"Wow! ……”

The Armenian merchant Henrik Mshita watched the captured horse thieves carry one corpse after another under the threat of bayonets, and discarded them in the mountains by the side of the road, showing all kinds of miserable conditions on their bodies and faces, and dark red blood stained the ground, only to feel a river in his stomach, and immediately squatted on the ground and vomited violently.

Several armed caravan guards glanced at him, all with a hint of mockery.

These Persian merchants, when they encountered horse thieves, were frightened one by one, and even suggested that they take the initiative to offer some gold and silver to those horse thieves who robbed the road, in order to get a chance to save their lives.

But the problem is that this caravan is mainly based on the Persian trading company of our Qi country, and the goods escorted by it include a large number of precious porcelain, clocks, furs, perfumes, gold powder, pearls and other commodities ready to be sold to the Safavid royal family, plus a larger amount of cane sugar, spices, dyes, cotton fabrics (cotton cloth), steel, copper, and the value of the goods is four or five hundred thousand Hanzhou silver dollars.

As a result, in the first battle early this morning, the officers and men of our army, oh no, our trading company escort used the tactic of "attacking the carriage with fire" to destroy the horse thieves, killing and wounding 360 enemies, capturing more than 400, and the rest fled without a trace. Moreover, it is gratifying that more than 200 horses and more than 30 camels were captured in this battle, which can be regarded as making up for some war losses.

However, these robbers are really despicable, except for a few leaders who have some surplus wealth, the rest of the people, whether dead or alive, can hardly find anything valuable, which disappoints the "guards" who clean up the battlefield.

"Come, let's have a drink."

At this time, Henrik Mkhita vomited only the acid water in his stomach, and as soon as he stood up, he saw a kettle handed to him.

"It's really uncomfortable to watch, but we have to thank the brave Qi guards who saved all of our lives. Oh, and of course, our precious cargo. Isn't it? Michael Henry, an English businessman, said with a smile.

Henrik Mkhita knew a little Turkic and Chinese in addition to Persian, but was not very familiar with English, but based on the same religious beliefs (Armenians were Christians), he had a natural affinity for the European in front of him.

"Thank God for saving us from plunder and killing. The current form of the Empire is so bad that there should be a tribal armed force of this magnitude to intercept our merchant convoys. Nor did they know how the governors and garrisons managed the local order, and if the great Shah had known about it, they would have been condemned. ”

Michael Henry blinked, though he didn't understand what the other man was saying, but judging by the expression on his face, he might have been glad that he had survived the fierce armed conflict, or that he was admiring the bravery of the Qi Nation's guards.

"Oh yes. The guards of the Qi State were very brave, and the way and process of fighting were also full of oriental wisdom. Michael Henry turned his head to look at the Qi guards with muskets and a thoughtful expression, "But, how do I feel that those guards look like a well-trained army. …… If they are soldiers, then what are they doing in Isfahan? ”

As a European, or more precisely, as an Englishman, Michael Henry's views of Qi Guo were very mixed, with mixed jealousy and disgust.

For some unknown reason, the powerful Indian Ocean hegemon has never been very close to England, and even sometimes shows a strong hostility. They can maintain very friendly relations with the United Provincial Republic, France, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, etc., and even get back to Spain, which was once a mess, but they just can't maintain close relations with them, England.

Qi seems to have deliberately distanced himself from England, always staring at them with a wary and scrutinizing gaze. In 1688, after William III, the ruler of the Netherlands, came to London, the English once thought that they could use the "face" of this king to further deepen their cooperation with Qi, and even imagined that they could completely replace the Netherlands and become Qi's closest partner in the East.

However, the Qi people directly ignored the frequent flattery from England, and continued to maintain cooperation with the Dutch East India Company, showing full loyalty and loyalty.

For so many years. The Qi people also set up various restrictions and obstacles to the attempts of English merchant capital to open up trade in the East, and sometimes even used force to obstruct them, so as to ensure that their outstretched tentacles were excluded from their sphere of influence, and then their trade monopoly could be maintained.

Japan, Qin, the Malay Peninsula, the East Indies, and even Bangladesh and India, there were Qi people everywhere, and the English merchants were suppressed and excluded, and finally had to succumb to the monopoly capital of the merchants of the Qi State, becoming one of their many trade distributors, and eating some of their leftover scraps through entrepot trade.

In Persia and Ottoman, although Qi did not achieve absolute monopoly, it also occupied most of the market share in the entire trade system due to its relative dominance. In time, with the decline of the Safavid dynasty of Persia, it is conceivable that the Qi people would take the opportunity to take control of this important node connecting East and West trade, and turn the whole of Persia into their economic colony.

In fact, the Qi State not only expanded aggressively in the Indian Ocean Rim region, trying to consolidate and strengthen their maritime supremacy in the region, but also began to set up points in Europe in order to exert their influence.

In 1688, the War of the League of Augsburg (i.e., the War of the Grand Alliance) broke out, and the Netherlands, Spain, HRE, Sweden, Brandenburg, Saxony, Bavaria, and England joined forces to fight France in order to prevent Louis XIV's further expansion.

During the war, the Netherlands and England had strongly invited Qi to join their anti-French grand alliance and jointly carry out military strikes against France.

You must know that at this time, France not only had the largest army strength in Europe, but also surpassed the combined strength of the British and Dutch two countries. In this situation, France not only did not lose the slightest advantage with one enemy, but also defeated the anti-French allies one after another. In particular, in June 1690, at the Battle of Cape Beach, the combined Anglo-Dutch fleet was defeated by the French fleet, and the French army of 80,000 men waited to cross the Channel and invade England to help restore James II. At that time, there were only a very small number of troops in the British mainland, and the situation was very critical.

Although Qi was far away from the European continent and could not send an army to war, they had a powerful fleet that was no less large and effective than the French Navy, and South Africa, Morocco, Egypt, and South America all had a large number of professional warships deployed. As long as they can send twenty or thirty ships into the Atlantic or the Mediterranean, it will be enough to change the balance of maritime power between the two sides and greatly ease the military pressure of the anti-French alliance.

However, no matter how much the British and the Dutch tried to persuade them, Qi was unmoved, saying that they had no intention of intervening in the situation in Europe and would maintain a strict policy of neutrality.

But in the turn of the day, Qi and Louis XIV eyebrows, on the condition of not participating in the anti-French alliance, signed a series of trade cooperation agreements with France, becoming the second country after the Netherlands to fully enter the French market.

Tired of the fruitless bloodshed of the nine-year war, which left all the belligerents burdened with a heavy economic burden, the Peace of Ryswick was signed with France in 1697, ending the war without any winners.

There is no winner, but compared with the various participating countries in Europe, the Qi country, which watched the fire from across the strait, took advantage of its neutral status during the war, and its trade tentacles continued to extend to European countries, and its business was booming. The volume of direct trade between Qi and Europe increased eightfold compared with the pre-war period, making it a huge fortune and a lot of money.

According to English estimates, the trade volume between Qi and Europe is likely to exceed 10 million pounds, making it the most important trading partner of European countries.

If the War of the Augsburg League allowed the influence of Qi to be demonstrated in Europe for the first time, then the subsequent War of the Spanish Succession provided an excellent opportunity for the expansion of Qi's influence (influence) in Europe.

Because, in this war, the people of Qi came to an end in person.

Under the pretext of the territorial dispute in the Americas, the Qi people brazenly declared war on Spain, and then launched a large-scale attack on the Spanish American possessions.

In a very short period of time, the Qing State, a vassal state established by the Qi State in South America, sent troops to sweep through the entire La Plata and seize the east bank area (that is, the east bank of the Uruguay River and the Le Plata River, the area of present-day Uruguay), and the army was directed at Paraguay.

In North America, the Qi people easily annihilated the weak Spanish Pacific Fleet, controlled the entire Baja California region, and seized Coiwa, the Pearl Islands, and Panama City on the Pacific side of the Isthmus of Panama.

In September 1703, after six months of bitter fighting, the Spanish governor in the Canary Islands was forced to surrender to the Qi-Moroccan alliance, ending their two-hundred-year rule in the Canary Islands.

Subsequently, not long after, at the cost of providing 100,000 Hanzhou silver dollars in aid, Qi obtained the ownership of four islands from the Moroccans, including Tenerife, La Gomera, La Palma, and Hierro, and successfully sought an extremely critical maritime base in the North Atlantic.

In 1704, the English navy captured Gibraltar, south of mainland Spain, and directly threatened the Spanish mainland. However, the Qi people did not want to concentrate on fighting against France and Spain, but feared that England would control the strait, which would affect their Red Sea-Mediterranean trade, so they immediately took-for-tat and leased Ceuta on the south side of the strait to Morocco as a naval base.

In July 1707, England united with the HRE to besiege the port of Toulon in southern France, and once again invited Qi to send troops to assist, but the Qi people refused to participate in the war under the pretext that the war in the Americas was stalemate and could not spare too much combat power, which made the English people unhappy.

With Spain's weak naval combat power, it could not pose a threat to the navy of the rival country at all, and in the war on the American land, Spain was even more defeated in successive battles, and was almost unable to fight back. In such a situation, how can a stalemate in the war be formed?

To put it bluntly, Qi Guo behaved like this, just because he didn't want to consume his strength and worked hard for the Europeans.

By August 1712, the war had been going on for eleven years (because of Qi's entry into the war, the war had lasted less than the original time and space), and both sides were exhausted and unable to fight any longer. The Peace of Utrecht was signed with France and Spain on one side and Britain, Qi, the Netherlands, Prussia, Savoy and Portugal on the other, ending the war.

In July 1713, Spain signed the Treaty of Madrid with Qi separately, and Qi obtained La Plata and the East Coast of South America, Baja California in North America, and Panama City was returned to Spain on the Isthmus of Panama, but the island of Coiwa, the Pearl Islands, and the Azuero Peninsula near the isthmus on the Pacific side were ceded to Qi.

During the entire war, Qi never launched a military campaign against France, except for fighting against Spain and seizing a large part of its American territory, and also sheltered the weak French East India Company in the Indian Ocean region, prohibiting the British and Dutch East India Companies from exterminating it, and gained excellent popularity in front of the French.

After the war, when the European belligerents entered the reconstruction of the country, in addition to further expanding the trade market in the Netherlands, Britain, Prussia, Portugal and other countries, it is not surprising that they also obtained a large number of commodity orders from the French, timber, grain, oilseeds, tea, steel, cotton textiles, leather goods, machinery and other commodities flocked into the French market, seriously squeezing the market space of the Netherlands, Genoa and Venice.

Although the two wars of great scale thwarted Louis XIV's desire for expansion and ended France's hegemony in Western Europe, it is undeniable that all the participating countries, including England, the Netherlands, and the HRE, were greatly weakened and their finances were on the verge of collapse.

The Netherlands, once the richest country in Europe, suffered huge losses in the war in its maritime transportation industry and international commerce, from the largest creditor country in Europe to the third largest debtor country in Europe, and its powerful navy was also continuously reduced and declined after the war due to insufficient military spending. The country was in marked decline, gradually retreating from the competition between European powers, and soon ceased to be included in the list of the leading European powers (in 1719 the Netherlands refused to participate in the peace conference of the great powers).

Although Britain profited a lot from this war, it obtained a thirty-year monopoly on the black slave trade in the Spanish American possessions, and the occupation of the Spanish seaports of Gibraltar and Minorca, which allowed the British navy to extend into the Caribbean and the Mediterranean Sea in the Americas, and obtain partial sea control and trade rights between the two places. In addition, France renounced its claim to the British colony of Hudson's Bay in northern Canada, ceding Arcady and Newfoundland islands in eastern Canada to Britain.

But compared to the benefits obtained by the Qi State, the British could not help but feel a little jealous and angry.

In addition to seizing large tracts of land in Spanish America, Qi also sought several key maritime points such as the Canary Islands and the southern coast of the Mediterranean, so that the Qi navy could extend into the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean. At the same time, Qi also obtained the right to trade freely in Spain's American territories, thus breaking the trade blockade that Spain had extended for more than 100 years.

In this war, although the French navy was almost completely wiped out, the Spanish navy was also severely damaged, and the Dutch navy was also seriously weakened, so that the British navy became the first in Europe, but the more powerful Qi navy took the opportunity to enter the Mediterranean and Atlantic Ocean, becoming one of the main forces affecting the situation in the entire region.

At this point, the English suddenly realized that this Qi country, which is also an island country, has become their potential biggest threat. Although they have not yet developed the idea that "Europe is the Europe of Europeans", subconsciously, the involvement of a powerful foreign power in Europe's geopolitics will inevitably pose some unpredictable risks to England.

Based on this background and public opinion, those English merchants who went to the East to trade, in addition to trying to make huge trade profits, were constantly trying to break the trade monopoly of Qi in the Indian Ocean region, and hoped that Qi would fall into great trouble in a certain region and shake their trade dominance.

Therefore, when Michael Henry, an English merchant, saw that a group of trading company guards suspected to be the regular army of Qi were about to go to Isfahan, he couldn't help but have a different kind of thought, thinking about whether he could make some articles to make a dislike between the Qi people and the Persians, and then intensify their contradictions.