Chapter 657: Offering Bounties to Recruit Desperadoes

Ten li southwest of Luoyang City, Mount Zhou.

Pines soared into the heavens; golden ginkgo leaves blanketed the ground.

Zhang Yichuan put away Liu Chengzong's letter and raised his telescope to gaze at the majestic cluster of Luoyang buildings in the distance.

Beside him, Regional Commander Song Jiang asked excitedly, "Grand Commander, our Henan Five Battalions have brought honor to the Grand Marshal — is the Grand Marshal's reward satisfying?"

"Reward?"

Zhang Yichuan glanced at Song Jiang, lips slightly pursed, his expression complicated, the corners of his mouth drooping downward yet forcibly twisting into a smile.

Reward, my ass!

Zhang Yichuan was not highly educated — he had only received basic childhood schooling.

But he was no fool.

Liu Chengzong, through the three offices of the Military Office, the Rites Office, and the Marshal's Headquarters Central Army, had sent two official dispatches and one private letter in succession.

First, he had the Military Office publicly commend him for his merit in leading troops to capture Yongning City, letting him save ample face before the Henan Five Battalions.

Then, through the Rites Office, he set regulations stipulating that captured imperial princes must not be killed without authorization, and proclaimed this to the entire army.

With these two official documents preceding it, the officers and soldiers of the Henan Five Battalions naturally all assumed that Liu Chengzong's private letter to Zhang Yichuan would surely be praising him.

But the final private letter was clearly nothing of the sort.

Liu Chengzong had all but pointed at his nose and called him a fool.

Still, for Zhang Yichuan, it was no big deal... at least Liu Chengzong still addressed him as "Elder Brother" in the letter, and didn't call him Commander Zhang or General Zhang.

Truth be told, this perfectly normal form of address, within the abnormal Marshal's Headquarters — or rather, for Liu Chengzong, who controlled a group of abnormal individuals — using titles during work was far more obscene than outright cursing.

But getting chewed out never puts anyone in a good mood, and for Zhang Yichuan, this whole affair was an undeserved calamity.

As a rebel, he'd killed a Ming prince — the Ming Emperor hadn't even gotten worked up about it, yet he'd been scolded first by the rebel Grand Marshal.

Where was the justice in that?

The key thing that left Zhang Yichuan utterly deflated was that, well, he felt the Grand Marshal was right.

If the offensive outside Luoyang City had gone smoothly, he'd have been huffing with rage, utterly defiant and bristling with indignation — but the current situation was that Luoyang's city defenses were nothing like what he had imagined.

He truly felt like he was riding a tiger and couldn't dismount — completely stuck.

At this moment, Liu Chengzong's letter arrived, a string of after-the-fact remarks — none of that really mattered. What mattered most to Zhang Yichuan was that the Marshal's Headquarters had left him a way out.

They had ordered Zhang Tianlin to open a passage east of Tong Pass and made preparations to receive him.

With that gesture in place, even if Liu Chengzong had cursed him out thoroughly in the letter, he wouldn't be afraid.

Because before this, Zhang Yichuan had a solid understanding of Luoyang. As early as two years ago, when he led his troops through Mianchi, he had inquired about Luoyang's city size and general location, and had even obtained a critical piece of intelligence about a weakness in Luoyang's defenses.

Luoyang's city wall had a circumference of eight li, surrounded by four rivers — the Chan River to the east, the Luo River to the south, the Jian River to the west, and the Gu River to the north.

Outside the city, water from the Chan River was diverted to encircle it, digging a moat three zhang wide. The city walls had been faced with grey bricks in the sixth year of the Hongwu reign, and thirty-nine watchtowers were built atop them — a formidable stronghold, easy to defend and hard to attack.

The weakness Zhang Yichuan was counting on in Luoyang lay precisely in this four-zhang-wide moat.

Three zhang wide — calling it a moat was less accurate than calling it a defensive trench.

For an ordinary city it might pass, but for a prefectural seat like Luoyang, crisscrossed by rivers and with easy water diversion, it was very narrow.

But there were understandable reasons for this.

After all, this was an ancient city whose walls had been brick-faced in the sixth year of Hongwu. Brick facing could greatly strengthen a city's defenses, but it also made expansion difficult.

Expansion cost money, after all. In reality, the expansion of many cities did not happen because the governing official thought it should be expanded and then went ahead with it.

The truth was, everywhere under heaven — from counties and prefectures all the way up to the imperial court's Six Ministries — it was the same wherever you went. Money was needed for everything, and the treasury was never sufficient.

Unless absolutely necessary, who would go looking for trouble by repairing city walls?

More often, unbricked earthen walls went decades or even centuries without seeing war, eroded by rain and snow, dug into by common folk for earth to build houses — collapsing where they would, sinking where they would.

They had long since lost their original defensive capability, and even so, people simply turned a blind eye and put it out of mind.

Only when an official with ambitions to make his mark arrived for a new posting, found the city walls truly an eyesore, would he convene the gentry to discuss building yet another wall.

That way, there was no need to tear down the old wall — the construction scope was smaller, the cost lower, and all parties found it easier to accept.

But once a city wall had been brick-faced, further expansion was not so easy.

Whoever dug away the earth kept it — one commoner carts off a load, another carts off a load, and within a few years the wall no longer looked like a wall.

The rammed-earth walls in various counties that hadn't been brick-faced could only maintain their wall-like appearance thanks to convict laborers.

Using criminals to repair city walls as penal labor was an old tradition — in the Qin and Han periods, they were called wall-builders.

But wall bricks were different from rammed earth. Grey stone blocks were not easy to steal, and damage was very conspicuous. What's more, Luoyang housed both the prefectural and county governments within its walls — whichever official took office, prefect or magistrate, was willing to repair and patch the walls to make them look better.

And so, Luoyang's urban construction throughout the entire Ming dynasty had never changed much.

By the Chongzhen reign, this city still looked exactly as it had when built in the Hongwu years.

This meant that the city was outdated — severely outdated.

Its hypothetical defensive enemy was the enemy of the Hongwu era.

A narrow defensive trench was sufficient.

But over two hundred years after the Hongwu era, the range of firearms and cannons had become very long, and this city's narrow defensive trench was no longer adequate.

Beyond that, Luoyang was a great metropolis. Outside the city walls, which stretched over eight li in circumference, beyond the several-zhang-wide river trench, the suburbs of the four gate districts were packed with row upon row of dwellings, residences, compounds, pavilions, and temples.

Village buildings two or three li outside the city had linked up into continuous stretches — bustling and crowded.

This was Zhang Yichuan's greatest source of confidence in daring to bring his troops to Luoyang, certain of victory.

The Ming army would find it very difficult to carry out a scorched-earth policy at Luoyang — those structures were his greatest asset for filling in the trench.

They could serve both as cover to defend against cannonballs and bullets, and be conveniently dismantled to provide bricks, tiles, timber, and stone for filling the defensive trench.

Once the city trench was filled, with twenty thousand peasant soldiers attacking from all sides using the outer residential buildings, the defenders atop the walls would lose much of their advantage, and the city's fall would be only a matter of time.

But!

Only after Zhang Yichuan arrived did he discover — he couldn't find that Luoyang City anymore.

Or rather, Luoyang City was still in that same spot — it was just blocked from view by some things.

Specifically, an extra city wall had been built outside Luoyang. Zhang Yichuan sent cavalry to scout along the wall, but even after they finished eating, the riders still hadn't returned.

In the end, they waited nearly a full shichen before the cavalry came hurrying back to report: Luoyang… had expanded with an outer city.

Outside the original prefectural city, which had a perimeter of just over eight li, the people had added a rammed-earth wall over thirty li long, enclosing and protecting all the surrounding villages, gardens, temples, and shrines.

Now, outside Luoyang's outer city lay not a narrow defensive moat, but the four rivers to Luoyang's east, south, west, and north, serving as its moat.

How the hell do you attack that?

Zhang Yichuan thought to himself: Damn, last time I came to this godforsaken place, it didn't look like this!

In truth, this was his misperception. The expansion of Luoyang City had begun in the fourth year of the Chongzhen reign.

It was just that the last time Zhang Yichuan passed through Henan Prefecture, parts of this high wall were still unfinished, and they hadn't attacked Luoyang then, so he never realized the scale of this massive defensive project.

From the fourth year of Chongzhen onward, the peasant armies swarming through Shaanxi and Shanxi had made the officials of Henan Prefecture sense a looming crisis.

After all, Luoyang's defensive moat was indeed laughably narrow — a ditch a mere thirty or forty zhang wide, which any peasant army could easily fill in.

Secondly, the forts and stockades scattered across Henan were constantly warring with one another. Thirdly, the refugees from two major floods had become the region's greatest source of instability.

The local officials of Henan Prefecture, mindful of the Prince of Fu's importance as imperial uncle during the Chongzhen reign and also seeking to solve Henan's practical problems, devised a plan for relief through public works.

Seizing this opportunity, the officials built a thirty-three-li-long earthen wall around Luoyang, tracing almost exactly the maximum range of the cannons atop Luoyang's city walls, to serve as Luoyang's outer city.

It was a dauntingly long wall.

But Zhang Yichuan had stormed cities, seized territory, and slain a prince of renown. His troop strength, military momentum, and experience had all grown immensely; his fighting spirit was high, and he was in peak condition.

If it were just this high wall, Zhang Yichuan had nothing to fear.

At this point, even if it weren't just a high wall before him but Zuo Liangyu himself standing on the battlements, he still wouldn't be afraid.

What truly made him realize that Liu Chengzong's letter had a point was that the fighting spirit of Luoyang's defenders was off.

Since Luoyang now had an extra high wall, he would have to find a way to breach it. To breach a high wall, he first had to build pontoon bridges across the river.

This was also why Zhang Yichuan had set his camp on Zhou Mountain — he needed to fell timber first to get the materials for the pontoon bridges.

He never expected that before he could even launch an attack on Luoyang, Luoyang's defenders would come rushing out to kill him.

Three hundred men, well-armed and well-armored.

Over two consecutive days, they sallied forth three times. They didn't use the drawbridge but descended from the walls on ropes, swam the river carrying their armor and weapons, and the moment they crossed and saw a man, they drew their bows and shot, drew their blades and hacked.

Their fighting spirit was fiercer than Zuo Liangyu's troops. They sent his two newly formed peasant battalions besieging the city on the west bank of the Jian River scattering and fleeing with their heads in their hands.

Even when Zhang Yichuan up on the mountain got word, he initially thought his subordinates were joking with him.

He'd never heard of any famous general in Luoyang City — how were these Luoyang soldiers so ferocious!

It went on until this morning, when Zhang Yichuan sent Regional Commander Ke Tianhu to take the field personally, supervising a crack battalion under his own command to completely surround those three hundred men, bombarding them with cannons and shooting them with guns — and even that failed to persuade them to surrender.

In the end, an entire battalion of over two thousand men pressed the attack all at once, shooting arrows, hacking with blades, fighting hand-to-hand. It took an entire morning to annihilate those three hundred men completely. Only seven were captured or surrendered.

Their fighting spirit even frightened Zhang Yichuan. What kind of Ming Dynasty celestial soldiers and generals were these?

If there were ten thousand of these things inside the city, never mind him, Zhang Yichuan, being unable to take Luoyang City — even if Liu Chengzong came in person, he couldn't take it either.

Only after interrogating the prisoners did he learn that these men were no celestial elite troops. They weren't even government soldiers at all, but rather serious felons released from Luoyang's prisons and civilian braves.

Their recruiter was the Prince of Fu, Zhu Changxun.

Zhu Changxun was a man who could not be ignored across the four reigns of Ming: Wanli, Taichang, Tianqi, and Chongzhen.

Or rather, after the Wanli reign, he was the most exalted man in the realm — even the emperor had to come second.

Because he was Wanli's most beloved son, and at one point the emperor had even been ready to depose the eldest son in favor of the younger, wanting to make him crown prince.

Centered on this matter, the Ming Dynasty erupted into the fifteen-year-long National Foundation Controversy.

In those fifteen years, Wanli forced the resignation of four Senior Grand Secretaries and over ten ministry officials of the sixth rank and above, implicating more than three hundred capital and local officials, of whom over a hundred were dismissed, stripped of office, or banished.

In the end, Wanli lost. The eldest son, Zhu Changluo, was still named crown prince, and Zhu Changxun was enfeoffed as Prince of Fu. In retaliation, Wanli began to neglect governance from then on.

But Zhu Changxun did not lose.

Aside from being unable to make Wanli depose the eldest for the younger, the court officials conceded and compromised on nearly every other front, shaping a Prince of Fu with a transcendent status.

He continued to live within the Forbidden City for a full thirteen years, only departing for his fief in Luoyang in the forty-second year of Wanli.

Although he failed to inherit the throne, he obtained a portion of the realm's authority, which in some respects even exceeded that of the emperor.

Princely fiefs generally relied on clan stipends and land holdings. And since clan stipends were often shorted due to local fiscal problems, most fiefs resorted to extortionate levies on the common people through their land holdings.

But the Fu fief was different.

Zhu Changxun's largest source of income was the Ming Dynasty's national tax revenue.

Before the Prince of Fu departed for his fief, Wanli granted him the various miscellaneous river taxes from the four prefectures of Yangzhou, Zhenjiang, Nanjing Yingtian, and Taiping, along with a portion of the revenue from the salt wells of Sichuan.

In other words, these national taxes that originally belonged to the Ming Dynasty had nothing to do with the court after the Wanli reign — they became the Prince of Fu's private property, and also extended the Fu fief's tentacles of power into the Southern Metropolitan Region.

In this regard, although Zhu Changxun did not obtain the throne, he possessed more private wealth than Zhu Changluo, who did.

The news of the Prince of Wan'an's death greatly agitated the Prince of Fu.

It spurred him, the moment he learned of Yongning's fall, to send men to the court and to Kaifeng to seek reinforcements, while simultaneously hosting a banquet at the princely palace, inviting all the civil and military officials of Luoyang City.

That very night, he painted a grand promise: "Hold Luoyang, and the Fu fief will contribute one hundred thousand taels of silver to reward the troops and memorialize the court to guarantee your promotions and ennoblement."

Still, he did not donate funds to support military provisions. Instead, after consulting with Grand Coordinator Chen Biqian, he released prisoners who still had families in the city and recruited a group of braves at high prices from within the city, forming a death squad to sally forth and strike at Zhang Yichuan.

The intent was to blunt Zhang Yichuan's edge and boost the morale of Luoyang's defenders.

Those prisoners and civilian braves fought to the death outside the city, the vast majority choosing death over surrender. There was no other complicated reason — the Prince of Fu had simply paid enough.

For sallying forth: a reward of fifty taels of silver, given to their families. If killed in battle: another fifty taels, also given to their families.

The money was simply to buy their lives.

Facing the Ming army's frenzied, death-defying assaults, Zhang Yichuan had initially been somewhat frightened and had begun entertaining thoughts of retreat.

But after learning from the prisoners that these were death warriors heavily recruited by the Prince of Fu, he was instead relieved.

Fifteen thousand taels, and they came out to fight three engagements. They went back with their men dead to the last; according to the agreement, His Lordship the Prince of Fu would have to pay out another fifteen thousand taels.

Zhang Yichuan truly could not fathom how Prince Fu's brain was wired. If it were him, he would definitely demand a reward of fifty taels of silver for killing one enemy, rather than a hundred taels for a dead body.

Now look — thirty thousand taels' worth of offensive momentum had been dismantled by him in a single morning. Could Prince Fu still recruit any more death-sworn warriors?

Zhang Yichuan did not know, but he did know this: if Prince Fu, famed as one of the richest men in the realm, had only this much ability, then he was determined to take Luoyang City. He could fight until Prince Fu went bankrupt!