Daming Yuanfu

Chapter 2426: The Duke is not an assistant, but a regent (XVII) The ambition of the prime minister

In early March, the city of Bukhara was still wrapped in the ice armor of the remaining winter. The surface of the tributaries of the Amu Darya River was covered with jagged icicles. When the hooves of a large number of Liaodong cavalry stepped over the river bank, the broken ice made a crisp sound like glass breaking under their iron palms. Fortunately, it did not crack in the end.

The white breath exhaled by Li Rumei condensed into frost flowers on the sable fur collar. He raised his hand to wipe off the ice on the telescope, and the tube reflected the nine white flags on the top of the city that were bent by the snow. The flag was frozen stiff, and even the wolf-head pattern of Lindan Batur, the so-called "Heavenly Saint Khan", did not show any majesty.

"Mount the guns at the longest range!" Li Rumei whipped her horsewhip, cracked the icicles hanging from the dead branches, and shouted orders.

The wooden wheels of the No. 3 light gun rolled over the riverbank, causing the ice to creak. The gunners deliberately raised the muzzle three inches, and the dark hole faced the array of ice cones under the eaves of the tall rammed earth tower. The morning light was cut into pieces by these ice blades, and jumped into dazzling spots on the iron helmets of the Chahar defenders.

Burihatu leaned out from the snow on the battlements, the tips of his wolf-tail helmet stained with ice crystals. After seeing the movements of the Ming army a mile away, he rolled up a tin trumpet that he learned from the Ming army and laughed loudly, "General Li is in a good mood. I heard that he brought the Liaodong men to the Western Regions to enjoy the snow?"

The Mongolian scimitar in his hand suddenly slashed into the air, and the military order was immediately issued, "Warriors of Genghis Khan, come and wake up the Ming army!"

The order was as powerful as a mountain. Sixteen Persian heavy crossbows on the top of the city were tightened at the same time, and arrows tied to pottery bottles of kerosene were shot into the center of the moat. The ice surface was pierced by arrows as thick as a child's arm, and the kerosene in the pottery jar was ignited and spread at the same time. Dozens of frozen fish in the ice holes floated up with their bellies turned up.

"Those who haven't crossed the river yet should retreat first!" Li Rumei's mouth twitched twice, and she shouted loudly, swinging her gilded wrist guard forward fiercely: "The front cavalry artillery adjusts the firing range and fires freely!"

The solid bullets with reduced charge whizzed past the battlements and smashed the half-acre ice shell outside the west wall. The flying ice debris mixed with frozen soil hit the iron gate and rammed earth wall, which was more powerful than the rain of arrows.

The young Lin Danhan raised the collar of his mink fur coat and said, "Grand Master, there are not many men and horses crossing the river. Why don't I lead people to attack them..." Before he finished speaking, he was dragged back to the dark side of the arrow tower by Burihatu.

The Grand Tutor held him down with his hands, and then spoke calmly: "Great Khan, look at the horseshoes of their cavalry - they are wrapped with felt to prevent slipping. They look like they are ready to fight to the death and attack the city?" He paused, then shook his head and said: "Those who came are Li Rumei's elite servants... Your father and grandfather should have told you a hundred times what the Li family's elite cavalry are capable of."

"Then just watch them show off their power outside the city?" Lin Danhan was obviously still unwilling, but he did not dare to disobey the Grand Tutor who had entrusted him with the care of his son. Although he said this, his body remained obedient and did not move at all.

Burihatu snorted, "Li Rumei is not Li Rusong. He will not easily lose his men. This time he came to fire cannons just to test whether we will be fooled and leave the city... This strategy of luring the enemy is too insincere."

"No sincerity?" Lindan Batur was a little stunned.

"What he meant was that he knew that I, the Grand Master, could see through his tricks, but it would be bad to do nothing, so he still came here to pretend, that's all."

"No wonder we only used sixteen Persian heavy crossbows..." Lindan Batur suddenly realized, "The Grand Master was just pretending to cooperate with him, right?"

"He came so quickly, and all 60,000 of his men are cavalry. Who would believe him if he said he was going to attack the city?" Burihatu sneered, "He just wants to trap me in the city and watch Samarkand fall. So what?

Samarkand is important because it is a place for trade. However, the Ming army occupied Andijan and blocked the trade route. Keeping the city is useless. Now that the Ming army wants it, give it to them. Tashhai is a smart man. Once it is hopeless to defend the city, he will try his best to preserve his strength and escape. "

Lindan Batur was still a little worried and asked, "Can we really escape?"

"The main force of the Ming cavalry is almost all in Bukhara. There are no more than 10,000 armored cavalry left outside Samarkand. It will be difficult for Tashhai to defeat them head-on, but if he wants to leave, the Ming cavalry will not be able to stop him."

As Burihatu expected, Li Rumei's feint ended hastily before noon. When the Liaodong cavalry retreated, Burihatu patted Lindan Batur on the shoulder and sneered, "Look, Khan, he has been busy for more than an hour, and has only fired less than a hundred rounds of No. 3 cannon solid bullets... Li Rumei really saved money for his brother-in-law. If it was Li Rusong, he would not leave until he had fired all the bullets."

Li Rumei retreated five miles, and he and Boshoketu sent troops to guard the four gates respectively, but never launched another attack. As if by tacit agreement, after "beating back" Li Rumei, Burihatu had no intention of leaving the city to fight again, and the next three days became a pantomime in the snow.

Every day at noon, the Ming army would choose a city gate to fire blank cannons: the shells would sometimes shatter the ice waterfall, sometimes shake off the snow shell of the city wall, and the most dangerous one just brushed past the bronze bell on the east gate watchtower.

The defenders initially tried to pour oil, but later found that tung oil solidified into a thin amber shell on the ice surface, which made the ladders unstable. However, considering that such supplies were not easy to obtain in the Western Regions, Burihatu simply ordered a stop.

Three days later, the night wind was particularly sharp, and Li Rumei was stroking the frozen and cracked scabbard in the central army tent. Suddenly, a scout rolled in with ice chips, and a secret letter shook out from a sheepskin tube with the smell of gunpowder from Samarkand: "Bian Zhiyuan's troops have seized the Tongmen, and the remaining Yuan general Tashhai burned the warehouse and fled!"

He stood up suddenly, and the sound of the rhino horn pierced the snow curtain: "Move camp! Throw the caltrops into the southeast wind vent! Inform Boshoketu and lead the army to follow immediately!"

Lin Danhan, who was on night duty at the top of the city wall, was the first to notice something was wrong. The empty cannon fire that sounded every day was replaced by the roar of the glacier cracking. He rushed to the arrow window and saw the torches of the Ming army camp forming a long winding dragon, retreating towards the ice bridge upstream of the Amu Darya River. The fake artillery fort covered with snow was set on fire, and the unburned straw mats floated in the rising black smoke, like a fleeing black dragon.

"Hang up the flags! Hang up all the flags that can fly!" Burihatu's voice came with snow particles. In a moment, three hundred old and new battle flags were erected on the top of the city. Even the Bukhara and Khiva battle flags that Curry found were tied to spears. The defenders swung their axes to chop the frozen arrow stacks and threw the frozen arrows in bundles down the city wall. The sound of them hitting the ground was like the drumbeat of a triumph.

On a snowy hill five miles away, Li Rumei reined in his horse and looked back. He saw flags covering the sky above the city of Bukhara, and smoke mixed with unmelted snow rising ten feet high, transforming into the shadows of thousands of troops under the morning sun. He suddenly sneered, raised his hand and shot a whistling arrow. The copper whistle at the end of the arrow tore through the cold wind, startling the remnants of Tashhai who were sneaking at the edge of the snowy forest.

These light cavalrymen who escaped from Samarkand ran fast enough. When Li Rumei received the good news of the capture of Samarkand, the remnants of the Chahar army had actually run back to the outskirts of Bukhara. However, Bukhara was besieged by 60,000 cavalrymen, and Burihatu was obviously unwilling to waste his manpower to fight outside the city. Therefore, the remnants of Tashhai had to lurk at the edge of the forest and wait for the opportunity. At this moment, they were sipping the last few sips of kumis with sheepskin bags.

"Marshal, do you want to stay behind to cover the retreat?" The soldier asked Li Rumei with a whimper. Li Rumei's whip brushed across the ice hanging next to the saddle - it was the broken ice from the Amu Darya River that he broke off from outside the camp every day, and now it had frozen into a blurry wolf head.

"No need." He whipped the ice sculpture to pieces, and the crystals blossomed into stars in the morning light. "The Grand Master has lost two important places, Tashkent and Samarkand. There must be some reason to cheer people up. I am a soft-hearted person, so let the Grand Master burn a few more flags... to keep warm."

When the last group of Ming troops disappeared in the snow and fog, Burihatu was pouring half a pot of mare's milk on the floor tiles of the arrow tower. The wine instantly solidified into a winding ice line, as if outlining the escape route from Samarkand to Bukhara.

When Lin Danhan untied his frozen sword, he suddenly discovered that the red coral embellishing the throat had cracked in the severe cold - just like the pursuit plan that had never been implemented and was forever sealed under the ice in March.

"Send people to spread the word in the city, saying that our army successfully repelled 100,000 Ming cavalry and won a great victory in the defense of Bukhara." Buzhihatu said in an emotionless tone, "Also send people out of the city to pursue - remember not to get too close. By the way, look for Tashhai, I think he should be nearby."

A few days later, the news that the Anxi Ming army had successfully captured the cities of Tashkent and Samarkand was delivered to Gao Youshi via carrier pigeons from Beijing.

The chief minister stood with his hands behind his back on the terrace of the Qianqing Palace, staring at the "Kunyu Wanguo Quantu" made in Beijing and spread out on the desk. The snow on the glazed tiles reflected the sunlight, illuminating the vast land outside the Ming territory. His fingers gently stroked the border between Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Persia, and the cold bronze paperweight pressed down several volumes of secret reports.

"1604..." He whispered softly, a sigh escaped from his throat. This year was just an ordinary number in the history textbook, but at this moment it was like a red-hot iron rod, burning his palms.

At this time, Europe was on the eve of the Thirty Years' War, the power of the Holy Roman Empire was declining, and the confrontation between Protestants and Catholics had reached a critical point. Gao Youshi knew that this pan-European melee that would last for thirty years would reshape the European landscape, and what he had to do was to project the influence of the Ming Dynasty into this chaos, buying more time for the development of Chinese civilization so as to welcome the arrival of the colonial frenzy.

The Russian double-headed eagle emblem glowed coldly under the gloomy sky. Gao Youshi's fingertips passed over the territory of the Russian Empire, which was not yet huge but had begun to take shape, as if he had touched the gold, oil and natural gas under the frozen soil of Siberia.

"Rurik has no descendants, so the Romanov dynasty will come to power, right?" he muttered to himself, "But at this moment you are fighting a desperate battle with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Swedes are also eyeing the Baltic Sea covetously..."

Yes, in 1604, Russia was in the interregnum after the fall of the Rurik Dynasty, and the Polish-Russian War was in full swing. Gao Youshi knew that the Russian Empire was eager for an outlet to the Baltic Sea, and that the Russian bear would invest huge human, material, financial and energy there for many years to come.

However, after conquering the Volga steppes, the Tsar gained the loyalty of the Cossack cavalry. Those steppe bandits who later made Europe tremble in fear were now fighting for Russia.

Gao Youshi suddenly chuckled, "Don't you love expansion? Then I'll make you bleed to the last drop of blood in Eastern Europe." He pressed his finger heavily on the Tomsk mark, "But before that, when the summer gets warmer, I will let Erdemutu march west again. By then, my Ming army's Anxi cavalry, together with the Tumed and Qihe tribes, nearly 100,000 cavalry will sweep Siberia. Let's see if you can continue to stay east of the Ural Mountains!"

As soon as he received the military report, Gao Youshi had the prototype of the "Anxi Iron Wall" plan in his mind, the essence of which was to turn the Western Regions into a meat grinder for the Russian Empire's eastward advance. He planned to completely control Central Asia and Siberia, hurt the Russian Empire's bear claws, and force them to retreat west of the Ural Mountains-Ural River-Caspian Sea line.

As for what happened after that, of course, it would be to build a Ural River defense line and then hold this line of defense - he was not afraid of Tsarist Russia attacking over the Ural Mountains, because it was too far north for a large army to pass through, and a small force invading would be like delivering food.

After staring blankly for a while, Gao Fusi seemed to find the crescent flag of the Ottoman Sultan fluttering on the map. His eyes shifted to Asia Minor, where a storm that would change the world was brewing.

"Ahmed I, can your 'New Order Army' stop the Persian Isfahan New Army?" He ran his finger across the Mesopotamian region, "Titrik, Baghdad, Basra... these granaries in the Fertile Crescent should be enough for you and the Persians to fight for ten years."

That's right, although the Ottoman Empire had passed its heyday at this time, it still controlled the Mesopotamian Basin and Egypt. The reason why Gao Youshi asked Anxi Governor Li Tingji to contact Abbas I of the Safavid Dynasty of Persia was to provide him with some relatively advanced firearms drawings and instigate him to compete with the Ottoman Empire for Iraq - the so-called relatively advanced, of course, was only advanced in the category of matchlock guns, and Gao Youshi was not generous enough to provide them with flintlock gun technology.

The lion and sun emblem of the Safavid dynasty of Persia was distorted in the candlelight. Gao Youshi pulled out the "Persian Armament Report" from the Beijing Secret Report, and the structural diagram of the matchlock gun flashed before his eyes.

"Abbas I, your military reforms are indeed interesting, but I will definitely balance you so that you can put enough pressure on the Ottomans without destroying them." He suddenly rolled up the blueprint into a tube, "Defend your Caucasus Mountains well, and don't let the Ottomans come from the Caspian Sea to bother the Ming Dynasty - oh no, it would be best if both of you suffer losses!"

The black eagle emblem of the Habsburg dynasty was silent in the corner of the map. Gao Fusi's eyes finally turned and fell on the Principality of Transylvania, which should still be in chaos, but it always attracted the Habsburgs' covetous attention.

"Ferdinand II, your 'Battle of White Mountain' is about to begin, right?" His finger hovered over Bohemia. "I have relieved the pressure on the Ottoman Empire for you. I hope you can concentrate your strength on suppressing those Protestants... After all, the countries established by those Protestants are the ugliest scum in the colonial era."

Gao Youshi suddenly swept the paperweight to the ground. The crisp sound of bronze and gold bricks hitting each other startled the crows sleeping under the eaves, and they fluttered over the eaves of the Forbidden City. However, he did not take any further action, but only whispered:

"I want Russia to continue to fight the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and let the Swedes mess around in the Baltic Sea."

"I will make the Ottomans and Persians fight each other in the Fertile Crescent and make rivers of blood flow."

"I want the Habsburgs to fight the Ottomans to death in Transylvania and to lose both sides to the Protestant princes in the Thirty Years' War."

"I will plunge the whole of Europe into an even more tragic quagmire of the Thirty Years' War..."

He turned around abruptly and took a deep breath. "And I will build the Anxi Iron Wall on land in this chaos, and build the Southern Xinjiang Maritime Great Wall in the Indian Ocean, so that the European colonists will never dare to get involved in China!"
-

PS: Hey, this chapter was coded a lot slower than expected, so it’s past midnight…

Thanks to the book friend "First Login" for the reward and support, thank you!

Thanks to the book friends "gz2010", "Don't ask my name 000", "Crescent Moon Scimitar Killing", "Something is wrong with you, boy", "I am Brother Nan", "Idol Needs a Sewing Machine", "Book Friend 20230303184218780", "Expert Zhao", "doni", "Lei Lao Hu_dc", and "First Login" for their monthly ticket support, thank you!