After entering Higo from Hizen, Hirate Honhide first met the only force in southern Kyushu that is still resisting the Shimazu family, Aso Shrine. The name of the contemporary Omiya Division is only a kind of leader, and it is the leader who really speaks to the old Jiafei Zongyun.

This is a legendary general, surrounded by countless powerful enemies on all sides, using military strategy and wisdom to maintain the survival of the main family, maintaining a territory of about 50,000 to 100,000 koku in one and a half counties.

In the process, countless relatives and friends around him were rebelled one after another, including all four of his sons. In order to maintain the situation, Kai Zongyun personally killed the second and third sons, exiled the younger son, and only one of the remaining eldest sons survived the persuasion of his colleagues.

In order to be loyal, kill your own flesh and blood, and there is more than one! It's really not something that ordinary people can do.

When he saw it, Kai Zongyun was already an old man in his seventies, thin and shriveled, his eyes were blank, and he looked very inconspicuous. If no one introduced me, I would never have imagined that he would be a powerful person.

There were also thousands of tired soldiers on the side, almost all of them wounded, and it was clear that it would not be easy to fight repeatedly under the siege of Shimazu's army.

"As long as you keep your foundation with peace of mind and wait for the people who unify the world to intervene in Kyushu, then the Aso family will be able to survive." Jia Fei Zongyun said with emotion: "The old man has been repeating the same sentence to the people around him all these years, but he never thought in his heart that he could really see this day coming. ”

As soon as this remark came out, it really seemed extraordinary in style and far-reaching.

A simple and natural remark to posterity was a very scarce and brilliant insight in the sixteenth century. Walking from Kyoto to Kyushu, in fact, most of the wealthy people did not realize the weight of the word "people who unify the world", and thought that as before, they would squat in their own earthen enclosures for a few months, and wait until the army withdrew to be the emperor of the soil.

For the sake of this sentence, Fan Xiu decided to give a special touch.

He made the decision: "All the land in Aso Prefecture can be counted as a shrine security, and there is no blame for any illegal occupation in the past." But in the future, please focus on religious matters, and do not worship the gods while wielding swords and guns. All the secular samurai were separated from it and transferred to Kanto as courtiers of the new daimyo of the Kai clan. ”

This result is much better than the previous plan, but it is still not a very generous treatment. The reason for this is that Hirate was very wary of the combination of religious forces with secular samurai.

The most troublesome thing is the powerful in-laws......

When the plan was announced, the expressions of the other people in the Aso family were complicated, and it was not that they were satisfied or dissatisfied, only Kai Zongyun stroked his palms and laughed, all the wrinkles on his face unfolded, and Gu Zuo said: "It seems that the shrine will sit back and relax in the future, and the old man has finally lived up to his father's trust, so he can go with confidence." ”

……

Further south, Hirate learned that Shimazu Yoshihisa had been recuperating and training at Minamata Castle in southern Higo for a long time, and that Shimazu Yoshihiro and Shimazu Iehisa had also arrived.

In other words, after the enemy had inflicted heavy losses on the southern front of the crusading army in Hyuga Province, he concentrated his forces and prepared to fight the main force of the crusading army.

There is no intention of timidity at all, and it is a hard-hitting posture.

At this time, the army around Hitete was still about 70,000, and there were some losses on the Chikuzen battlefield, but then he received enough backup.

The Shimazu family, on the other hand, has never had the opportunity to recuperate due to their perennial wars, and despite occupying the territory of Shikoku, the total number of troops is still only more than 30,000.

However, they have always been known for their high proportion of samurai and for not mobilizing peasants and soldiers, and they have a strategy of placing great emphasis on quality over quantity.

Winning more with less is an honor worth remembering for a lifetime for other daimyos, but for the Shimazu family, it is commonplace and accustomed to it.

It's the same 30,000 people, but it seems to be a different weight from the dragon temple family.

The most intuitive thing is that the flat hand has been in southern Kyushu for several days, but there has never been any Chinese wealthy family who has taken the initiative to take refuge, and there is no one.

Is this because the Shimazu family's rule is so popular? Or do they have the confidence to win?

Hosahide asked the people who were close to him to share their opinions, and then Hosokawa Fujitaka made a very comprehensive statement.

First of all, it is undeniable that Shimazu Yoshihisa is very skillful, and it is said that he has a deep charisma, is very fair, and can make both parties feel impartial when deciding cases. At the same time, his third brother is considered to be "a mysterious and wise man who can naturally perceive people's hearts", and often perceives potential internal contradictions from his words and even his actions, and then skillfully channels, alleviates or suppresses them.

Then there are the two people whose family is more famous in public opinion, the second brother Yoshihiro who is brave and the fourth brother who knows the soldiers and is good at planning, the two have joined forces to create many classic battles with fewer victories, and for more than ten years on Kyushu Island is synonymous with long-term victory and undefeated, and only by relying on the name can make the samurai with a foreign surname frightened and flee. (The fiasco of Yoshitomo Otomo is an example)

Four talents with different emphases but can form complementary talents were born into four brothers at the same time. It is just because the family can get a share of the cake in the expansion during the rising period, and it is incredible that there is no big disagreement and efficient cooperation is maintained.

The ability to resist blows is definitely stronger than that of Ryuzoji, and most of them are better than Maori, maybe it is still above Gohojo.

There is also a distinctive feature of Minami Kyushu that should not be overlooked.

That is, after the ancestors of the Shimazu family established themselves here five hundred years ago, the hegemony of this land has never been out of the control of this family, but has only circulated between different branches.

After a long time, it spreads out and falls, and it is as huge as a towering tree. There are more than a dozen families that still use Shimazu Miao characters, and there are even more than thirty or forty Shu people who use other Miao characters, so it can be said that any person with status in Southern Kyushu can find that they are either differentiated from the Shimazu family lineage or married the daughter of the Shimazu family.

Why is the proportion of samurai in the Shimazu army so high? It may be because of the lush foliage and the large number of children and grandchildren, the boy who came out of the house has been educated as a samurai since he was a child, but he has not inherited much Zhixing territory, so he can only actively participate in joint battles and earn a living with swords, guns, bows and horses.

A family has persisted in this remote land for 500 years, and the inertia formed is terrible. It's one thing for brothers to fight inside the wall, and if you want to intervene as an outsider, it will cause public outrage from the same enemy.

- This is the statement of Takashi Hosokawa.

The tie had to think deeply.

In the battle before Chikuzen, he won 30 relatives and more than 200 ministers of the Ryuzoji family, which is equivalent to destroying the entire system and breaking the foundation, and how to deal with it later is at your fingertips.

But in Shimazu's situation, I'm afraid that tens of thousands of people will have to be killed to eliminate their influence in southern Kyushu.

It's a bit too much to lose, it's too troublesome and too energy--it's better to force it to give in - Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu on the original "official history" may have thought so.

Purely from a military point of view, the Shimazu family is difficult to deal with, but it is not impossible to deal with, after all, the size is limited, and it is not afraid that it will drag on or not to drag on if it pulls more than 100,000 people to fight a protracted war for a year and a half.

But what about the politics behind it?

Crusade is not an end, but a means. The purpose was to stabilize the prestige and make the foundation of the "Tie Shogunate" seem to be ripe. If the political situation is more unstable than before the war, won't it backfire?

But is the Shimazu family really that stable?

In fact, looking at it, the competition between different branches has always been fierce due to the conflict of interests. It was not until decades ago, after the rise of Shimazu Tadaya and Shimazu Takahisa, that two generations spent a great deal of energy to build a new order, dividing the descendants into the inferior and the superior, and clarifying the status and rights and responsibilities of each family, which laid the foundation for recent expansion.

Tie Tsuei felt that it could never be really invulnerable.