"Fu'anzi, King Saifudin is here."

Huang Yuan raised his head from the paperwork in front of him and asked, "Didn't Your Majesty hunt on the outskirts of the city today?" Saifuddin didn't have a past? ”

"The army has just returned, and His Majesty has hunted a few wolves and a bear, and is going to roast bear meat at night."

Huang Yuan smiled, although there are bears here in Persia, they are only found in the north, and the climate here in the south is hot, even if there are bears, I am afraid that the tribes here deliberately caught and released them.

However, he has no intention of exposing this, as long as His Majesty is in a happy mood, it is better than anything else.

He got up and walked out of the desk and greeted him outside the door.

Saifudin, as the king of Kurumus, although it is only a small country, but in recent years it has been protected by the Ming Dynasty, and Kurumus has become a famous trade center in the Middle East, and it has developed very rapidly.

Saifuddin had been threatened by the Timurid state, and now with the protection of the Ming navy, he no longer trembled, but in the face of the Ming Dynasty, he also completely lost his original independence.

Seeing Huang Yuan personally greet him, he jumped off his horse and said with a smile: "Mr. Huang, this king is here to disturb again." ”

Huang Yuan bowed and saluted: "The monarch came in person, Yuan has missed the welcome, please forgive the sin, please inside." ”

Saifuddin had invited a Da Ming Xiucai to teach him to learn Da Ming dialect three years ago, and now although he speaks with a strong accent, there is no problem in communicating.

In the reception room, Saifuddin said straight to the point: "Mr. Huang, your country has now transported a large amount of timber from Kezhi and built a large number of trebuchets, can I buy a batch of trebuchets." ”

Huang Yuan couldn't help but smile and asked, "The monarch should have told His Majesty, right?" ”

"Yes, Your Majesty asked me to come to you."

Huang Yuan said with a smile: "Now that my Ming Dynasty is about to go north, this trebuchet will only be too little, not too much." My Ming Dynasty is now in the army, and the monarch naturally does not have to worry about safety, and when my Ming soldiers withdraw, these trebuchets will naturally not all be transported back. ”

Saifudin then understood, and said with a smile: "I see, ...... so."

In the Ming Dynasty, trebuchets have long been replaced by newer artillery. Not only can artillery hit farther than trebuchets, but it is also not much less lethal.

But in this place, because there is fire oil everywhere, the power of fire oil bombs is stronger than that of artillery, but the distance is a little closer.

Artillery will consume a lot of gunpowder, of course, it must be saved, so the Ming will build a large number of trebuchets.

When they go back, of course, all of these trebuchets will not be transported back to Daming, and most of them will stay here.

Therefore, he will not be required to buy it at all, and it will be left to him.

Moreover, the Kurumus were not wealthy in the eyes of the Ming Dynasty, and they relied on the protection of the Ming Dynasty and now became a center of trade. The Ming Dynasty earned more in these trades than Hurumus.

The stronger a country that is completely dependent on the Ming Dynasty, the more it is in the interests of the Ming Dynasty. Some small money, but it is a small thing.

Now that Saifuddin is here, Huang Yuan also asked about the progress of the craftsmen he organized to process the oil bombs.

The invention of the trebuchet is more than a thousand years old, but in the East, almost all of it is stone-throwing.

The manufacture of fire oil bombs is not as simple as hollowing out a stone with a stonemason.

The size of the opening of the fire oil bomb is related to how long it can burn and how powerful it is.

The Ming had no experience in this area and relied mainly on Arab craftsmen to make it.

To be able to get a batch of trebuchets for nothing, Saifudin was quite happy. There are steppes and water sources in this part of Persia, but there is a lack of trees.

When trees from the north are shipped to the south, they become sky-high. So most of the trebuchets here are built with timber brought from India.

Now that he can save a lot of money on military spending, of course he is happy. "Now 5,000 oil bombs have been made, enough for an army to fight all the way to Samarkand."

Now that the main force of the Southern Route Army was about to set off, Huang Yuan went to the fire oil bomb manufacturing base on Gesham Island on the second day.

Qeshm Island is the largest island in the Persian Gulf, and this island is a stone island with an inexhaustible supply of stones.

Huang Yuan first inspected the production of fire oil bombs, and saw that all kinds of fire oil bombs as large as seventy or eighty catties and as small as twenty or thirty catties were sealed in wax, sealed, and transported to the Daming military camp on land, so he was relieved.

Most of the servants who worked here were servants brought in from India, and although they were a little stupid, they were still qualified for manual work and carrying baggage.

Subsequently, he came to the Daming artillery base in the north of the central stone mountain.

The solid shells fired by the artillery were all handed over to the craftsmen of Kurumus, and the base here was small, but it produced the most powerful flowering shells of the Ming Dynasty at present.

This kind of flowering shell is actually a large grenade, which cannot be fired with artillery, but only with trebuchets.

The center of the stone bomb was hollowed out, and inside it was stuffed with gunpowder and stones, thistles. The stones are slightly larger, and the thistles are lighter. When it explodes, the shell of the stone bullet and the stones inside can form a killing range of more than ten meters, while the killing range of the thistle terrestris can reach thirty or forty meters.

Because of the limited quantity of gunpowder, not much of this kind of shell was produced, but the Ming army had high hopes for this kind of shell.

When the power of trebuchets is not far apart, and the manufacture of fire and oil bombs is not much different, this kind of bomb is the most effective weapon for conquering cities.

The Ming Dynasty now has long-range artillery, medium-range trebuchets, and short-range muskets, and in the entire weapon architecture, it has tended to be complete.

However, the Timurid state only had a medium-range attack and some threat, so the Ming was almost 100% sure.

The only thing that could restrain the Ming soldiers was the wasteland and the excessively long battle line.

However, now that there is India's servant army, with the continuous transportation of grain from various Indian countries, and the fact that the Ming Dynasty has decided to implement a plundering policy throughout Persia, those who obey us will prosper and those who oppose us will perish, so the supply problem can be greatly alleviated.

Of course, the good coordination of Indian countries and the coordination of their relations is quite a test of Huang Yuan's ability.

If he can handle this matter well, he will be the first to do this expedition to the west.

The day of the expedition was scheduled for the first day of October, and the army was expected to attack Herat in three months.

Rest in Herat for some time before continuing north.

At that time, the Northern Route Army would also send troops from within the country and attack Samarkand directly.

If the war goes well, the two armies will converge between the summer and autumn of next year.

In this battle, Zhu Di will lead the land army slowly but firmly all the way north to conquer the city.

The cavalry would roam left and right, mopping and mopping, while the Indian servant army was responsible for plundering and transporting supplies.

The preparations for Kurumus's army have entered the final stage, and Zhu Zhanji, who is far away in the capital, is also counting the days.

Although the Ming Dynasty's westward expedition was not a national force, after all, the pathology that could be sent was limited, and it was mainly based on cavalry.

But this is definitely a battle of national fortunes, and if Timur can be defeated, it will keep the Green Cult out of Central Asia.

In the original history, the chaos and rebellion in the northwest would not have reappeared.

And on the first day of October, when the snow had begun to fall in Mobei, Zheng Heng had already led a large army from Beiming Mountain and headed to the northwest four months ahead of schedule.

He did not dare to wait until February next year to set off again, for fear that the war would be unfavorable or the road would be dangerous and his trip would be delayed.

Although it is freezing now, the supplies of the military guards along the way have been in place. Their 130,000 cavalry only needed to carry weapons and travel lightly, and the cold weather would not be an obstacle.

From Beimingshan, he took 80,000 cavalry, plus 10,000 cavalry from Wara, 30,000 cavalry from Tatars, 10,000 cavalry from Duoyan Sanwei and Eastern Liao, a total of 130,000 troops.

When they reach the northwest, they will also draw another 20,000 cavalry from the various military guards in the northwest to make up 100,000 cavalry.

As for the Turpan Kingdom, Huozhou Kingdom, and Liucheng Kingdom in the northwest, although they will not send troops to the army, they will be responsible for the supply within their borders.

Of course, these supplies were also transported to the northwest by the Ming Dynasty, but the Ming Dynasty only transported these grains and grass to Jiayuguan and Hamiwei in the far northwest.

For the rest of the journey, they were responsible for transporting it.

However, they are still very happy, because in the past three years, the Ming Dynasty has transported mountains of grain and various fabrics to the northwest, which are the most wanted trading goods for all ethnic groups in the northwest.

And now, as long as they are in charge of transportation, they can drop half of it, and they don't have to pay a tael of silver, how can they refuse!

The Eastern Chahatai Khanate, which had the largest power in the northwest, not only sent a large number of wagons to transport cotton to Jiayuguan and grain back, but also sent a cavalry of 30,000 men to participate in the battle.

They have been bullied enough by the Timurid state over the years, and they have lost a large part of the territory in the middle of the river, and they have long been inseparable from the Timurid state.

Chen Cheng has been in contact with the northwestern countries these days, and in addition to these countries, he even went to the Golden Horde to conduct various trade negotiations with the tribes of the Golden Horde, which was actually a political court.

Although the Golden Horde was founded by Temujin's grandson, Batu, two hundred years have passed, and the dominant position of the Mongols has long since ceased to exist.

The composition of the population in the territory of the Golden Horde was complex, and the level of social development was very different. Some tribes are no less civilized than Timur, but there are also many tribes who live a primitive life between poor mountains and bad waters.

By the fifteenth century, the main branch of the Batu line of the Golden Horde was replaced by the emerging White Horde, and the Mongols gradually lost control in Central and Eastern Europe and Northwest Asia.

This substitution was not only the Golden Horde, in fact, the Timurid state was originally a tribe of the Western Chakhatai Khanate, and finally replaced the Mongols as the ruler of the Western Chakhatai Khanate.

It is precisely because of this complex ethnic composition that the Ming Dynasty's western expedition to Timur will not encounter too much resistance, but other ethnic groups are willing to help the Ming Dynasty and conquer the most powerful Timur country.

Zhu Zhanji's attitude towards the Golden Horde was no closer than that of Timur, because the current Golden Horde had completely lost the tradition of the Mongol Yuan people and was moving closer to the West.

Muhammad Yue is also translated as Uzbek Khan, which was originally the Uzbek Khan. The ninth Great Khan of the Golden Horde, and the longest-reigning monarch of the Golden Horde, ruled for a total of thirty years, from 1312 to 1341.

During his reign, he greened the Golden Horde.

Not only did he maintain diplomatic relations with the rulers of Egypt, Mamluk, Byzantium, and Bulgaria, as well as Yuanrenzong, against the Ilkhanate.

As a sign of closeness, he married a princess to the Sultan of Nasir of Egypt.

Another major event during his reign was the struggle between Lithuania and the Kipchak Khanate to become the protector of Russia, and Ivan I of Moscow took the opportunity to cooperate with the Kipchak Khanate in order to develop.

For this reason, he married a Byzantine princess and made her also convert to the Green Religion. It was only later that the princess left him and returned to Orthodox Christianity.

The history of a hundred years ago has only just passed for the present. Due to the decline of the Mongol Yuan people in the Golden Horde, the number of people who believe in the Green Religion has been greatly reduced.

However, Zhu Zhanji did not want to leave a little trouble, so during the period of sending Chen Cheng as an envoy, he asked him to establish relations with the Kazakhs, so as to weaken the power of the Golden Horde.

Today's Golden Horde is led by the White Horde, most of whom later became known as Uzbekistan.

Later Russia, however, was still a small principality, sheltered by the Golden Horde.

And another powerful people, the Kazakhs, do not yet have this nation at all.

Because the meaning of Kazakh was originally to be a detached, a refuge, they were originally a branch of the Uzbeks, separated from the Uzbeks.

Zhu Zhanji asked Chen Cheng to come to Central Asia for the purpose of finding out this branch and supporting them, and to support a large yellow-skinned force with Mengyuan blood that did not believe in Orthodox Christianity or the Green Religion in Central Asia.

With this idea, Chen Cheng's footsteps went from Yili to the shore of Daqing Lake (Balkhash Lake) to find a descendant of the Mengyuan people who were still living a nomadic life.

At a time when most of the tribes were semi-sedentary and cultivated crops, the tribe still lived a primitive nomadic life.

But there were definitely quite a few of them, 50,000 of them, and they were brave and good at fighting.

Chen Cheng contacted them under the introduction of Yili and promised to give them the West Seven Rivers area of the Chu River and Talas River basins to nomadic herding in order to strengthen their strength.

This area was later the northern part of Kyrgyzstan and the southern part of Kazakhstan, and is currently part of the disputed area between the Khatsakhanate (Yilizhari) and the Golden Horde.

But with the concession of Yili Li, this place was assigned to this tribe.

The Ming Dynasty's request was that the other party could not believe in the Green Religion and the Orthodox Church, and was willing to join the Ming Dynasty.

And they originally believed in Buddhism, so they readily agreed to Chen Cheng's conditions.

The time entered the end of November, and after a long march of more than a month, Zheng Heng arrived at Broken Leaf City with a total of 180,000 troops.

This small city, located northwest of Lake Issyk-Kul and on the Chu River, became the forward position of the army.

Here they will wait for the weather to warm up before marching southwest to Samarkand.

On the southern front, after making a fortune in India, the Eastern Route Army also entered Peshawar, a garden city ceded by the Delhi people.

In fact, this name is not mainstream today, and many people still call this place Kushan City because of the former Kushan Kingdom.

Since in Shahpur, collecting a ransom to save the opponent's city from the war, under the intentional spread of the Ming people, other cities took the initiative to send gold in exchange for the Ming people's non-attack.

After leaving Shahpur, 12,000 cavalry galloped back and forth across the vast plains.

Although Delhi also organized several confrontations, they had no resistance in the face of muskets.

Under the muskets, they no longer dared to attack on a large scale with numerical superiority, so they could only defend the city.

The entire country of Delhi seems to have become an undefended country, allowing the Ming soldiers to run amok.

Under such persecution, the Delhi people could only admit defeat, knowing that they were not the main target of the Ming Dynasty, and were willing to open up the upper Indus River area, and cede Peshawar at the Khyber Pass to the Ming troops to transport supplies.

After obtaining the authorization of the new king of Delhi, Muyizdin Mubarak, Zhang Xin and the others finally gave up. Armed with tons of gold they had harvested, they set out from the city of Delhi without any delay and headed directly northwest to Peshawar.

At this time, a large number of Indian porters pulled boats, under the protection of the Ming soldiers, along the Indus River all the way north, turned into the Swat River, the Butini River, and reached Peshawar.

At this time, the army led by Zhu Di followed the mountains above the Iranian plateau, and almost after much fighting, it arrived at Telrabat in the west of Herat.

The Iranian plateau of this era is not as barren as it was a few hundred years later. It's like the Mongolian Plateau, with large grasslands and small rivers.

It is precisely because of this unique environment that a strong country can be born.

Without such conditions, Shaharu would not have thought of moving the capital to Herat.

However, the semi-nomadic, semi-sedentary Persian tribes did not have fortified cities.

So most of the tribes on the plateau have migrated north with Shahru, leaving behind an empty grassland. Even the tribes that were reluctant to move north were robbed of a large number of horses and sheep by Shaharu, and their lives were difficult.

For such an opponent, Zhu Di didn't care at all, he was like playing in the mountains and rivers all the way, even if there were some tribes that didn't want to belong, they had already been wiped out by the cavalry.

Because of the unimpeded journey, they had planned a three-month journey, but in only two months, they were already on the verge of arriving in Herat.

And Terrabat is not only the gateway to the west of Herat, but also a famous transportation hub on the Persian plateau.

It is only 300 miles away from Herat, and it is also the battlefield prepared by Shahru to fight to the death against the Ming soldiers.

Before Zhu Di's infantry arrived, the cavalry who had arrived early had already chosen a place for the army to be stationed in a small town called Rizhen outside the city of Telrabat.

There is a small river in the west of Terrabat, which is also the largest agricultural base in the region, and a large number of crops are grown.

Because there is a river, plus the mountains next to it, it has the necessary conditions for a garrison.

And when Zhu Di arrived, the war was about to break out.

This was the first head-on collision between the Ming and the Timurid army, although three years earlier, the Timurs had already fought against the Ming at sea once, and the whole army was wiped out, but they believed that it was the Ming with artillery.

The army is not afraid of the confrontation at all.

And after two months of marching, the Ming soldiers are now exhausted, and they have a great chance of winning.

On the night of November 26, the day the Ming army arrived, Shaharu sent a cavalry of more than 30,000 men to carry out harassment tactics.

Unfortunately, their sortie did not work, and they did not even get close to the camp of the Ming Dynasty, and were killed by the Jingwei who deployed more than 5,000 people.

This new tactic of using infantry against cavalry made the Timurid people known for the first time that cavalry was not omnipotent.

In the following days, the Ming cavalry did not dispatch, but the infantry escorted the Indian servant army, collecting forage from the nearby soldiers and horses.

In a skirmish, in the face of the muskets of the Ming people, the cavalry of Timur was killed before they could get close.

It was also at this time that the Eastern Route Army defeated the Delhi Sultanate with 10,000 men, and the news of their surrender reached Herat.

Looking at his subordinates with low morale, Shaharu, a consistently urbane king, showed his irascible side for the first time. "Why? Why don't we have reliable muskets! ”

Timur now has a small artillery, but this kind of artillery with a high iron content cannot be used on a large scale at all, because if it can't be fired a few cannons, it will explode.

At the moment they could only use bronze to cast cannons, but in the whole of Persia, copper was not produced in high quantities.

Even reliable artillery could not be built, and more demanding muskets, they could not do anything.

Before the first official war began, the morale of the Timurid people had already dropped considerably.

At such a time, Shaharu was not willing to wait any longer and decided to start a war on his own initiative.

"Your Majesty, by all means, now all we can rely on is the trebuchet to defend the city. To give up our superiority and let our soldiers face the enemy's trebuchets, artillery, and muskets directly is to use our own shortcomings to meet the strengths of the other side. ”

"But the Ming people are not moving now, and the situation is becoming more and more unfavorable for us. They have far fewer cavalry than we do, and I don't believe they can defeat our cavalry with infantry alone. ”

But he didn't know that there was a weapon called barbed wire.

This kind of iron wire that can be coiled together with a triangular tip has been transported by the Ming people for tens of thousands of meters, and when it is coiled, it will not occupy too much space, and a board car can be loaded with thousands of meters.

When these barbed wires are unfurled, only two layers need to be laid out, inside and outside, to form an attack on the horse's legs.

When the horses were afraid to move in front of the barbed wire, the speed advantage of the cavalry was completely lost.

What's more, because it was a personal expedition, a large section of trenches had been dug outside the Ming military camp, and when the Ming soldiers hid in the trenches to attack them, they could only become targets.

Therefore, when Zhu Di saw tens of thousands of cavalry rushing over with an unstoppable momentum, he just smiled indifferently. "A stupid king, an outdated tactic. I want him to know why I have the confidence to come to the expedition tens of thousands of miles away. ”

The barbed wire, which was arranged in a double layer, was bumped by the Timurid who knew nothing, and a large number of military horses began to go crazy because of the scratches on the legs of the horses, and the seemingly powerful cavalry, before they could get close, had already thrown themselves into disarray.

Then, a loud bang rang out, and because of the rush of time, most of the trebuchets had not yet been assembled

But the artillery did not need to be assembled, and it played its due power.

The Timurid cavalry, which was already in disarray, was even more confused at this time, because their horses were not trained for loud noises.