open sea

Chapter 1106 Lifetime
The Patna region of Bihar, the eastern frontier province of the Mughal Empire, was the main battlefield for the confrontation between the Mughals and the Bengali rebels.

To the west of Patna is Mughal, to the east is Bangladesh. It is located on the south bank of the Ganges River Basin. It is the gateway for the Mughal army to enter Bangladesh. Among the siege.

At the same time that the elite soldiers of the royal army entered this land, the Mughal King Akbar was anxiously waiting for a reply from Ming. In the hinterland of Bangladesh, he almost killed the abbot of West Shaolin from Ming Dynasty on the battlefield.

At this time, Akbar, who claimed to be the king of justice, was not ready to attack the Bengal nobles supported by the "Da Ming merchants" - his Portuguese adviser explained to him the situation in the Indian Ocean and let him know that he had worked closely with him in the past The Portuguese are unreliable at this time.

Paradoxically, Akbar of the Mughals signed an agreement with Christianity to allow Christianity to enter the Mughals, but the purpose of this agreement was to allow Portuguese ships at sea to protect the visitors of the Holy Land of Mecca. .

Now Portugal can no longer achieve Akbar's goal. If they do not get the permission of the Western Army, they will not even be able to guarantee their own safety when they leave Goa; what's more, even if they get the warrant from the Western Minister to allow them to go together, the Red Bay navigation is in control. Under the hands of another Ming man, the former capital of Xidacheng, King Lin Feng of the Ming Han Dynasty.

Without the protection of the Portuguese, most of the ships sailing into the Red Bay can live in peace as long as they pay taxes according to the number of passengers and the weight of the cargo. .

Of course, this is just a hypothesis. No Portuguese dared to sail to the waters where Han pirates were infested.

The Portuguese, who used to fight against the deep sea with Spain with a small country and big ambitions, carve up the world in business, colonize and conquer several countries in Southeast Asia, was forced by Lin Afeng to become a land-based daughter-in-law, and could only be active as a foreign gun team. In various battlefields of the subcontinent.

At this time, the Patna Fortress, the forefront of the battle between the two armies, is still in the hands of the leader of the Bangladeshi rebels. The local Afghan lord has died on the way out of the city to fight. An old black person named Hakim.

Afghan lords or tribal chiefs from Persia ruled various countries in India. The long-term developed maritime trade made the flow of various ethnic groups very frequent. The local military system also relied heavily on the black slave army from Albania.

These blacks were resold by Arab traders to Indian or Persian nobles as slaves. Most of the men were trained as warriors from an early age, received a salary, and remained loyal to their masters for life.

What is special is this 'lifetime', which is the life of the owner. When the owner dies, they will be free and retain the right to continue serving the army.

Although they are unlikely to become new nobles, they still have the opportunity to become the new military chiefs of a certain country, city-state or tribe. Since there is only one word for Indian military chiefs in this era, they are called captains for the time being.

Hajim is already the second generation of Westcomers from the Indian subcontinent. He has lived in Patna as a soldier since he was a child. At this time, he took over the fortress and garrison left by his master.But because the master went out to fight against the attack and was frustrated, most of the defenders had fled eastward, and now there were less than [-] slaves left in the city who wanted to avenge their master just like him.

The situation is not good for Hajim. A few days ago, he watched the army from the Mughals sweep past Patna and attack eastward from the city. They have lost their chance to retreat to the east. With paddle boats placed by the locals on the south bank of the Ganges, they had nowhere to escape, and they could only hope that the Bengali nobles in the east could repel the Mughal army and push the front back to Patna.

But there are two prerequisites for this. One is that they can live until that time. In order to prevent them from attacking the supply route on the Ganges, the Mughal king army specially left two thousand captains to dig trenches outside the city to block the fortress.

Second, in Hajim's perception, the Bengali nobles could not defeat the Mughal king's army, and the army of the Bengal rebel forces was almost defeated on the hundreds-mile-long front.

The main force of the Mughal army was very elite cavalry, infantry recruited from a large number of places to wear trousers and hold daggers and hatchets, as well as a small number of elephant soldiers and artillery.

In the past, the elite Mughal cavalry were fearsome on the battlefield. The Timurid knights, both men and horses wearing armor, were skilled in riding and archery, and could charge fiercely; The relationship with China is not good, and the proportion of Turkic cavalry in the army is decreasing, turning to the Rajputs in northern India as the main source of Mughal cavalry.

The new Mughal cavalry paid more attention to the speed of charging. Compared with the Turkic cavalry, they were a little poorer so that they could not buy Mongolian-style armor for themselves and their horses. The degree of bravery is not inferior to the Turks.

What's more, the Mughal infantry also had well-crafted muskets and artillery from Ottoman. Even if the war elephants and artillery were pulled east by the royal army to attack more important towns, the Mughal infantry and cavalry left outside the fortress would still fight in the field It brought disaster to Hajim's more than [-] slave soldiers.

Compared with the Mughals, the eastern city-states could only use war elephants and hand-to-hand combat, because the trade environment after the rebellion left them short of gunpowder.

In the west, there are pirates from the Han Dynasty making troubles. There are no more Arab merchants here, and even the entire coast of India has become a taboo for Ming merchants. They sell finely woven cotton cloth, silk, porcelain, tea and various hardware crafts. , Even influential people in the Southwest Eryang Military Government like Abbot Tianshi sold a small amount of well-made Franc machine guns and matchlock guns.

But in Daming, gunpowder and raw materials are absolutely embargoed, and no one except the Siyang Military Mansion dares to touch it.

So, what's the use of selling more artillery?
Without the Chinese snow in the Arab population, the Chinese salt in the Persian population, and the sulfur in the east of the Strait of Malacca, charcoal sticks cannot explode.

Day after day after the siege, the Mughal cavalry outside the city often rode tall and slender Arabian horses across the ditch and shouted loudly. There was not much food in the city, which made Hajim very worried.

Until that night, Hajim, who was sleeping with his sword scabbard leaning on the top of the city, was awakened by the noise from the top of the city. The anxious team leader reported to him that someone shot a bow and arrow into the city in the dark with a letter tied to the torch on the top of the city. .

The letter was written in Bengali language, asking him to distribute plain turbans to his subordinates early tomorrow morning, invite the besieging army to fight, and after reading the letter, shake a torch on the north wall of the fortress a few times, and the Ganges River will respond after the battle their reinforcements.

The slave soldiers stood at the top of the city suspiciously. Hajim held the arrow shaft engraved with the Chinese characters of "Shaoshimonk" with a knife, lit a torch and looked north.

After a short, suffocating calm, they saw——there are countless ship lights flashing on the dark Ganges under the night in the northeast. A towering long flag.

(End of this chapter)