Chapter 2146: Shizong Chronicles 14: The Storm in Central Asia (Part 2)

For the three states of Anxi, especially the state of Anxi itself, this eastern expedition organized by the Ghaznavid dynasty was something that had to be taken seriously. Not only because of the direct military threat brought by its large-scale eastern campaign, but also because if the three states wished to establish themselves long-term in the Transoxiana region or even further west in the Two Rivers region, the Ghaznavid dynasty was a problem they had to solve.

From a geopolitical perspective, Ghazni, which used "Afghanistan" as its foundation, bordered both Anxi and Kangju, with a sufficiently long border stretching from west to east. Although separated by high mountains, deep valleys, and rivers, there remained direct conflicts of security interest.

Moreover, between the two sides, grievances ran deep, with the earliest traces dating back to the time of the first Islamic eastern expedition. On that occasion, the Arab followers of Islam once fought their way to the very walls of Suyab, posing a serious threat and causing destruction to the rule of the Anxi Protectorate. Although Ghazni was merely a minor player in the Islamic world at that time, it had participated as well.

The more recent enmity lay in the carving up of the Samanid dynasty. As a newly emerging dynasty that had broken away from Samanid rule, it naturally harbored "feelings" toward its former suzerain. But since the Han forces came from the west, continuously expanding through the Seven Rivers region, and eventually destroyed the Samanid dynasty, seizing nearly all of Transoxiana and devouring a large piece of fat meat—

And what of Ghazni? Although it had seized vast territories in Persia to the west, completely annexing and swallowing up the remnant petty states of the Saffarid dynasty, and had conquered lands in the northwestern Indus River valley to the south, in the "traditional" Transoxiana region it had only obtained scraps and leftovers. How could it accept this?

The contradictions between the two sides, the conflicts in fundamental interests, were nearly impossible to reconcile.

Just as the three states of Anxi appeared in the eyes of Ghaznavid monarch Mahmud as wolf-like and tiger-like foreign invaders—the greatest threat to the Arab states and the unity of Islam—so too in the eyes of the three kings, Ghazni was the greatest obstacle on the road of the three states' development and progress.

Things were not what they were thirty years ago. The Ghaznavid dynasty had completely replaced the Buyid dynasty to become the most powerful dynasty under the framework of the Abbasid Empire. Shouldering such weight, it was also the leader of the Islamic world at the present stage, and its monarch Mahmud had become the first prince to adopt "Sultan" as his honorific title. Most importantly, it was still in a golden period of upward development.

As the "big brother" of the three states, Anxi, along with Kangju—which had already engaged in numerous conflicts and battles with Ghazni in the upper reaches of the Jihun River—had long reached a consensus on the matter of striking against Ghazni.

There was no precedent to draw upon for any of this, because looking back a thousand years, no Chinese dynasty had ever been able to extend its reach to such distant and vast territories. Even when drawing the sword, it was never in the form, on the scale, or to the degree that the current Great Han Empire had done.

Therefore, the longer one stayed in Central Asia and the Middle East, the deeper one's understanding of those enemies and foes became, and the more cautious one's attitude grew.

If the Islamic world were still as it had been twenty or thirty years ago—with the various states in decline, internally divided, and warring against one another—then allowing the three states to stabilize, wait, recuperate, and develop quietly for a while would not have been unacceptable.

However, caution was merely a posture, not cowardice. When the second Islamic allied army was successfully assembled and came surging eastward, the high-ranking officials of the three Anxi states, led by Liu Min, quickly put away all hesitation and restored their usual decisiveness and ruthlessness.

Within the three states, an important reason for the previous endless debates over whether to wage expansionist wars was also the hesitation at the upper levels. Otherwise, as blood descendants of Emperor Shizu and the "founders who established the three states," suppressing the clamor and criticism from below would hardly have been a difficult matter.

Compared to the other kings of the Liu clan who were conquering lands and sweeping away barbarians in Southeast Asia, Liu Min had always believed that what he and his people were doing was more difficult and more valuable. Even toward the northeast, which had also been built through hardship, Liu Min's attitude remained reserved, because the opponents they faced there were merely indigenous barbarians.

But the development of events never follows individual will. In foreign lands filled with Muslims, even more things were beyond control. The rise of Ghazni was one aspect, but even more unpredictable was the violent reaction brought to the Two Rivers and Seven Rivers regions by the large-scale western expedition of Han forces.

Even after more than twenty years of continuous western campaigns, having forcibly carved out a vast territory and, representing Chinese power, deeply rooted in Central Asia—a region beyond the reach of all previous dynasties—when facing certain strategic development issues, the King of Anxi, Liu Min, still had to suppress that bit of pride and complacency and handle matters with a relatively cautious mindset.

And although the enemies faced by the three Anxi states were still officially described and referred to as barbarians, when it came to planning battles and waging war, could they really treat them with the same casual disregard as uncivilized, savage, and ignorant indigenous tribes?

If Liu Min and the others had maintained an arrogant and conceited attitude, they could never have achieved what they had; they would long ago have been drowned by the holy war frenzy of Islam.

After all, everything he had been doing was an undertaking without precedent, and every step taken, every city conquered, every person subdued was a breaking of traditional Chinese barriers, an unprecedented breakthrough for the Han people.

This was different from the Yuezhi, Xiongnu, Turks, and other nomadic tribes that had migrated westward after losing their struggles for supremacy in East Asia over the past thousand years. The Han as a group—when they did not move, nothing happened, but once they took that step, regardless of the environment, they took root and sprouted with great ease.

The assembled army of one hundred thirty thousand included essentially all the elite troops of the three Anxi states. Within their own territories, apart from necessary garrisons, nearly all other troops had been drawn out. The various military commands and camps organized under military methods were all mobilized to provide support in logistics, transportation, and other areas.

This was the most thorough mobilization of the military machine of the three Anxi states, after all, the scale and intensity of the enemy they faced were different.

This war of exhausting military might had to be fought—not only fought, but won! Setting aside the benefits of victory, one only needed to know that if they were defeated, then not to mention the recently conquered Transoxiana region, even the "former Kara-Khanid territories" that had been managed for twenty years would become unstable, and they would face the direct threat of Arab counterattack and the frenzied revenge of those Islamic believers. Even with the Great Han at their backs, so that they would not be directly driven back to the Gaochang Road, the achievements of thirty years of westward expansion would suffer a heavy blow. To stage a comeback would be essentially impossible, because the Great Han entering the Yongxi era could no longer support the western expedition with reckless abandon as it had in the time of Shizu. National policy and grand strategy were very difficult to reverse.

Therefore, the three Anxi states, especially the three kings, deeply understood that in this war they had only the reason to win and no option to lose. Because of this awareness, from the very beginning of the war, the allied forces of the three Anxi states had committed their full strength, striking with everything they had.

This was still not a war of the Han single-handedly taking on the entire Islamic world, because the Islamic world—or rather, the Arabs—had never truly formed a united front when facing the Han.

Even though the Arabs had shown considerable unity when launching the second eastern holy war, when the war machine of the three Anxi states was fully engaged, they still found it somewhat difficult to cope.

The "Second Han-Islamic War" broke out in the autumn of the eleventh year of Yongxi and officially ended in the summer of the twelfth year, lasting a full year in total, divided into three phases and two major battles.

The first phase was the siege of Mingcheng, with the Islamic forces attacking and the Han defending, as both sides engaged in a life-or-death struggle over the city. Mingcheng (Ashgabat, Turkmenistan) had not existed as an independent city and administrative district for very long. It was a brand-new city built entirely by Han hands, saturated inside and out with rich Han cultural content.

A city not particularly large, yet sturdy enough, had risen from the ground in just four short years. This involved the diligent management of Liu Wentao, the Jinglue Commissioner of Haidong (second son of Zhao King Liu Fang, younger brother of Northern Court King Liu Wengong), and it was inevitably steeped in the flesh and blood of numerous local indigenous people and Muslims.

"Building cities with flesh and blood" was common practice even within the Great Han Empire, let alone in the Central Asian region where all restrictions were completely cast aside and everything was done without scruples. According to legend, in order to build Mingcheng, over ten thousand Islamic religious personnel and believers from Haidong and the surrounding areas died from forced labor, and many were directly buried in the city foundations and within the city walls. This was also one of the most condemned "Han atrocities" in the Islamic world.

With this history, and being located at a transportation hub, an economic confluence, and the military-political core of Haidong, it naturally became the first target of the eastern expeditionary army.

The battle began in September of the eleventh year of Yongxi, with the Ziyarid general Mawil serving as the main commander, leading an allied force of fifty thousand to attack Mingcheng. At that time, Mingcheng's defenders, including the subjugated vassal troops, numbered no more than seven thousand—a ratio of nearly one to ten.

Fortunately, Mingcheng was the city in the Haidong (east of the Caspian Sea) region with the highest degree of Sinicization and the highest loyalty. Its troops were few, but its grain, armor, and weapons were abundant, and it even had twenty cannons as defensive weapons. Thus, it could hold out for a short period.

Even with these many "favorable factors," the single disadvantage of the disparity in troop numbers was enough to make the defenders of Mingcheng fight bitterly, struggling more and more as the battle wore on.

The intimidating power of the cannons remained formidable, but they were no longer a novelty in the Arab regions. Their area of coverage was limited, and their lethality was also restricted. Once the cannonballs were spent, traditional urban siege warfare once again became the mainstream form of combat.

As for the attacking allied forces, apart from a few thousand "elite" troops from the Ziyarid state, the rest were all holy warriors from the vast Islamic world. Moreover, during the preparatory phase, they had developed a certain degree of organization and discipline—this was a lesson Ghaznavid Sultan Mahmud, the supreme commander of the entire allied army, had drawn from the failure of the first eastern expedition.

And this eastern expeditionary army—organized, trained, well-supplied with equipment and provisions, firm in their will to fight, and filled with holy war fervor and vengeful emotions—used their fearless, death-defying charges to push Mingcheng to the brink of destruction.

However, though the holy warriors surged like a tidal wave, the defenders of Mingcheng were equally steadfast as rock. Not to mention the Northern Court Army's main force, which had gradually increased to four thousand men, even the vassal troops fought to the death. They too had no possibility of surrender, for as "betrayers" of Islam, they were heretics hated even more.

At the same time, when it came to harming local tribes and believers, these vassal troops had done even more, with more blood on their hands than the Han themselves—the so-called "pledge of loyalty." This meant that if the Han forces were defeated, their fate would be even more miserable, and they dared not fail to give their all.

Therefore, throughout the nearly month-long siege of Mingcheng, even when the situation was several times as precarious as a stack of eggs, the defending officers and soldiers fought with an extraordinarily resolute attitude, bathing in blood and fighting to the death to protect the safety of the city.

During this process, the three Anxi states displayed a seemingly "indifferent" attitude. Apart from deploying troops, arming soldiers, gathering supplies, and conducting reconnaissance, they made no further moves.

Even at the most critical moment for Mingcheng, when faced with messengers who had fought their way out to plead for reinforcements, Northern Court King Liu Wengong was anxious to dispatch troops to relieve the siege of Mingcheng, yet the King of Anxi, Liu Min, remained silent, choosing to observe and wait……