Culturally, Father Mikhail and others did not resist such a plan.

For them, they have to use Greek characters anyway, and there is not much difference. And in these years, there is actually no common understanding of "Rus culture" among the people. For most ordinary people, the oppression and suffering brought by the princes of Rus' far outweighed the sense of identity between them and the commoners. And for the local aristocracy, this "Rus' community" was more like an excuse used by powerful parties such as Moscow to annex themselves.

In fact, this kind of thing is not uncommon. In this era, the same ethnic group does not mean that they will be treated well, which is a common political knowledge known to Mongols - Möngke Khan conducted a survey and was surprised to find that Mongol military households had to pay 1.5 times their total annual income. As a result, even the Great Khan himself could not stand it, so he could only urgently order to lighten the burden on everyone.

As for the Rus region, let alone this era, even in Guo Kang's previous life, different "Rus" people have a sense of identity with each other......

They are mainly concerned with religious differences. However, this is not a big deal at the moment, because the Church of Rome has characterized these doctrinal contradictions as theological and scholarly dissenting understandings, and does not consider them to be offensive to the very essence of the Church. Therefore, compared with the Poles and Hungarians who used the same scriptures, the Purple Horde was more friendly to them.

As for the principle, Guo Kang is also very clear. Other churches insist on rejecting heresy because that's all they have to maintain the common faith of the organization. However, the belief of the Church of Rome is based on the "religion of Rome", and the foundation of the belief that sustains the organization lies in "Rome", so as long as there is a common belief in this regard, the details of the religion can be less concerned.

From this point of view, the religious foundation of the Purple Horde was more solid than that of Eastern Rome: the church in Eastern Rome was only a subordinate of the imperial court, and often fought among themselves, even affecting the political situation and hindering foreign wars: but the church of the Purple Horde was the son of the Khanate itself, and the relationship between the two sides was much closer.

With this foundation, the problem of language itself is not very difficult.

Examples can be found in places where the Central Plains regime was ruled, and even in places where it was affected. For example, in Guo Kang's era, the most familiar Vietnamese sentence for the Central Plains people was probably a shout of "Nuo Song empty leaves".

This sentence, written in Vietnamese characters, is "Na Gong Kong (extinguish)". Na and 铳 are both words from the Chinese language that mean to hand over a firearm; Empty is a particle in the local language, which indicates negation; extinguish is a variant of the word "extinguished" and "extinguished", which also comes from Chinese, which means to break and kill. Taken together, the four words are "surrender the gun and not kill".

In other words, three of these four characters are actually Chinese words, and their pronunciation is close to ancient Chinese pronunciation. If the Ming Dynasty shouted like this, they would understand it the same......

There are many similar examples, forming a large category called "Han Yue words" in Vietnamese, even if Vietnam later switched to pinyin script, it would not be able to eliminate so many words. Especially in the military field, such as weapons, encirclement, and capture, they are almost the original pronunciation of Chinese.

In fact, Vietnamese and Chinese, in terms of linguistics, are not even the same language family, and the gap between them and Chinese and Greek is at the same level. But even so, Chinese has managed to adapt and infiltrate the local language.

Chinese is still the dominant language here. Maybe the Greek language is a little more resistant, and people in other places don't even resist it very much.

Of course, the performance of the Greeks is actually a matter of attitude, and to put it bluntly, the Purple Horde is too lenient with them. Historically, the Greeks in Asia Minor accepted the Turkic language brought by the Seljuks in two generations - it stands to reason that the Greek language has an advantage in terms of cultural level, which in turn affects the Turkic language, and even those Turkmen tribes are reluctant to speak Turkic language to be normal. However, the Greeks have always been quite flexible in this regard......

Under such circumstances, Guo Kang believes that it is difficult to take on the Greek language, and the promotion of Chinese is indeed effective.

The lessons learned here can be referred to the Qing Dynasty.

When Yongzheng was in power, he tried to promote the official language throughout the country, and even issued a mandatory order for this purpose, stipulating that those who could not speak official could not participate in the imperial examination. The trigger for this incident was the inconvenience of communication between officials in Guangdong and Fujian and other people, but behind this, there was also a set of considerations and measures.

The greatest difficulty of the Qing Dynasty was the low legitimacy of foreign rule. In order to solve this problem, Yongzheng tried to start from the aspect of ethnic distinction. The core of his theoretical conception is to replace the division of nationalities with the division of regions.

According to Yongzheng's discussion, Huaxia and Yidi are actually the same group of people, and there is not much difference in blood, and there is no difference in culture. Their differences are due to geographical distinctions. Manchuria is also a place of origin, not a nation, and like all parts of China, it belongs to the name of the people who live in a specific area, and should not be excluded.

On this basis, we should rely on virtue, rather than looking at specific regions, to determine who will be the ruler, and finally establish a "Huayi family" type of unified power covering Han, Manchu and Mongolia, and realize the Confucian ideal of "Yi Di into the king, the world is as big and small as one".

The promotion of official language is one of the supporting measures. Theoretically, breaking down the geographical barriers through the official language can provide greater legitimacy and stability for this new dynastic model.

To be sure, there is a lot to be said about this idea, and it has implications for future generations. But it faced the same awkward situation as many of the other strategies of the Qing Dynasty.

In other words, many of the policy theories of the Qing Dynasty were not backward, some of the organizational methods were even very advanced, and the government and the people did not lack sufficient wealth and vitality as a foundation. The biggest problem of the Qing Dynasty was the Qing Dynasty itself......

The first problem faced by Yongzheng's conception was that he could not treat Manchuria as an ordinary place of origin, as he said. Not only that, but in order to maintain the existence of the Eight Banners organization, it was necessary to constantly emphasize the study of the Manchu language, otherwise the bannermen would soon forget all this.

In the same way, since it is argued that Yidi is not inferior, there must be supporting measures. Yongzheng himself was also aware of this, and changed the original two-layer structure of Huaxia and barbarians to three layers of Huaxia, barbarians, and beasts, believing that geography distinguishes between Chinese barbarians, and whether or not they abide by Tianli and human ethics distinguishes between humans and beasts. In this way, the traditional view of "barbarism = beast" is counteracted.

(End of chapter)