At the end of October, the nineteenth year of Chongzhen in the Ming Dynasty, Qufu, Shandong Province.
The hometown of Saint Kong is much cooler than the last time Duduo came to attack. The nine round fortresses outside the Qufu Grand Bastion are now empty, with no residents left. There were only some regiment training troops in red coats, and under the command of the officers, they were feebly dismantling the fortress.
The purpose of dismantling these fortresses is to avoid being used by the enemy in the next siege battle - now there is not enough manpower for Shi Kefa and Kong Yinzhi to use in the next battle. Because of the food shortage sweeping the southeast, Shandong was also not spared.
There were many refugees in Shandong, and it was on the front line of the struggle against the Qing army. Large areas of flat land suitable for farming were occupied by the Qing army and became the green-flag farms of the Qing Dynasty.
Although Shi Kefa, Gao Hongtu, and Zuo Mao worked hard to introduce sweet potatoes, they were still unable to solve the increasingly serious food shortage.
So starting this summer, the refugees gathered around Qufu began to pour into Huaibei, Xuzhou, Haizhou, and then south of the Huaihe River.
However, while the number of regiment training troops has decreased, their equipment level has been significantly improved. Not only did they obtain many muskets from Japan, they also cast many "one-pound" and "three-pound" general cannons by themselves.
Their Japanese cannons were all bought by the Zheng Sen mission. When Zheng Sen was in Nagasaki, he seemed to disdain the insufficiently powerful Japanese cannons. However, when he arrived in Edo and was given a grand reception by Tokugawa Iemitsu, he came out In order to balance Sino-Japanese trade and promote Sino-Japanese friendship, we still reluctantly purchased 10,000 Japanese blunderbuss.
Zheng Sen hasn't returned yet, but the 10,000 Japanese gunshots he ordered have been shipped back in a hurry.
At the same time, the Generalissimo's Palace received a Spanish light matchlock gun shipped from the Dutch. When comparing the two, it is natural to judge the difference - the Spanish light matchlock gun is not light at all and is very powerful. It can shoot at a distance of thirty paces. There is no problem with shield-piercing vehicles. The turtle-dove musket can even be eliminated, thus reducing the logistical pressure on the new army.
Therefore, the Generalissimo's Office looked down upon this batch of Japanese cannons and did not receive the goods (the funds were also tight!). The Zheng family resold them to Shen Tingyang, and Shen Tingyang sold part of them to the relatively wealthy Shi Kefa - Shi Kefa occupied the treasury of the Kong family in Qufu, so of course he had money to buy arms.
The Qufu Regiment, which received three to four thousand Japanese muskets for training, began to copy the tactics of the Model Army Infantry Regiment and formed a square infantry formation with long spears and muskets. They also imported a batch of general cannons with improved gun mounts from Shen Tingyang's Dengzhou Artillery Factory, including "one catty" and "three catty" cannons. They also built a batch of squatting tiger cannons by themselves.
While acquiring a lot of muskets and artillery, Shi Kefa also did not forget to strengthen the training of the army. However, he disdained Zhu Cixiang's plagiarism of Western routes. Instead, he looked for "New Book of Jixiao", "Records of Military Training" and "Miscellaneous Notes on Military Training" and studied them carefully, and used Qi Jiguang's method to form a chariot, infantry and cavalry camp.
With these more than 10,000 troops equipped with firecrackers and artillery and the official position of "Governor of the Military Gate of Seven Provinces", Shi Kefa transformed into "Liujie Town" (Shi Kefa, Gao Hongtu, Zuo Maodi, Gao Jie, Huang Degong, Zhu Yihai).
However, unlike the army training in Qufu, which took the elite route, the armies of Gao Hongtu, Zuo Maodi, Zhu Yihai, Gaojie and Huang Degong were not reduced due to food shortages. Because the armies of the four warlords are all linked to the land - Gao Hongtu, Zuo Maodi, and Zhu Yihai are all local snakes in Shandong, and they occupy a large territory. There is a group of large and small landowners below, all of whom are opposed to the big land. In the Qing Dynasty, enclosures and land equalization were implemented. Naturally, we must go all out to maintain the scale of regiment training!
Even if there is not enough food and we drive away some refugees to beg for food, we still have to feed the regiment to defend our land!
However, the armies of Gao Hongtu, Zuo Maodi, and Zhu Yihai were all established to protect the land of the landlord class. Naturally, they were unable to meet the land needs for ordinary regiment training... Therefore, in the Qing Dynasty, the land was enclosed Under the dual pressure of land granting, land equalization based on population calculation, and the implementation of land granting by the Gao and Huang armies, their military morale fluctuated a bit.
In addition, it needs to be mentioned that although the military equipment of Gao Hongtu, Zuo Maodi and Zhu Yihai is not as good as that of Shi Kefa (among them, Zhu Yihai's military equipment is better), the training and organization methods adopted are all learned from Qi Jiguang's. A mixed path of cannon, infantry and cavalry.
The two warlords Gao Jie and Huang Degong were half transformed by Zhu Cixiang - from mercenaries to feudal land armies, but the nature of the warlords did not fundamentally change.
After the transformation, the two warlords had much fewer troops on the books (they did not exist in the first place), but they were still able to maintain a fighting force of 10,000 or 20,000 people (households). They were also awarded farms and were organized according to the model army. After adjustment, a group of Luogan was formed. The tactics were of course all "Morris" style, but the number of muskets and artillery was insufficient.
Of course, the land soldiers who have farms will not be driven to death by famine, so the food shortage sweeping Huaibei and Xuhai has not had a big impact on them. In some cases, it has even strengthened the strength of this group of land soldiers - many of them have been displaced. All the northern refugees became tenants of the landlords of the Gao and Huang armies.
However, both Gao and Huang Jun also have their own hard-to-recite scriptures.
The problem for Gao Jiajun is that he has too much money! Gao Jie and Mrs. Xing took refuge with Zhu Cixi relatively early, and they were the leading figures in the bandit faction of the Beifu Group. Prince Zhu intended to support them to balance the Liaozhen faction (that is, the gang of Wu Xiang, Wu Sanfu, and Wu Guoyong), so he gave them a piece of Good Land Haizhou - This is a newly established Zhili Prefecture, including the original Haizhou (substate), Suqian, Pizhou, and Shuyang areas. It has coastal canals, criss-crossing water networks, and fertile land. It can be regarded as "Huaibei and Jiangnan".
After acquiring this land, Gao Jie and Xing Niangzi spent a lot of effort to take care of it. They didn't bother with official fields or military villages. They just carefully sorted the land and then collected grains per mu. One bushel for dry fields and two bushels for paddy fields. There was no tax exemption... Don't underestimate it. After arriving in Haizhou, a careful inventory found that there were no less than seven million acres. Taking an average of one and a half dou, the land tax alone was no less than one million dan.
In the process of Zhu Cixiang's "transformation" of Gao Jiajun, Haizhou Prefecture was not deprived of its right to rule, nor did it touch Haizhou's tax revenue and land. Instead, it took Xuzhou's land (Xuzhou was conquered and occupied by the Qing army, The population was greatly reduced and there was a lot of wasteland) among the officers and soldiers of the Gao family army.
Therefore, the approximately 20,000 soldiers of the Gao Family Army had both the land of Xuzhou and the taxes of Haizhou, and they all became rich... They were rich, but unfortunately they also became less courageous, and they were less willing to fight with the Qing army. Beaten to death.
They have everything but lack fighting power. How can they have the courage to fight the powerful Qing army?
The problem for Huang Jiajun is that he has little money!
Because Huang Degong joined Zhu Cixiang a little late, and he was from the Yongwei camp, a direct lineage of Chongzhen, he was never favored by Zhu Cixiang, and he did not have a good land to fish for. The Huaibei area assigned to him was already poor and was ravaged by the Qing army, so We can only divide the land, and there is no place to collect taxes.
Moreover, Huang Degong's team arrived at the land relatively late, missing last year's farming season and causing widespread harvest failure in Huaibei. This year, there was another drought in Huaibei, and the area for spring sowing was small (the land had just been divided), so there was a food shortage before the autumn harvest.
Huang Degong had no choice but to borrow food from Gao Jie, a wealthy man. Gao Jie refused to borrow food, so the two had a falling out.
Huang Degong made a fuss about Suining and Taoyuan, which were disputed by both parties (both counties are to the west of the south-flowing Yellow River), and directly sent troops to occupy them.
Gao Jie didn't know where he got the news that Huang Degong was protecting Zhu Cihuan, and he was reported to him through a secret plan!
But Shi Kefa didn't know about this (Zhu Cihuan was protecting Gao Jie), and he considered himself the leader of the armies, so when Ji Kunji's secret agent came north, he summoned Gao Jie, Huang Degong, Gao Hongtu, and Zuo Mao in Qufu. The third group, in the name of welcoming Zhu Yihai who returned from the pilgrimage, wanted to unify his position on the two issues of Zhu Cihong's progress and the Ming Dynasty's Northern Expedition.
But now Huang Degong, Gao Hongtu, Zuo Maodi, and Zhu Yihai have all arrived in Qufu, but Gao Jie is nowhere to be seen... And a large number of warlords organized such gatherings before the imperial envoys arrived. No matter how you look at it, they are all conspiring. !
