stubborn thief

Erdeni's return to Lake Uvs has driven his men insane.

The saying goes, "What the superiors do, the inferiors will follow." The will of the ruler often influences his vassals in unexpected ways.

The nobles of the Hetuite tribe had previously regarded Liu Chengzong as a mortal enemy.

Because they had heard of Liu Chengzong long ago.

As early as when Ligdan Khan passed away, Liu Chengzong called himself Daiqing Khitan Khan, and he had already become famous far and wide in the northern desert.

At that time, although he was very famous, his reputation was terrible.

Whether it was Ligdan Khan's personal abdication or the Kurultai held in Qinghai, the nobles of the northern desert did not consider it to have any legitimacy.

Especially Erdene.

The three major feudal lords of the northern desert were Gunbu, Shuolei, and Subadi.

Erdeni, as a minor lord of a branch family, was only famous in parts of Rus'. In the traditional southern Mongolia and Oirat regions, no one regarded him as a Khan.

As a result, Erdeni was not even qualified to nominate Liu Chengzong for his declaration of becoming Khan.

The three Khans of the Northern Desert had received a silk scroll from the tribe. Not supporting them would be making enemies. Besides, they didn't know much about Liu Chengzong's situation at the time, so they accepted it with a vacillating attitude.

Erdeni was different; he never recognized Liu Chengzong's ridiculous title of Khan from beginning to end.

Because there was a resentment in his heart, he just couldn't accept it.

Why?

If you hold a knife to someone's throat and run a powerful kuritai (military headquarters) in a prisoner-of-war camp, who would dare not support you? This thing is entirely born of violence and has no legitimacy whatsoever.

If you say you have a strong and powerful army, well, we can't help but acknowledge that; but to say that you are a miracle worker or that you must be virtuous is utter nonsense.

I just don’t accept it!
Besides this obvious reason, the deeper cause was Erdene's jealousy.

He was jealous of Liu Chengzong.

Erdene's hostility stemmed from jealousy.

His tribe was founded to rule the Oirats; his father did indeed rule the Oirats until he was killed by nobles under Harahura.

When Erdeni took over and Toghit, pastureland shrank, livestock were plundered, and the population dwindled.

The men who died fighting on the Ertis River returned home with bodies that didn't even have enough cloth to wrap them. The old man silently dug a pit with a wooden shovel in the desert oasis.

The widow cried and asked him, "The next generation hasn't grown up yet. Who can protect us like those fallen warriors?"

nobody.

At that time, Erdeni was just a boy who had lost his father at an early age.

He could not protect anyone; only the towering Altai and Sayan Mountains could delay the Oirat's counterattack.

Later, even Sayanling could not hold them off, and Uriankhai lost most of its territory. The remnants of the Tuba tribe in the north could only cross the Tannu Mountains.

Erdeni tried to get revenge by attacking Weilat while Chuhuertaiji was causing trouble.

However, the Oirat army also possessed excellent equipment and valiant tactics after several major victories. Khara-hula was also a brilliant strategist, dealing with his rebellious son Chuhu'er while simultaneously defeating Erdeni.

Erdeni dreamed of killing Harahula.

A tremendous resentment hovered over Lake Uvs.

He lived until he died of old age in the Tianshan Mountains.

Erdeni raised an army again, but suffered repeated defeats.

Unlike his father, Harahula, who was invincible in battle, Batur Khuntaiji, who succeeded to the throne, was more of a king and bridged the conflicts among the four Oirat tribes, giving them greater cohesion.

They were no longer evenly matched. The Oirat became a powerful alliance dominating the northern foothills of the Tianshan Mountains, while the Tohuit tribe had lost all its resources in the war of revenge.

Erdeni dreamed of defeating the Oirat.

But the gap widened, and Erdeni no longer mentioned raising troops for revenge. Even when he asked Rus for troops, he only used revenge as an excuse to consolidate his existing power.

A crushing defeat on the grasslands can be devastating. It takes twenty years for a child to grow into a valiant archer, and those twenty years allow the Oirat to grow stronger and stronger.

All the crushing defeats were decided the moment he inherited the tribe; this was his fate.

He didn't just accept his fate; he was truly at his wit's end.

It was at this time that Liu Chengzong's name reached his ears.

That scoundrel who drove him mad with jealousy was practically the ideal superego in Erdene's mind.

Ligdan Khan's westward expedition sweeping across southern Mongolia came to an end. He easily defeated the allied forces of the four Oirat tribes. With a single scroll of silk, he held the sky in his hands and, from Tibet to the Greater Khingan Mountains, pressed down on the necks of all the Taijis and Noyans, making them acknowledge that he was the only true Khan in heaven and earth.

It's been many years since we've seen such a thug who doesn't even bother with acting and just flips the table.

Erdeni hated it.

He deeply resented this powerful fake Khan; why wasn't it him?
The nobles of the Tohti tribe, fueled by Erdeni's jealousy and resulting dislike, harbored immense hostility towards Liu Chengzong.

Ironically, at Subadi's invitation, Erdeni ended up participating in the Lingdong Campaign by chance.

To be precise, it should be spectating.

The entire battle completely transformed his views on Liu Chengzong, the Marshal's Office, and even the entire world.

Throughout the entire process, Liu Chengzong only gave him a second glance when he was dividing the spoils of victory and appointing him as a military officer.

In that one glance, all jealousy vanished.

In Liu Chengzong's gentle, smiling eyes, Erdeni saw the monster within himself—the world's power was rolling towards him, and his ambition and mission to build a strong tribe could be achieved through this man.

Let's put aside the question of mission.

On one hand, with the three tribes of Outer Mongolia joining the Dunta Khanate, Erdeni suddenly discovered that his own tribe, the Toghtod tribe, had moved from the border region of Outer Mongolia's Khalkha to the heartland of the Dunta Khanate.

Of course, Sayanling may not be as 'deep' as Helan Mountain, but it is 1,500 li away from the nearest front line, Taimengwei, so it can hardly be called the frontier.

The peace we had longed for suddenly arrived.

To be honest, Liu Chengzong's title of Jinlianchuan Military Commander was... a real pain for Erdeni.

For Liu Shizi, three thousand troops were nothing more than an expansion of one battalion.

The vast Marshal's Mansion only housed nearly a hundred officers of the rank of lieutenant general or higher. Giving Erdene a position there was considered a favor to Suba. However, for Erdene, this favor was far too heavy a burden.

Where was he supposed to gather three thousand soldiers for Liu Chengzong?
It wasn't that the tribes in the northern deserts were too weak, but rather that Liu Chengzong's army had a high proportion of mobile forces.

To put it bluntly, the Xinganling-Liaodong line was a war front with an intensity that was among the highest in the world, and all the participating countries were powerful hegemons.

Even the weakened Northern Yuan during the reign of Ligdan Khan, whose defeated troops fled in panic, abandoning their land and rolling westward, was still an infantry and cavalry regiment capable of crushing countless small countries.

In fact, Ligdan Khan did crush countless small states. For example, the once powerful Tumed tribe declined into a small tribe that struggled to gather even three thousand elite soldiers after Ligdan Khan passed through its territory.

This kind of front is too much for Erdeni.

Let alone asking him to bring three thousand herdsmen over, Subadi's seven thousand-strong army in the Lingdong Campaign was considered elite in the northern desert, and should be able to do whatever they want anywhere.

However, on the Lingdong battlefield between Liu Chengzong and Huang Taiji, Subadi's men could only sneak along the sidelines and dared not even touch Huang Taiji's Han army formation. Bayala rushed out and beat them to a pulp.

They didn't even dare to engage in a direct confrontation from beginning to end. Post-war statistics showed that they inflicted the heaviest casualties on the three tribes of Mobei, the worst in decades.

Even after returning to the Uvs Lake Basin, which belonged to the Hotok tribe, Erdeni still felt lingering fear about that battle.

Looking at the misfits in his tribe, he calculated that even if all the elites were sent out, they wouldn't be able to muster three thousand armored cavalry. Moreover, once these people left, his tribe would soon be scattered.

They had lost a generation in the war against the four Oirat tribes, and their forces were already small.

If it were just about letting him lead an army to follow Liu Chengzong, that would be fine. He could just gather a mediocre semi-armored force and freeload off the Grand Marshal. Judging from how wealthy and powerful Liu the Great Khan was, it wouldn't be long before the semi-armored battalion became a fully armored cavalry elite force.

Unfortunately, Jinlianchuan is not really a rear area; it's very close to the Xing'an Mountains, and the Later Jin army might break out from Songmofu next year.

Liu Chengzong's troops were strong, but Huang Taiji's troops were not weak either.

Those were well-equipped and fiercely fighting troops. If Erdeni had led his poorly equipped nomadic troops, they would probably have been wiped out in a single battle.

So, after much deliberation, he realized he could only muster a thousand elite soldiers, no, three hundred elite cavalry and six hundred auxiliary cavalry.

The remaining two thousand people still need to be sent out from outside.

The Tuba tribes of Uriankhai need to recruit soldiers.

And of course, there's Erdene's old friend, Rus'.

Along several large rivers in the forest, the Toghit people knew the locations of more than a dozen winter camps and fortifications of the Oros.

In Erdene's eyes, the Rus' who settled in Siberia were a very strange thing.

They wore chainmail, carried firearms at their waists, and could ride horses and sail boats, but they didn't evoke in Erdeni the same envy he felt when looking at Liu Chengzong's group, nor did they inspire a genuine desire to join them.

Instead, it gives you a sense of pride that your animal friends are really amazing.

North of the Gobi Desert, in a place where even cattle and horses cannot survive, every year groups of Oroqen people, who don't know why they live, flock there.

It is foreseeable that with the Temeng Khanate cutting off the shipping routes to the west, it will be difficult for them to cross over before the city of Taimeng is captured.

Erdene would naturally set his sights on the Rus' people who remained there.

However, controlling them is not easy, but fortunately Erdeni has a special method of manipulation.

Thanks to their persistent deception, Rus' intelligence on the Khitan remained largely inaccurate.

Because Erdeni had always presented Guihua City as a Khitan city to the Rus' people.

Therefore, there are absurd claims that the Khitan were a large city by the river, sometimes an impregnable city, and sometimes a city that was conquered by Ligdan Khan.

As long as he sends someone to tell the Rus' people to organize an army and go to Khitan with him, they will organize a capable army on their own and act with him.

This naturally brings great hidden dangers, such as they will not truly obey one's own control.

But here, it doesn't matter if they are not under Erdene's control. As long as they reach Jinlianchuan on the western route of Xinganling, where Liu Dahan's tens of thousands of troops are stationed, it's just that these few hundred or a thousand of them look different from the others.

They will then have no choice but to be controlled.

Erdeni informed Yakov, the Rus' envoy who had accepted his investiture, that he was about to lead a delegation to the Khitan. The two scoundrels immediately agreed.

The feudal aristocratic system makes it difficult to foster a national consciousness; if it does, it will inevitably transform into a centralized state with a bureaucratic system.

Comparatively speaking, although Russo's science and technology were terrible, it was actually more advanced than Western Europe in this respect.

Because they were indeed ruled by the Mongols.

This kind of consciousness will slowly dissipate in the greenhouse of peacetime, but it will return on its own in times of war.

They all fought their way to the top.

Take, for example, the Central Plains, where everyone is baring their teeth and brandishing their claws.

The Book of Rites strictly defined the categories of the Northern Di, Eastern Yi, Western Rong, and Southern Man.

The Ming Dynasty explicitly stipulated in its laws how much silver was awarded for the head of a Northern Barbarian and how much silver was awarded for the head of an Eastern Barbarian; correspondingly, if a Han Chinese did not know that he was Han Chinese, Nurhaci's knife could also help him recognize his ancestry.

Yakov was a nobleman, and one who had previously served both the Rus' and the Toghtod Khanate. He had no interest in the Rus' soldiers and hunters who made a living in Siberia.

Instead, he persuaded the Rus' soldiers to join the campaign and then tried to establish trade relations with the Khitan, so that the credit would go to him from both sides.

He accepted the mission to recruit soldiers in Yeniseiburg without hesitation.

The mission was accomplished brilliantly. Less than ten days after they arrived, before Erdeni had finished recruiting the various tribes of Uriankhai and before the army had even assembled, news came back from Yenisei Fortress.

Peter, the governor of Yenisei, was extremely excited by the news. He immediately assembled two hundred soldiers and ordered conscription from the surrounding fortresses and winter camps. He expected to be able to organize a force of 1,300 men within two months to follow the Khan of the Golden Age and advance southeast.

This news made Erdene extremely happy.

He directly changed the recruitment plan.

Not only did they expand the plan to incorporate 900 cavalrymen from their headquarters into the Jinchuan Camp, but they also spared no expense to increase the number of troops to 1,200.

He also ordered the Tuba tribes, who were nomadic in the north and south of the Sayan Mountains, to send fewer soldiers to the campaign, only 500 cavalrymen, but to also send 500 hunters to graze and hunt in the Xingan Mountains for the sake of long-term survival.

They even had to transfer a group of women and children from the tribe to settle there and form a new nomadic tribe.

However, Yakov worriedly reminded Erdeni: "Your Majesty, the governor Peter recruited the army because he thought we were going to take them to the southeast to plunder and fight for wealth. If they are organized into an army, they might cause trouble."

"It was about plundering and fighting in the past, huh? They didn't even know what the Khitans looked like. There was a big city next to a great river, and the city was full of silver... wasn't that Shengjing?"

Erdeni argued vehemently, "It doesn't matter who we rob, besides, once we get there and start fighting, Khan Liu's rewards are notoriously generous!" (End of Chapter)