Jin State has almost been dispersed.
The Southern Song Dynasty temporarily turned around, and finally accumulated the vigor to counterattack the Jin State. However, all this is only a temporary respite, and the real decisive battle is yet to come. Although the Jin people were troubled by internal fighting, they were brave and good at fighting, and were known as hussar generals. How could they just let the Southern Song Dynasty reckless and sit idly by and watch the Central Plains fall under the rule of the Song court? The decisive battle between the two sides is about to break out, and the smoke of the Huayi War will soon be re-swayed in the Central Plains.
In March of the eighth year of Shaoxing, the Song army marched in Huaixi, and Yue Fei personally commanded more than 100,000 troops to go out of Cai and cross the Huai River with martial power. This was a large-scale attack that the Southern Song Dynasty had not encountered in a hundred years since the Jingkang disaster, which was enough to make the Jin State look sideways.
The Song army first attacked Huaiyang and Fengyang counties, and drove the rebels out of the Yangtze River in an instant. Yue Fei took advantage of the victory to pursue, and divided his army to go up along the west of the Jiangxi River, and approached Huangzhou, Yongcheng, and other places where the army was attached to the rebel camp of the Jin State, and the offensive was like a rainbow for a while.
Jin Ren didn't expect Yue Fei's attack to be fast, and in the chaos, he had to desperately block it. Seeing that the situation was critical, Wanyan Zongbi urgently transferred the Central Plains army to the south and joined forces with the rebels to resist the Song Dynasty. In June of the eighth year of Shaoxing, the two sides encountered each other in the northwest corner of Bianjing, Huangnixian, and fought hard with each other for dozens of days.
This battle was only a small battle between the two sides, and the Song and Jin armies had already lost tens of thousands of horses. It can be seen that once the decisive battle begins, the sacrifices that both sides will have to pay will be so heavy. The decisive victory or defeat is related to the survival of the country, and Huizong of the Southern Song Dynasty will certainly not stop here, and will use Yue Fei's army to open the way; The Jin people also relied on their old generals to ride the elite of the iron cavalry, aiming to counterattack and recapture the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River. As a result, the streets and alleys of Bianliang Avenue began to build guns, spears, and halberds in full swing, and the two armies were ready to ignite the fire of the decisive battle.
After that, the armies of the two sides were gradually transferred in place, and the war was ignited by the Huangnixian resistance battle, until the first month of the ninth year of Shaoxing, they finally fully clashed on the east and west roads of Bianliang Avenue, Yue Fei's troops fought against Wanyan Zongbi and Yang Shizhen's troops, and Song Yansi and other armies were far away from Wanyanchang's army.
The Huayi War officially kicked off. The two sides rode and shot elite in the Bianliang Avenue two roads for many years, for a time the Hao River swirls blood, the horses are intertwined, reborn from the fire, the golden iron horse is all over the two towns of Bianliang, just like the second Jingkang difficulty will revisit the land of China. The only hope of the Southern Song Dynasty to turn the tide of the war was pinned on Yue Fei, the commander of the army. However, where will the tide of war ultimately go? The ownership of the Central Plains Chinese territory is also as confusing as ever. The smoke of history is swirling in the raging flames of war, and the two sides of Huayi are fearing that this time, the price of reinstatement will be even heavier.