The Manchu Qing Eight Banner Army defeated all enemies in the last years of the Ming Dynasty, playing a mainstay role in the unification of China for the Qing Dynasty, the Eight Banner Army since the Chongzhen Dynasty, rarely lost battles, and faced the large-scale battles of the Ming Empire, it was almost completely victorious.
So, at that time, there was no army that could fight against the Eight Flags Army? In fact, there were, but this army was not a Ming army, but Li Zicheng's peasant rebel army.
What is the strength of Li Zicheng's peasant army? Why did they eventually perish? Today we will talk about the almost forgotten army at the time of the fall of the Qing Dynasty.
First of all, we can be sure that since Emperor Taiji took over the Manchurian regime, the Ming Empire has never been able to defeat the Eight Banners Army militarily. Because Emperor Taiji built the Eight Banner Army into a powerful military group composed of infantry, cavalry and artillery.
At that time, the Ming Empire, whether it was the Guanning Army, the Qin Army, the Tianxiong Army, or the Sichuan Army and zhejiang soldiers in the south, was not an opponent of the Eight Banner Army, even if the Ming Dynasty gathered all the main forces in the Battle of Songjin to fight a decisive battle against the Qing Army, and in the end it was almost completely destroyed.
Throughout the history of the late Ming Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty lost hundreds of thousands of field forces in the past twenty years in the face of the Eight Banner Army in the northeast, and it can be said that the Ming Dynasty had no way to take the Eight Banner Army.
Some people will ask, the Ming Dynasty army, as the country's regular army, is not the opponent of the Eight Banner Army, Li Zicheng's peasant army is a new army, mostly rebellious peasants, how can they fight against the well-equipped Manchurian Iron Horse, who has experienced hundreds of battles?
In fact, this is a small look at the rebel army, indeed, Li Zicheng did not have much strength at the beginning of the uprising, he was a "laid-off" pawn, although after the uprising organized some people, but these people are either hungry people, or were bandits, except for a small number of bankrupt rebels, Li Zicheng army did not have any decent soldiers and horses.
However, with the decay within the Ming Dynasty, the rebel army burned all over the northern land like a fire, and there were hundreds of thousands of displaced people everywhere, and Gao Yingxiang, Li Zicheng, Zhang Xianzhong, and others relied on this continuous source of troops to continuously expand their strength.
A few years later, Li Zicheng networked a group of brave and warlike warriors in the rebel army, forming a core armed force of thousands of people, and he became the leader of the young rebel army.
Later, the Ming Dynasty sent Hong Chengzu, Sun Chuanting and others to surround and suppress the Shaanxi rebel army, Gao Yingxiang's army was defeated and captured, And Li Zicheng and others were also defeated, and at one point they were beaten to the point where only a hundred people followed him and fled into the mountains to hide.
It can be said that At this time, Li Zicheng was facing complete failure, however, the Ming Dynasty was drying firewood everywhere, and as long as the fire of the uprising existed, it could immediately ignite a raging fire.
Within two years, the revolt of the displaced people revolted again, and Li Zicheng took advantage of the situation to go out of the mountains, he led more than a thousand old troops, made a comeback, and in an instant recruited tens of thousands of displaced people, fired and merged a group of rebel troops, and brought their elite under his command.
Li Zicheng did not repeat the mistakes of the past, he fought in the Central Plains, successively defeated the Ming army Zuo Liangyu, Fu Zonglong, Wang Qiaonian, Sun Chuanting and other people who were encircling and suppressing, and broke through the Ming Dynasty's important towns luoyang and Kaifeng, obtaining a large amount of grain and grass materials and capturing a large number of Ming regular troops.
In just two years, Li Zicheng had grown from an armed force of only 1,000 men to a powerful armed force with nearly 100,000 troops and a complete number of ma bushui armies.
He formed in Xiangyang and divided the soldiers and horses into five armies, especially the most elite of the Zhongquan pro-army.
At the beginning of the seventeenth year of Chongzhen, Li Zicheng built the name Dashun in Xi'an, and then waved his division eastward and attacked Beijing, during which Li Zicheng swept through the border troops along the Ming Dynasty Great Wall, and many Ming regular troops surrendered, which in turn enhanced the strength of the rebel army.
Four months later, the rebel army broke through Beijing and Chongzhen committed suicide.
Up to this point, Li Zicheng had pacified Shaanxi, Shaanxi, Hebei, Henan, Beijing, and other places, sitting on hundreds of thousands of troops, strong and strong, and his subordinates had old troops that had followed him in the uprising for many years, rebel armies with other forces that had been incorporated, and former Ming dynasty regular troops who surrendered.
However, Li Zicheng was a light enemy.
Shanhaiguan was the most important barrier against the Manchu Qing, and Wu Sangui was guarding there, and Li Zicheng did not succeed in surrendering Wu Sangui, so he decided to solve it by force.
However, he did not expect that the Eight Banner Army would support Wu Sangui, let alone that Wu Sangui would surrender to the Manchu Qing.
In the decisive battle at Shanhaiguan, Li Zicheng personally led the main force of 70,000 or 80,000 rebel troops to engage Wu Sangui's Guanning army first, and after two days of fierce fighting, the 50,000 Guanning army saw the collapse.
Wu Sangui broke through to ask Dorgon for help, shaved his hair and changed his clothes, knelt down and surrendered, so Dorgon sent tens of thousands of elites from the Eight Banners to attack the rebel army by taking advantage of the wind.
The rebel army fought fiercely for two days, and it was already exhausted, and the sudden appearance of the Eight Banner Army was completely unexpected by Li Zicheng.
Even so, the rebel generals still fought bravely to kill the enemy, and the Eight Banner Army suffered quite serious casualties, and after a very fierce battle, it defeated the rebel army.
At the Battle of Shanhaiguan, Li Zicheng's rebel army was seriously injured, and then it was pursued by the Qing army and suffered heavy losses. After this battle, Li Zicheng was never able to regain his peak strength, and was constantly attacked by the Qing army, and eventually lost and died.
After Li Zicheng's death, the rebel army was forced to unite with the Southern Ming against the Qing army, and in the case of a large number of former Ming army surrendering, the rebel army always held high the banner of resistance to the Qing Dynasty, preferring to die rather than surrender.
The rebel army of Li Zicheng's family later turned to the area around Chuandong in Chongqing, and they were known as the "Thirteen Families of the Eastern Qing Dynasty", who resisted until the third year of the Qing Kangxi Dynasty, twenty years after the fall of the Ming Dynasty, and this group of people was also the anti-Qing armed forces that the mainland persisted to the end.