While the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was busy gathering local power, Hong Tiancheng's enemies were not idle and did nothing.

The reason why the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was not attacked by any foreign enemies during the period when they were busy sorting out their internal affairs was not that Hong Tiancheng's opponents were completely scared, but that they also needed time to lick their wounds.

From the real rise of the Taiping Army in 1649 to the great war, knowing that in 1653 the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom expanded its territory to close to the heyday of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a full four years of war, the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, two of the three great powers in Eastern Europe, were pulled down from the throne of great power in one fell swoop.

On the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian United Kingdom and the Russian Empire, two nascent states, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and the United Cossack Emirates, were formed.

The latter is only regarded as a third-rate puppet state in the international community, but the former's combat effectiveness can bring forth new army tactics, which has shocked the whole of Eastern Europe and even the entire European continent, and even the distant Republic Army led by Cromwell has begun to imitate the style of the Taiping Army, comprehensively changing flintlock pistols in the army, and training the army to fight in line battles.

France, a powerful country in Western Europe, strengthened the standing army system, constantly recruited troops, and collected military power from the dying local feudal aristocracy to achieve true centralized rule.

The small Prussian state, which had a small standing army, was able to equip its soldiers with new flintlock pistols more quickly, and began to pay attention to the army's firepower output.

The Kingdom of Sweden, which had already undergone military reform in the era of Gustav the Great, was the first to fully replace the flintlock smoothbore gun, and when the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom fought to the death with the Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom and the Russian Empire, it had completed the period of adaptation of soldiers to new weapons, and formed a large number of field armies, ready to join the battle for the division of the hegemony of Eastern Europe caused by Hong Tiancheng.

The Russian Empire, on the other hand, exerted its "milking" efforts, borrowing heavily from Jewish merchant groups, as if there was no upper limit, recruiting young men of school-age from remote villages to join the army, and in many areas there was even a phenomenon of forced enlistment.

In the face of the crisis of national annihilation, Lao Maozi's mobilization ability was still very strong, the political contradictions between the Duma parliament and the tsar were suppressed to a minimum, and the two major political blocs that ruled the Russian Empire helped each other and fully played the war machine of the Russian Empire.

Even the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania also took advantage of this period of running-in to temporarily resolve the political contradictions between the three internal factions, and the power of the Sulm Council was once again raised to the commanding heights, and at the same time, the bigwigs in the Sulm Parliament of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania learned a profound lesson, and did not take the Masovia region that was actually stripped from Jobs, and overturned the previous elite army policy, and began to form a large number of standing armies with muskets as the main weapon.

The repeated defeats of the Polish hussars cast a shadow on the hearts of the great nobles of the Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom, and the death of a large number of veterans of the Polish hussars with combat experience also put this elite cavalry unit famous in Eastern Europe at risk of disintegration.

The Council of Sum had to withdraw the last remaining Polish hussars into the hinterland as the last reserve and guarding force, intending to use the newly recruited standing army as the main force to fight the Taipings.

The Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania had already prepared a strategic plan for a long-term war with the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and was even prepared for the consequences of the death of a large number of soldiers......

It's just that the establishment of a standing army is not easy to talk about, the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania is not like the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Sweden, the standing army system has been established for decades, has a deep foundation and reserves, and the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania can only draw qualified people from mercenaries and militias to form a standing army, one can imagine how strong the combat effectiveness of this standing army will be in a short period of time......

Most importantly, will Hong Tiancheng give the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania enough time to train a standing army worthy of a war?

Now Hong Tiancheng did not attack the weak Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom, but because there were more than 100,000 armed forces gathered in the direction of Moscow and the border of the Russian Empire, including tens of thousands of real elite troops of the Russian Empire!

What's worse is that these enemy troops are all stationed in the continuous fortresses, and they have no intention of coming out to fight the Taiping army in the field, and if they want to destroy them, they will inevitably fall into a long-term tug-of-war between attack and defense, just like the Battle of Kiev launched by the Russian Imperial Expeditionary Force.

The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and its enemies were fighting and licking their wounds, and even the new third-rate state of the Cossack United Emirates sent people everywhere to the Cossack settlements in Russia and Crimea to bring people into the Cossack United Emirates, flooding the population and attracting more Cossack warriors to join the chariots of the Assman chieftains.

Unfortunately, the Crimean Khanate still looked leisurely, and did not even enter the state of war, the shift of the Russian Empire's gaze, and the natural barrier of the Cossack United Emirate, made the situation around the Crimean Khanate suddenly become stable, and the only thing they had to do now was to provide supplies and slaves for the existence of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, which was half of the suzerain.

The Ottoman Turkish Empire was struggling to resist the Crusader attack dominated by the Austrians in the Holy Roman Empire, and the main force of the Ottoman Turkish Empire had been defeated, but the withdrawal of the Polish army greatly reduced the strength of the Ottoman Turkish Empire to regain lost territory, thus making the Ottoman Turkish Empire have signs of resurgence and gain a firm foothold.

I have to say that the rise of Hong Tiancheng helped the Ottoman Turkish Empire a lot, the Polish hussars of the Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom, but the Ottoman Turkish Empire's Janissaries suffered a lot, however, more than half of the Polish hussars who killed the Ottomans fell under the guns of the Taiping army......

For the first time, in the name of propagating Christian doctrines, Jobs launched an offensive against the white areas that did not believe in Christianity, and took advantage of the situation to invade the surrounding Christian faith areas, those local aristocratic forces could not fight with the battle-hardened cathars, Jobs only took less than a year to open up the land passage from the Masovia region to the Livonian controlled area!

The territory occupied by the Christian Brotherhood is already comparable to that of ordinary small European countries, but because the Eastern European countries still need the Christian Brotherhood to fight against the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, they turned a blind eye to Jobs's small-scale expansion, and anyway, the territory of the Christian Brotherhood is all bordering the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, which just forms a 'buffer zone'.

At the beginning of 1654, after taking over power from the local government, Hong Tiancheng once again turned his attention to foreign aggression.