To the rulers of the Ming Dynasty, Mongolia was like a cloud that lingered overhead, lasting for three hundred years. Especially during the Wanli to Chongzhen periods, the experienced Ming Dynasty was defeated by Hou Jin in the process of winning over the Mongols, resulting in the last twenty years of the dynasty being attacked from both sides.
Speaking of this, we can't help but wonder why the Mongolian problem, which the Ming Dynasty failed to solve for 300 years, became a problem in more than 20 years after the Jin Dynasty.
This matter has to start from the Northern Expedition.
In 1367, Zhu Yuanzhang northernly attacked the Yuan court, and by the time of Zhu Di, Meng Yuan had retreated to the desert and fell into chaos, splitting into the three forces of Wuliangha Sanwei, Walla, and Tatar.
During the Zhengde period, Dayan Khan unified the Mongol departments, dividing the southern and northern parts of the desert into two wings, totaling 60,000 households, while the Chahar Department where the Great Khan was located was called the Central Ten Thousand Households, which belonged to the left-wing departments. During the Jiajing period, the Chahar tribe moved east to Liaodong, causing the Mongols to split again, and their left and right wings were opposed to each other.
Because mongolia belonged to the nomadic people, lacked agricultural economic support, iron, cloth and other materials were very tight, the Ming Dynasty took advantage of this urgent need of Mongolia to force the Mongol ministries to submit with tribute and trade, and finally in the Longqing period, it reached the title of tribute, determined the relationship between the Ming Dynasty and the right-wing Mongol vassals, and achieved a brief peace in the northwest for nearly 40 years.
However, for the left-wing Mongols, the Ming Dynasty was reluctant to live in peace, so the Liaodong region was invaded for many years, especially during the Wanli period. At this time, the left-wing Mongolia was mainly composed of three parts: Chahar, Khalkha, and Korqin.
Among them, the Korqin Department is the closest to the Jurchens, so the two inevitably intersect. Later, Nurhaci conquered the Jurchens of Jianzhou and rose rapidly, causing dissatisfaction among the Jurchen tribes in Haixi, so a civil war broke out between the two sides, and the Horqin tribe also participated.
It turned out that the so-called Nine-Part Coalition army was defeated, and the Horqin Tribe was among them, but Nurhaci did not want to be an enemy of the Horqin Tribe, so he tried to ease the contradictions with the Mongol tribes, and planned to further deepen the relationship with the Horqin Tribe and gradually dominate the Mongols.
In the forty years of the Wanli Calendar, Nurhaci took the initiative to hire a woman as a concubine to the Horqin Ministry, thus opening the road of a hundred-year marriage between Manchuria and Mongolia. Nurhaci then married another daughter, and both his sons Emperor Taiji and Azig were married to the Mongol Horqin. In the forty-fifth year of the Wanli calendar, Nurhaci even gave marriage to the hostile Mongolian Khalkha, completely ending the hostile relations between the Manchu and Mongolian ethnic groups.
Just as the so-called "the south does not seal the king, the north continues to kiss", political marriage is not only an important means for the later Jin dynasty to unite with Mongolia, but also one of the basic national policies that the Qing Dynasty has adhered to in later generations. Nurhaci both consolidated his dominance through political marriage and split left-wing Mongolia.
The political imbalance in the political imbalance caused strong resentment among the Khalkha and Korqin tribes, despite its ambitions to reunify Mongolia, "regarded itself as the Son of Heaven".
In the 47th year of the Wanli Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty was defeated at Salhu, which made the situation in Liaodong passive, and in order to stabilize the situation, the Ming Dynasty ordered Xiong Tingbi to reorganize the defensive line on the one hand, and sought the support of the left-wing Mongols on the other, hoping to curb the rise of Later Jin.
The best candidate is undoubtedly the Chahar Ministry, which is isolated by Mongolia.
Faced with the increasingly tense situation in Eastern Liaoning, the Ming Dynasty united with Lin Dan Khan of the Chahar Department and succeeded. After the Battle of Salhu, the Lin Dan Khanate warned Nurhaci not to invade Guangning, the throat of Western Liaoning. By the forty-eighth year of the Wanli Calendar, Houjin was directly approaching Shanhaiguan, and the Ming Dynasty was unable to fight back for a while, but fortunately Lin Dan Khan sent troops to rescue houjin to force Houjin to retreat.
In the fifth year of the Apocalypse, Lin Dan Khan invaded the Horqin department in an attempt to reunite Mongolia, which led to a split in the Khalkha department, and the Horqin tribe fell directly to the Houjin. In desperation, Lin Dan Khan moved west to right-wing Mongolia, and only after many conquests did he barely control right-wing Mongolia.
At this time, Hou Jin, without the threat of Lin Dan Khan, chose to send troops to Shanhaiguan, only to suffer a fiasco at Ning Jin. After regrouping, Hou Jin shifted the route of attack to the north and south of Jizhou, but in this way, a frontal conflict with the Chahar Department broke out.
Since it was difficult to resolve the dispute between the two sides peacefully, Hou Jin simply went to war and marched south to the Chahar Department by force. Faced with the powerful Imperial Taiji army, the Chahar army was defeated one after another.
Although the Chahar Ministry also asked the Ming Dynasty for help, the Ming Dynasty and the Chahar Ministry were in constant conflict with each other, and the Chongzhen Emperor's ambitions made a misjudgment of the situation. Another point is that the outbreak of the peasant revolt made the Ming Dynasty unable and unwilling to spend a huge amount of money to aid the Chahar Ministry.
Under the influence of a variety of factors, Huang Taiji successfully conquered southern Mongolia, and implemented political measures such as dividing pasture land and organizing banners in Mongolia in accordance with the eight banners, which completely solved the Mongolian problem that plagued the Ming Dynasty for nearly 300 years.
In contrast, in the Ming Dynasty at this time, there was a powerful post-golden tiger on the outside, and there were frequent peasant uprisings on the inside, and under the external worries and internal troubles, it was nothing more than a matter of time before it was destroyed.
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