The problems between the Golden Tribe and the Night Chakra Tribe did not arise in a day.

The first problem is the change in strength.

As the second largest tribe of the Turks, the Night Wheel has endured thousands of years of wind, frost, rain and snow, and its foundation should not be underestimated. Whether it was the previous blood wolf tribe, or the more ancient Titan and Fire Demon tribes, the Turks developed from khanates to empires, and the ruling classes of various dynasties have married with the Yelun clan, forming an intertwined political vein.

Now, the Night Wheel Clan has become powerful again, and even has the potential strength to compete with the Golden Clan in some aspects.

This point is naturally more or less unhappy in the eyes of Khan Ashina. The so-called "raising a tiger is a problem, and the tail is too big to fall" has always been the most feared thing for the Ming monarch.

In addition to the threat of strength, another problem is even more serious.

The battle for the crown prince.

I don't know whether it was intentional or unintentional, but the Yelun tribe actually intervened in the dispute between the Turkic princes.

Ashina has a simple style, and has only married one queen in his life, with a total of two sons, one daughter, and three children. The eldest son Chili, the second son Tanli, and the youngest daughter are Hesijia, the pearl of the Hanhai Sea.

After the two princes grew up, they have been fighting openly and secretly for the status of the prince, and they have been in trouble, which has long been a well-known thing within the Turkic Empire.

Originally, the fight between these two men was relatively simple. Prince Chili Chongwu and Prince Tanli Chongwen, within the Golden Clan, they each have cronies, their strength is equal, and they have maintained a delicate balance that is comparable for a long time. However, just three years ago, Gema Khan, the patriarch of the Yelun tribe, suddenly courted Ashina and married his daughter to the eldest prince, becoming Chili's father-in-law.

At this point, the original balance was broken.

As the powerful Yelun tribe and the Yakut Legion chose to take sides, the political balance of the crown prince suddenly tilted in Chili's favor.

In order to stabilize the internal relations of the Turks, and in order to further influence and control the Yelun clan through marriage, Ashina gradually favored Chili and handed over more power and resources to the eldest prince.

All of a sudden, rumors spread within the Golden Clan that Chili would inherit the throne and become the next Turkic Great Khan. As a result, the centrist nobles and ministers who originally maintained a wait-and-see attitude immediately ran to curry favor with Prince Chiri, making the second brother Tanli very passive.

In turn, Chili's rising status has also led the Night Wheel tribe to continue to rise. After the marriage, in several wars between tribes and clans for turf, Prince Akari did not hesitate to support his father-in-law, and even directly mobilized his troops to help him fight, to a large extent, helping the Yelun tribe to continue to grow its strength.

Having tasted the sweetness, Gemar Khan was even more keen to participate in the power struggle between the two princes, jumping up and down, relying on his connections and prestige, constantly co-opting the leaders of various tribes, giving Chili a strong momentum, and at the same time playing with his life to squeeze Tanli.

In this Eastern Expedition to Shengtang, the Yelun tribe in order to show loyalty to Ashina, but also to fight for Prince Chili's face, they dispatched 120,000 troops, under the leadership of Gema Khan, to the western frontier.

According to the previous plan, the Yakutia Independent Legion, as a subordinate of Chili, was ready to go to St. Tang with the car. However, when Ashina decided to put the main force of the Templar Prince Ronia's army into the Eastern Front early, Chili and Gema Khan immediately made their own small calculations.

The two of them were for the sake of preserving their own strength, and also because they took a fancy to the fat of the Western Frontier, so Chili proposed to his father Khan, hoping to let Gema succeed Ronya as the new governor of the Western Frontier.

The 80,000 Yelun Clan disciples stayed behind to guard the ghost desert in the western frontier, and the other 40,000 followed him into the customs to fight.

Ashina thought about it for a long time, and finally agreed.

He also had his own thoughts on this suggestion: the battle of the Eastern Crusade, especially the attack on the imperial capital of the Holy Tang Dynasty, was bound to be very difficult. In this kind of decisive battle, only by using the elite of the Golden Clan, which has the most powerful combat power, can we be sure of victory. At the same time, as a strategic rear, the importance of Western Xinjiang should not be underestimated, and it is handed over to his blood alliance clan to guard, and it is the army under his son, which is of course more reassuring.

Thus, the day when the Turkic army marched eastward was also the time when Gema Khan took office. The patriarch of the Yelun tribe has officially become the new master of the ghost desert in Western Xinjiang.

In the later histories of the Shengtang, Turkic, and Western Xinjiang states, the character of Gemar Khan is described in the same way: arrogant and tyrannical.

It is not difficult to imagine how bad the character of the new governor was.

From an objective point of view, Gema, as a Turkic nobleman, his sense of national superiority is indeed excessively explosive, and compared with other Turkic princes of the same period, he belongs to a very prominent kind.

In the context of the "Great Turkic" ideology, Gemar Khan did not treat any alien race as a human at all, so much so that in the early days of his rule in Western Xinjiang, he directly implemented two policies that seemed unthinkable to later generations.

This is also a policy that has taken Li Jiangyao and his children by surprise.

One is to overlap the tax burden, and the other is to reorganize the Western Xinjiang Army.

More than 500,000 Turkic troops, plus 250,000 subordinate troops in Western Xinjiang, and nearly 800,000 soldiers and horses traveled thousands of miles to expedition against the powerful Shengtang Dynasty.

The Turkic army has always adhered to the strategy of "fighting to feed the war", that is, "where to fight, where to grab", using the enemy's territory and population to solve the supply problem on the spot.

This time, however, the method is a little ineffective.

The main reason behind this is also simple - the size of the army is too large!

The territory of the Holy Tang Dynasty was vast, but the real riches were the Central Plains, Lianghuai and Jiangnan. The prefectures and counties west of the imperial capital were barren and had small populations, so they could not support the needs of the 800,000 Eastern Crusade army.

Therefore, the Turkic high command came to the conclusion that only a complete capture of the imperial capital would have a chance to solve the supply difficulties of a third of the entire army; Only by completely seizing the Central Plains can we fundamentally solve the problem of army rations.

Until then, they must rely on, and can only rely on, the western frontier.

What is the concept of 800,000 people eating?

If an average soldier consumes two catties of grain a day, then the whole army will eat 1.6 million catties a day. This number, packed in a 100-pound hemp bag, is 16,000 sacks, stacked like a hill.

In just one day, a hill was gone.

At this time, it has been nearly half a year since the army set out on the expedition, and roughly calculated, more than a hundred grain mountains have disappeared, and it is still unknown how many more will disappear next.

In addition, the transportation of grain requires a lot of people's husbands and livestock. The farther the front is advanced, the higher the cost of transporting grain. In the end, if you send 100 catties of grain and grass to the front line, you have to consume the same 100 catties of grain and grass on the road.

As a result, the pressure on military quarters has increased exponentially!

And that's just rations. The food of the subordinate armies in the western Xinjiang was usually poor, but the Turkic warriors had to eat meat in order to have the strength to fight. Therefore, in addition to rice and white flour, it is not uncommon for armies to slaughter 2,000 cattle or 5,000 sheep a day.

Half a year has passed, and more than 500,000 cattle and sheep have been contributed by the countries of Western Xinjiang alone!

Such a huge supply of supplies all came from the war-torn countries in the western Xinjiang that had yet to recuperate, and its suffering was unspeakably miserable.

In order to complete the military mission, Gemar Khan's men kicked open the doors of every household of the people in the western Xinjiang, and took away all the food rations they needed for survival and the livestock they used to lay their young.

However, if it was just to urge food, Gema would not be too hated, because after all, it was a problem for the whole Turk, and he was just doing his duty. The real problem is that Gema Khan actually creatively invented a new tax model - overlapping tax burden on the basis of huge supply pressure.

From the royal families, officials and merchants in the western Xinjiang to the ordinary people, servants and slaves in the ghost desert, they must pay taxes directly to the tax officials sent by him according to their ranks.

In the past, the poll tax, the land tax, the transaction tax, and the city gate tax were all pediatrics, and in the concept of Gema, even giving birth to a child, marrying a daughter-in-law, doing funerals, seeing illness, and even shopping on the street, there are names for paying money.

This is equivalent to saying that the people of Western Xinjiang not only had to pay taxes to their own kings in order to support the expeditionary army, but also had to pay money to the Turkic tax officials.

As for the gold and silver that was collected, only a small part of it went to the front, and the rest was stuffed into Gema Khan's own pocket.

Compared with the harm caused to the people by excessive taxes and miscellaneous taxes, another policy, the reorganization of the Western Xinjiang Army, is tantamount to directly attacking the kings of Western Xinjiang.

Previously, Ashina Jin Khan also had a similar idea, integrating the armies of various countries in Western Xinjiang together, unified training and unified command, so that Western Xinjiang could truly become a Turkic territory.

Ordering 250,000 subordinate troops to go on the expedition together was also an attempt around this idea.

However, Ashina also knew in his heart that it would not be easy to fully realize the plan of reorganizing the Western Frontier Army. In order to avoid unnecessary backlash, he decided to take it step by step, first destroying Saint Tang and then speaking.

But he never expected that the Gema Khan of the Yelun tribe was far more courageous than the Turkic monarchs. On the third day of his tenure, he simply issued an order: All the armies of the countries in Western Xinjiang, except for the royal court guards, must be immediately concentrated and carried out large-scale reorganization and training.

Those who dared to disobey orders would be seen as a betrayal of the Turks, and the Yakut legions would be hanged.

Gemar Khan came so hard, and naturally there were his considerations behind it. But the problem is that the countries of Western Xinjiang now have no additional troops except for the royal court guards. After years of war, the armies of various countries have been extremely badly depleted, and now the main force has been dispatched to accompany the Turks in the eastward crusade, where is there any extra force for Gema to train and train?

However, the order of the governor of Western Xinjiang is also very clear: if you dare to disobey the order, you will be strangled immediately!

In order to avoid being annihilated by the Turks under the pretext of being annihilated, many countries in Western Xinjiang had to use their brains, and even began to re-recruit troops, and even the old man on crutches and the snotty doll were pulled into the ranks and sent to Gema.

Anyway, the Turks said that they were responsible for taking care of the food and sending the old people and children over, wouldn't they be able to save some rations?

Although the countries were reluctant to cope with the errands, which made the Gemar Khan a little dissatisfied, they still did what they were told, and in contrast, there was a special existence in the western frontier that was simply rampant: they were not ordered to surrender their troops, accept reorganization, and never pay any taxes or food.

Even the envoy sent by Gemar couldn't help it: "You Prince Tanli personally promised us that you don't need these messy orders!" ”

Stanley? What is Tamley? How unreasonable!

【Recently, I have received a lot of support and encouragement from readers and friends, and I am very grateful!】 Zhenjiang Army may be different from other novels about hegemony, his protagonist is not Li Jiangyao alone, but more of a portrayal of group portraits. Because I think that when the country is in crisis, everyone who is unwilling to give in and fight for it is a hero. 】

[Another point is about Murong Xue. This character, originally conceived and set, is relatively tragic. He came from a wealthy family, but he was an illegitimate child; Li Jiangyao fought alone, at least there were many comrades-in-arms around him, but he was really alone. Including the sacrifice of the Reverse Scale Division, it was just a mission, and no one really regarded him as a brother who had died. 】

[As for Rui Ji, Murong Xue can't see everything we see from God's perspective, he can only be torn between doubt and feelings. Just like we ourselves face our loved ones in our lives, sometimes, we may not be so rational. 】

[Of course, for a thousand spectators, there are a thousand Hamlets.] Anyway, thank you for your love for the Zhenjiang Army, and we'll see you soon! 】】