Chapter 375: Both Sides

At the beginning of the eighteenth year of Jiajing, Jiang Feng had already swept away the eastern part of the Mongolian steppe, the Mongolian tribes were all terrified, the big and powerful tribes were all gone, the leaders and nobles of the tribes were mercilessly slaughtered, and the tribes were turned into slaves.

If the rest of the small tribes still want to survive on the grassland, they must obey Jiang Feng's rule, but these small tribes are much better off than before.

In the past, those Mongolian tribes of several hundred or about a thousand people had to be collected by most of their own production and harvest every year, and the men in the tribe had to be requisitioned to fight on the battlefield at any time, but now what they have to do is to sell the horses, cattle and sheep grazing on the grassland to the manors outside the gate every year.

After the manors outside the Guanxi were stabilized, a large number of Han Min slaves were liberated, the land was distributed, and the labor efficiency was greatly improved.

The guards were all warriors, the Han people and slaves were basically from farming, and grazing was not what they were good at, at this time, the role of the remaining small tribes in Mongolia was revealed, the pastures were extremely vast, and the large tribes were killed, so naturally there was a lot of space left.

Under Jiang Feng's arrangement, these small tribes were no longer aimlessly nomadic in the grasslands, but were divided into several areas for animal husbandry management, and the cattle, sheep and horses they grazed were purchased in exchange for salt grain and all kinds of necessities.

These small Mongolian tribes thought that they would also be reduced to the same fate as the big tribes like Duoyan and Tuman, but no one thought that it would be treated like this, and these small tribes can be said to be inferior to the slaves outside the Guanwai at some times under the oppression of the big tribes.

Suddenly they settled down, and some people bought their horses and livestock regularly, sold them food and necessaries, and although they were also taxed, they were much better than before, and many of them had enough to eat for the first time in a row.

Of course, there are mountains between the Guanwai and the grassland, and the traffic between each other is several river valleys from west to east, and the ancient marches and traffic are basically carried out on the edge of the river, one is that the cost of water transportation is relatively low, and the other is that people and animals need to drink water.

At both ends of the Taer River crossing the remaining veins of the Xing'an Mountains, Jiang Feng used the Mongol slaves captured by this raid to build two forts, which were taken by the Taer River West Fort and the Taer River East Fort, the East Fort itself was in the hinterland of the reclamation manor, and was guarded by the military force of the Jiang army, while the West Fort was on the grassland.

The grassland was divided for those small tribes, naturally it would not be left alone, Xibao was actually the garrison where Jiang Feng was stationed here to manage the grassland, and the Jiang family army had four hundred regular troops with all firearms stationed here for a long time, in addition to a thousand guards, most of these guards did not participate in the war in the Taer River Valley, they were all members of the grassland that followed Jiang Feng to plunder and sweep.

The wealth and fiefdom they were granted were the pastures on the grasslands, and the trafficking of livestock and the buying and selling of grain were also their profits, and in order to obtain such rights, they had to fight and protect, and be loyal to Jiangfeng, they had their own pastures in the grasslands, but it was not enough to have pastures, it was necessary to have slaves grazing on the pastures, but those small Mongol tribes that had settled down and were subjugated could not be moved.

So the guards had to go further north or west to raid the population, and the more people they caught, the greater their wealth.

In fact, unconsciously, whether it is the guards on the grassland or the guards who run the estate, these people are more and more aware that to maintain their lives and wealth is to rely on the horses under their crotches and the knives and guns in their hands, they rely on serving under Jiang Feng, or serving under the leaders of the Jiang family's military system to obtain various tax exemption policies, and they and their descendants must continue to exercise their war skills to maintain this treatment. The only way out for them is to join the army or the armed groups under the system.

Jiang Feng's regular army is also gradually appearing like this, they have been treated higher than other civilians because of their children's military service, and at the same time, they are Jiang Feng's most descendant troops, basically through Jiang Feng and Zhang Liang, a group of regular officers born in Jinyiwei, Yang Da and Liu Shisan, a group of reckless people born in white, and the Western-style army education of white instructors.

After five or six years of fighting, they have rich combat experience, know how to maintain and change the formation of the phalanx and the square, cooperate with each other in battle, and more importantly, the use of firearms.

With so much experience and skill, it is clear that they will not just be used as soldiers, even if they are just ordinary soldiers now, they will become officers in the future, they are seeds, and when they are sown, more soldiers like this will grow.

In Huazhou, in Yizhou, and outside the Guan, Jiang Feng's 2 million Han people are trained by 300 regiments out of 5,000 people, and these regiments are trained in a way close to that of a regular army on weekdays, and Jiang Feng can mobilize more than 100,000 troops at any time as long as he is willing, and the grassroots officers of these units are Jiang Feng's current veterans.

With such expectations, there will naturally be preferential treatment, and their treatment is even better than that of the guards, and they also know that in order to maintain such good treatment, they will let their descendants continue to engage in this industry, and because of the good treatment, the children of these veterans must have a better living environment than others, and better nutrition and exercise methods when growing up in the body.

The next generation of these veterans is more suitable to become soldiers than the children of other civilians.

The same applies to the 10,000 sailors who crisscrossed the seas, including those in the Netherlands who worked as instructors and officers.

In the territory and population controlled by Jiang Feng, there were also some class divisions, among which the officers and soldiers of the army, the craftsmen of the workshop, and those various merchants who were attached to Jiang Feng's power system formed the main and most loyal part of this force.

The 'land prosecution case' at the end of the seventeenth year of Jiajing was only known to Jiang Feng in the early spring of March of the following year, and similarly, the inexplicable disappearance of the Tile Mongols on the grassland also reached the center of the Ming Dynasty at about the same time.

Many displaced Mongolian herdsmen have entered the Guannei, this time it is not a poor to come to plunder, but in order to survive, ask the Ming Dynasty to take in, the Ming Dynasty Yamen this is the reaction, hundreds of thousands of troops stationed in the garrison of the nine-sided town, may no longer need to be set up.

However, this is the food and clothing of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, millions of military households, and even tens of millions of people in the world, and no one in the grassland tribes will judge that they will die out so easily, so no one will say anything about dismantling.

Since the beginning of the eighteenth year of Jiajing, after sweeping away those powerful ministers and nobles who obstructed the emperor's policies everywhere because of interests, Emperor Jiajing really had a feeling of being a king today, of course, he had already felt it once in the Great Gift Case fifteen years ago.

This "big land seizure case" is that the emperor transferred troops into Beijing to purge, and the 12 regiments and battalions of the defense force in Beijing were quickly dispersed, and even caused losses to the people of Beijing, because the rapidly collapsed Beijing guard soldiers looted in Beijing and acted recklessly, without their actions, the Qin army could almost be said to have committed no crime in the autumn.

These soldiers are only capable of doing evil, after Jiajing took control of the Imperial Horse Prison Army in Beijing, the Qin army divided 1,000 people to stabilize the situation in the area where the Jingshi people lived.

After the nobles of the Beijing Division were purged, more than 1,000 Jingwei soldiers who did evil that day were beheaded at the southwest gate, and this incident also made Jiajing see the incompetence of the soldiers.

The equipment and armor of the five thousand Qin army are worse than those of the soldiers in the capital, but the awe-inspiring temperament is not much stronger than the young master soldiers in the capital.

In February of the eighteenth year of Jiajing, the emperor, at the suggestion of several officers in Yansui Town, Shaanxi, broke up the 12th regiment battalion of the Beijing Division, and after eliminating some of the old and weak and verifying the vacancies, only 40,000 soldiers were left, divided into eight battalions, which were guarded at the various gates of the Beijing Division.

The civil and military officials who were frightened by the court staff of the Great Rite case and the knives and guns of the land prosecution case no longer dared to argue with the emperor about anything, and Jiajing's several actions made people re-understand what kind of character this so-called "absurd emperor who likes magic and does not care about government affairs" is, and what fate he despises, everyone can see it clearly.

After the Spring Festival, the tax inspectors from Beijing to all walks of life set off one after another, and the restaurants, businesses, and handicraft workshops that were originally hung in the name of a certain lord and a certain minister were the objects of this tax collection.

In April, the officials of the household department were dumbfounded when they looked at the silver they had collected, and the deductions and embezzlement in various localities were certainly indispensable, but even so, nearly 17.8 million taels of tax and silver were still paid, and you must know that the annual income of Jiajing in the 17th year was only 1.5 million taels.