Chapter 221: Prisoner of War Sacrifice and Human Trafficking
Zhang Cong had no intention of returning these escaped slaves, so he sent someone to directly reject Daha's unreasonable request. The reason was: "Wuliangha originally belonged to the Ming Dynasty, and the population of Wuliangha was also a subject of the Ming Dynasty. It’s not about whose slaves, there were no slaves in the Ming Dynasty, and the Ming Dynasty also abolished the road guide system, and the people had the freedom to move within the country, so these escaped slaves did not break the law, and there was no question of returning them.”
Of course, Zhang Cong asked his own people to give Daha an answer, which was that if Daha allowed the escaped slaves to go back on their own, he, the governor of Hetao, would not force them to stay, but Daha had to pay for these escaped slaves who were already employed in Wuhai City. By paying liquidated damages, after all, the Ming merchant groups and government officials who hired these escaped slaves would be compensated.
Naturally, Daha could not make the escaped slaves return voluntarily, and he would not pay liquidated damages for his slaves to the business groups of the Ming Dynasty. However, he was reluctant to leave like this. He decided to block the officials in Wuhai City. On the road, they prevented merchants and travelers from entering Wuhai City, and even robbed these merchants to force Ming Dynasty to make compromises and concessions.
Naturally, Zhang Cong would not let Mongolian nobles like Daha cut off their ties with Wuhai City. After all, it would be difficult to survive once Wuhai City's trade was cut off.
The fugitive Hu slaves who moved to Wuhai City had been mobilized by Wang Xi, the magistrate of Wuhai in the Ming Dynasty, and nearly 40,000 people gathered at once.
The Mongols have been riding horses since childhood, and these fugitive slaves from the Hu people are no exception. As long as they have weapons and horses, they can become qualified cavalry.
When the officials of the Ming Dynasty told these fugitive Hu slaves that Daha, the nobleman of Uliangha, would massacre them or even take them back to continue to make them slaves and even seize their wives and children, and issued weapons, these Hu people who escaped from Wuhai City were The slaves suddenly turned into tens of thousands of cavalry with high morale.
Gui Yong, deputy commander-in-chief of the Ming Dynasty border army in Wuhai, Hetao, also led a thousand Ming troops to the outer city. Among them, five hundred musketeers were already in position with firing muskets. Grenades were also unpacked and stacked by the city wall, while the city gate artillery The dust cover was also removed, the shells were unboxed, and the barrel was cleaned.
But the Ming army has not yet launched an attack.
According to past experience, as long as these fugitive barbarian slaves can defeat their masters, the Ming army will naturally not have to do it themselves.
The reason why the Ming army was in a state of emergency combat readiness was naturally not only to prevent the fugitive Hu slaves from being defeated, but also to prevent these fugitive Hu slaves from rebelling.
However, these fugitive Hu slaves did not rebel. Although the Ming army had to be wary of these foreigners, in fact these fugitive Hu slaves had no intention of helping their masters capture Wuhai City of the Ming Dynasty, because the Mongolian and Yuan nobles This awareness has not been cultivated in them, not to mention that they have already regarded this place as their home and settled their wives and children here.
The Mongolian tribes are also divided into many levels. Nobles and civilians can naturally benefit from looting, but slaves do not have this right.
Under the deliberate propaganda of the Ming government, the fugitive slaves of the Hu people were more aware that they would be miserable if they continued to be slaves. Therefore, they all rode their horses to kill the cavalry in Daha regardless of their own safety.
Zhang Cong also beat the drums himself and shouted: "People who don't want to be slaves, be killed by me, repel the bandits, defend your home, defend your family!"
Zhang Cong shouted this, and the morale of these fugitive Hu slaves who rushed out of the barbed wire gate became higher.
"Bastard! Bastard! These damn escaped slaves! Kill my warriors in Wuliangha!"
Daha watched tens of thousands of escaped slaves wearing the Han people's cheap broadcloth shorts and shorts, riding their horses towards him like the wind and lightning. Busy also led his own cavalry to kill them.
The two iron streams collided violently. These fugitive Hu slaves who had been brainwashed by the Ming Dynasty government only had hatred for the Mongolian and Yuan cavalry, so they killed them very bravely. In addition, the Ming Dynasty government would also give them pensions. There is even insurance, and they are not afraid of death. Even if they are riding alone, they dare to break into the Uliangha cavalry camp. "What's going on? What kind of ecstasy soup did these Han people pour into them? How come these cheap slaves who don't even dare to fart are so brave and fearless of death!"
Daha watched his warriors being knocked to the ground one by one by several escaped Hu slaves. He didn't understand for a moment. If he had known that these cheap slaves had such strong fighting power, how could he have dared to enslave them? .
Although these tens of thousands of cavalry composed of fugitive slaves from the Hu people were not very skilled in operating the Ming Dynasty's conventional cavalry combat weapons, namely short crossbows, and did not have intensive lethality, they were able to defeat the cavalry with a spirit of fearlessness and fear of death. They were defeated, and they were so furious that they chased after them and killed almost all the cavalry.
The Ulyanha Mongolian cavalry who could no longer stand this kind of desperate fighting style were still killed by these fugitive Hu slaves after they dismounted and surrendered, and they were killed in retaliation. Basically every Ulyanha Mongolian cavalry was killed by the chaos. Killed with a knife.
Until there was no Uliangha cavalry left alive outside the barbed wire fence of Wuhai City, and rivers of blood flowed outside Wuhai City, these fugitive Hu slaves came back one by one, numbly handed their weapons back to the Ming government, and then went to collect the money. Those who died in battle will receive an extra pension, and those who were injured in the war will also receive an extra pension. Some recently emerged insurance companies will handle compensation on the spot.
It seems that these fugitive slaves from the Hu people did a job for the government.
But Zhang Cong was not happy about this, and said very dissatisfied: "Go and call the Wang Zhifu, who asked them to kill all the captives of Wuliangha's cavalry. Wuhai City is now in short supply of prisoners to serve. Doesn’t he know that when the time comes, all the major business houses will carry Later civil servants had to impeach him, the prefect, for inciting public opinion to kill prisoners indiscriminately, and they had to intercede with him! He ordered that in the future, those who sacrificed prisoners would be rewarded twenty taels to fifty silver for each prisoner, depending on the value of the prisoner. No difference between two!”
Zhang Cong did not expect that a way to increase the number of labor force that he just casually thought of at this time would trigger a wave of human trafficking in the era of primitive capital accumulation in the Ming Dynasty.
Some Mongolians or other non-Han people who were not captives, such as the Jurchens, Ewenki and others in Liaodong, and even Koreans, would also be captured by some Jianghu thieves and presented to the government as prisoners.
The government can only identify people through basic characteristics such as clothing and language. Naturally, it is not clear whether they are captives. In addition, because the expansion of production scale requires labor, especially free labor such as captives, who can be enslaved for a period of time, they are not too strict. , basically accept as many prisoners as you offer.
There are even some poorer ethnic minorities who are willing to be bought at low prices by some business groups specializing in human trafficking, and then brought to the Ming Dynasty and sold to the Ming Dynasty as prisoners.
Sometimes you can buy a strong foreigner for a piece of cloth, and then get thirty or fifty taels of silver from the government. This is naturally a huge profit. After all, after the Ming Dynasty's weaving industry realized mechanized production, the price of cloth is now low. To the point where it’s not worth a cent of silver.
Some nobles also began to become professional human traffickers, plundering the populations of weak foreign races and then selling them to the Ming Dynasty as captives.
In short, after these people offered prisoners to the Ming Dynasty in various ways, the number of prisoners of war in the Ming Dynasty increased sharply.
As a result, in a certain year, the Ministry of War reported to Zhu Houzhao that the number of new prisoners of war taken by the Ming Dynasty was as high as more than three million!
This made Zhu Houzhao even unable to believe it, because the Ming Dynasty had not fought a large-scale war in this year, but it could actually capture more than three million people? ! But even in a large-scale war, it is impossible to capture more than three million people! Zhu Houzhao had to admit that Ming Dynasty had indeed changed!
Sorry for the late update of this chapter in the morning
(End of chapter)