Majiazhuang is located in the south of Xianggong Temple, more than ten miles away. There used to be a small river there, and the land was very fertile. On both sides of the creek, there is a small village, each belonging to a different lord.

One of the lords, who brought in Greek engineers, built a water-powered mill on the creek and collected money from the villagers who needed to grind the dough. In his territory, the villagers didn't want to use the water-powered mill, and even their own hand-cranked stone mill was smashed by the lord, and with his mill, half of the wheat he brought with him had to be deducted. Therefore, although it is very suitable for farming, the villagers still do not have a good life, and their daily life can only rely on secretly hidden wheat, which can be boiled and eaten.

Moreover, after discovering that this mill had made money, the lord on the other side immediately turned red, claiming that the river also belonged to him, so the other party had harmed his interests by building the mill privately. The proceeds of the mill cannot belong to him alone, but must be spit out to him half of it.

The lord who opened the mill was naturally not happy, so the two sides quickly fought. In addition to calling various relatives, a team of mercenaries was hired from the Hungarian side. These foreign nobles and mercenaries were even more unkind to the people, not only robbing things every day, but also killing people and setting fires for fun.

The village quickly withered, and the surviving villagers fled one after another, all running to the hill west of Xianggongmiao Village and the Danube River north of the mountain, where they lived by fishing and collecting wild vegetables, shrimp and crabs on the river beach, and never dared to come out again.

Later, Guo Gai led the army south, crossed the river and came here, and without much effort, he eliminated the nobles entrenched on both sides of the river, and the bandit mercenaries who scattered and plundered, and sent people to the mountains to recruit villagers to come back. The fields had been barren for a while, but under the auspices of Guo Gai and others, everyone quickly resumed production.

Due to the good terrain here, after the situation stabilized, more and more people came back to join us. Many people who had taken refuge in the neighborhood from nowhere did not know where they came from also rushed to the city, hoping to be taken in. Therefore, on both sides of the river, water conservancy facilities were built, irrigation canals were dug, and large areas of barren grassland far from the river were also reclaimed. The mill by the river, which had been damaged by the aristocracy, was also restored and expanded on this occasion.

At that time, just like Yang Lao Baihu introduced, Hedong and Hexi were actually two villages, each with one hundred households for management. But then, something unexpected happened.

In the chaos that followed the fall of the Empress Dowager Helena, a series of noble rebellions and barbarian invasions broke out. In the year of Basil III's succession, the Polish-Hungarian kingdom, which was still a co-ruler at that time, united Lithuania and several Alemanni princes, re-branded the banner of the crusaders, and called on all the nobles and knights of Europe to join in the attack on the Purple Horde, claiming to take Constantinople again, demonstrating the glory of the Father and the prestige of the Crusaders.

The enemy was so powerful that even the nobles of England and France rushed to participate. At this critical juncture, during the reign of the Empress Dowager Helena, the local nobles who had been wooed through various diplomatic means turned against each other.

The pro-Polish Galic and Moldovan nobles rebelled, resulting in the control of the rebels from the Dniester River to the city of Lviv, cutting off the route of the front-line army. From here, the Crusaders took the opportunity to move south, into Bessarabia, and then along the Black Sea coast, breaking through all the way to the heart of the Purple Horde and destroying their core.

Guo Kang's grandfather, Guo Shuai, was serving in Dadu at the time, and after the situation changed, he hurriedly went north and urgently summoned soldiers. At that time, he was the closest to the various armies, so he had no time to prepare, so he could only take some dissatisfied war regiments and militias from various nearby places to intercept the crusaders.

The two sides fought north of the Danube, and Guo Shuai's troops were unfavorable at the beginning and retreated to the hills to defend. The Crusaders marched out to besiege the camp and conquered it four days later. Guo Shuai was unwilling to flee and died in battle with his two nephews, and more than 5,000 of his subordinates were killed. The Crusaders left no prisoners, killed the wounded and captured logisticians, and the entire legion was almost completely wiped out.

When the news of Guo Shuai's defeat and death came, Basil III immediately returned from Greece and went to Henan, and ordered that Henan and Hebei be exempted from three years of servitude, and that all men over the age of fifteen would immediately assemble and join him; Because of the large number of soldiers, a temporary order was made that all adult women over the age of 15 who had reached the age of 15 should go to the state and county yamen to accept the task of transporting supplies, and those who achieved the standard of delivering food and ordnance were equivalent to men being awarded knighthoods.

At that time, there were more than 200 households in each of the eastern and western villages, but because of their proximity and large number of people, hundreds of men were lost in this battle. After a series of heavy news, both villages fell into grief and panic, but Ma Paul, the head of the West Village, immediately invited nearby villagers to gather and discuss.

The head of the East Village had already died in battle, and Ma Paul was a cripple, and they didn't take him there at the time, so he survived. He told the people that the boundaries of these two villages were originally uninhabited. Now there are so many people, it's an exception.

The scholars in the town told him about the events of the year. Every once in a while, a group of madmen poured out of the West to launch a brutal and dark expedition against the Roman Empire under the guise of their false gods. Back then, the Greeks in the south were beaten by them.

After defeating the Greek army, these men divided the territory there, entrenched themselves, and saw themselves as new lords. They are more ferocious than the native lords before them. Under the united forces of the local lords, this place is no longer suitable for human habitation. If you are replaced by these people, you will definitely not be able to live.

Ma Paul also calculated, saying that the people in the village had survived by hiding in the northern hills, but there were not too many people hidden there, and they couldn't feed everyone, so in the end, most of the people in the village had to die. Now, if you go to the battlefield, the worst thing you can do is be cut down; If you don't go, you'll either be tortured and killed, or starve to death.

He was also a starving man in the past, and he had seen mercenaries lock up villagers in small churches and then set fire to them on all sides. Both sides are the same death, and it is more comfortable to die in battle, so it is better to go to the battlefield and ask for a good time.

In the end, everyone decided that since this was the case, everyone should go for it.

There are people in the East Village who have migrated from the Balkan Mountains in the south, and they still have relatives in their hometowns. Ma Paul and the others gathered more than 20 children in two villages who could not hold weapons and prepared to move. He also singled out a few young people who had gone to the church for two years and gave them all the valuable soft things in the village, and asked them to take their children with them. The rest of the people, men and women, young and old, all set out to find the barbarians to fight hard.

They took all the food from the village, put all the iron guys in makeshift preparation, and sharpened their sickles and pitchforks. In the village, from the old man and the woman in their early fifties to the half-aged children of twelve or thirteen, the physically weak carried the grain on their backs, and the strong men and women copied the guys. Ma Paul himself rode on a donkey, with a torn helmet and a spear to fight wild boars, and thus set out.

At that time, there were no old people in the village with limited mobility - they killed the lord and settled down, and it was only twenty years. Under the rule of the lords, there were almost no older residents here, and by the age of thirty-five, they exceeded the vast majority of the people, and further up, because of the decline in physical strength, they were basically eliminated by the lords.

Later, they traveled east along the river and saw more and more people. The intended staging place was a ferry port downstream, where they saw Basil III's banner and barracks. The officers who had come to register took with them more than twenty young men who had fought in battle, and told Ma Paul to take the rest of the men and continue in a southeasterly direction to help the army dig fortifications.

While they were busy, the Crusaders were scattering and looting. Upon confirming that they had defeated the enemy's regular army, the Crusaders immediately became revelent and began to try to collect more loot. The princes decided that this was a rare victory in history, and that the Purple Horde, like the Saracens and Greeks, had lost its ability to resist. As a result, they also began to quarrel with each other all day long, fighting for the right to distribute the spoils of war, hoping to gain greater benefits than their colleagues.

Basil withdrew the local armies north of the Danube, evacuated the local villages, and waited for the Crusaders to cross the river on their own. But the Crusaders moved more and more slowly, and it took more than ten days for them to reach the north bank of the Danube, and then stopped. Unsure of their intentions, Basil sent a large amount of treasure to the leaders of the Crusaders, claiming to make peace with them. At the same time, he urged the general who was still in the Crimea, Maimaitinikus, to immediately lead the northern army to cross the sea and go south to block the enemy's rear road; He also recalled the Golden Horn Fleet and sent them north to stand by.

Having received the treasure and the letter of peace, the Crusaders instead sped up. After moving south into the Roman region, their own supplies were quickly exhausted, and they had been relying on the fleets of the rebel nobles from the north to transport supplies from the regions of Galich and Moldova along the Black Sea to the south, so there was no shortage of ships. A few days later, more than 50,000 crusaders were sent across the river.

At this time, 120,000 people had been gathered in the three provinces of Hebei, 100,000 in Henan, and 30,000 men were temporarily recruited from Thrace. Basil drew the elite and obtained 50,000 soldiers, while the rest were scattered to various fortresses and fortified cities along the way, strengthening the defenses and gradually blocking the space for the crusaders to operate.

A few days later, Maimaitinicus arrived with more than 20,000 cavalry to join him, and Basil immediately ordered his troops to move. The Golden Horn Fleet joined the Crimean Fleet and headed north along the coast to the mouth of the Danube, where it engaged the Crusader fleets that had stayed there. At the critical moment, the Italian galleys hired by the Crusaders suddenly declared their neutrality and quickly fled the battlefield, turning the naval battle into a massacre of cargo ships and fishing boats. The fleets of ships waiting for transport in the area, and the crusaders who remained behind, were all wiped out, the number of dead could not be counted, and the water in the mouth of the river was dyed red.

The inhabitants who remained in Hebei also went into action, blocking the ferry, hunting down the mercenaries and bandits who had left the team, as well as the armed caravans that followed the Crusaders. Some people rose up to kill and chased the enemy all the way north, running to the border of Poland before they reacted. The crusaders' back routes and supplies also fell apart.

However, they did not realize that the situation had changed. The main force of the Crusaders came to the great port of Varna in the Bulgarian region to try to conquer the port city and get supplies and supplies more easily, not even knowing that their fleet was exhausted.

Under Basil's orders, Maimaitinicus took over the entire army, gathered 80,000 men, and set up two camps behind the crusaders overnight. The next day, the Crusaders realized that something was wrong, and hurriedly abandoned the siege, wanting to turn around and attack the camp behind them, which took a whole day and did not make the slightest progress.

In the evening, Maimaitinicus personally led his soldiers out of the camp to attack, and the crusaders were forced to continue the battle, and the two sides fought from night to daytime on the third day. By noon, the Crusaders had finally exhausted themselves and had collapsed. More than 10,000 soldiers were beheaded, and the rest were forced to the seashore, where countless people fell into the water and died. Some fled the battlefield, but the passages were blocked in all directions, and they could not return to the north of the Danube if they could escape. In the end, the 20,000 surviving crusaders could only declare their surrender.

Basil wanted to accept their surrender in exchange for a large ransom for the nobles among them, but the soldiers were not happy. At night, there was a commotion in the camp of the Hebei people. Soldiers who had been plundered in their hometowns walked out of the camp with their weapons in hand, went to the places where the captives were held, beat their shields, and made loud noises. The soldiers of the other divisions came out to watch the excitement, and the officers could not stop it.

When Maimaitinicus got the news, he told his staff and generals that the situation was urgent, and it was too late to inform the Great Khan, and he could handle it himself. Immediately afterwards, he sent his own soldiers to execute all the more than 100 nobles and nobles who were concentrated and imprisoned separately. He also ordered the other armies to come and put them on guard, and asked the militia to dig several large pits, and kill all 20,000 crusaders in one night.

After disposing of it, he went to Basil and said that he had acted on his own initiative and wanted to resign and be investigated, but Basil did not say anything, and let this matter pass on the grounds that there were still many wars in front of him and it was too late to deal with it.

As a result of this battle, all sides of the crusaders suffered heavy losses, the main Lithuanian nobles were lost, and the state was completely destroyed, and it became a small state that did not enter the stream. And the Poles, having lost a lot, were annoyed and angry, and soon found an opportunity to turn around and swallow Lithuania back into blood.

Hungary suffered the most. At the heart of the Polish-Hungarian United Kingdom was the court of King Lajos the Great of Hungary. At the heart of this operation, too, were Hungarians. After the defeat, a large number of the nobles who supported the king were killed, and the remaining powerful nobles, as usual, began to question the king's ability and conspired to challenge his authority. A year later, Rajos died of anxiety, and the Kingdom of Hungary fell into a long period of chaos until it was finally divided between Poland, the HRE, and the Purple Horde.

The remnants of the battlefield have now become some scenic spots that are still a little famous. Like the place where the Crusaders were executed and buried, it was called the "Barbarian Grave"; After inspecting the first level of the battlefield, the small soil slope that was filled in was now called "Mantoubao". When Guo Kang was a child, he went to these places.

However, at that time, the local villagers still paid a lot of price for this. In the East Village and West Village, the second group of people who set off also lost a lot. More than 30 people who were taken out to serve as regular soldiers did not have the opportunity to be disarmed and returned to the fields until the end of the entire Magyar War. Although most of the battles have been won all the way since then, only half of them have been left or returned home.

The village chief of Mapaolo led the villagers and kept fighting the enemy. After the decisive battle, he was told by his superiors that he could go back, but he only sent the old and young and the women home, and he took the strong men of the village and followed the army everywhere to exterminate the scattered rebels and bandits.

After the fighting in the hinterland was over, Basil and the others turned to the west and continued to deal with the enemy there. The troops who remained in the area, under the orders of the Khan's court, were reorganized into two legions and began to regain lost territory and purge the rebellious nobles.

In the northwestern and northern regions of the Black Sea, the legions conquered more than 20 towns and cities, completely regained the Galich region, and captured the nobles, the chieftains, and their die-hard loyalists of more than 1,000 people. Some nobles scolded them for being low-blooded mud legs, but now they want to turn the world upside down, and use manpower to fight against the rules of the Heavenly Father, and sooner or later they will all have to go to hell.

The newly recruited soldiers were generally uneducated, and they didn't know how to refute it, so they erected crosses and crucified them all on it, so that everyone could see if these people were really as noble as Heavenly Father and Heavenly Brother. The Purple Horde's habit of nailing the barbarian nobility began here. Now the supporting theory put forward by the official explanation actually has this matter first, and then the church will supplement and explain.

The village chief of Mapaolo and others were also involved in these operations. In the battle for Lviv, the last of the rebel nobles held on to the city, desperately resisting, hoping that the Poles would come to their rescue again. Knowing some carpenter's trade, Paul volunteered to lead people to make engineering equipment, ventured to settle under the city, and was finally killed in the repeated battles between the two sides over the city walls. When the battle was over, the legion commander told them not to fight, and forcibly sent everyone home, and they ended their journey.

After returning home, there were only about 100 adult males in the two villages. Counting those half-grown children, there are not as many people as usually in a small and medium-sized village. In order to maintain normal operation, the two villages chose to merge, which is the origin of the current Majiazhuang.

And their name is said to come from this small river - now the old people of the village can't remember what the full name of the river is in the Bulgarian vernacular, but they know that most of the residents, including the village chief, have a surname for the first time, which is directly borrowed from the first pronunciation of the river. The elders once considered whether to change the official name, but the old gentleman who invited him said that naming the boundary after the river as a surname was in line with the ancient rites, and there was no need to change it. So, I've been using it ever since.

Of course, after all, the terrain on their side is very good, so the population recovery is also extremely fast. In a generation and a half, it has returned to its previous size, and it is even more prosperous than then. With this history and a large population, it is not surprising that Majiazhuang wants a higher status.

(End of chapter)