Emperor Zhengde

Chapter 221 Prisoners of War and Human Trafficking
Zhang Cong had no intention of returning these fugitives, so he sent people to directly reject Daha's unreasonable demands, with the reason that "Wulingha originally belonged to the Ming Dynasty, and the Wulingha people were also the subjects of the Ming Dynasty, not the slaves of anyone. The Ming Dynasty had no slaves, and the Ming Dynasty had abolished the road permit system, so the subjects had the freedom to migrate within the country, so these fugitives were not breaking the law, and there was no question of returning them."

Of course, Zhang Cong asked his people to give Daha an answer, that is, if Daha could let the fugitives go back on their own, he, as the governor of Hetao, would not force them to stay, but Daha had to pay liquidated damages for the fugitives who had already been employed in Wuhai City. After all, the Ming Dynasty merchant corps and officials who hired these fugitives had to be compensated.

Daha naturally couldn't make the escaped slaves go back voluntarily, and he would not pay the penalty for his slaves to the Ming Dynasty's merchant groups. However, he was somewhat unwilling to leave like this. He decided to block the official road in Wuhai City, preventing merchants and pedestrians from entering Wuhai City, and even rob these merchants to force the Ming Dynasty to compromise and make concessions.

Naturally, Zhang Cong would not allow Mongolian nobles like Daha to sever ties with Wuhai City. After all, if the trade in Wuhai City was cut off, it would be difficult for it to survive.

The escaped Hu slaves who moved to Wuhai City had been mobilized by Wang Xi, the prefect of Wuhai in the Ming Dynasty, and nearly 40,000 people gathered at once.

The Mongols have been riding horses since they were young, and these escaped slaves from the Hu people are no exception. As long as they are given weapons and war horses, they can become qualified cavalrymen.

When Ming officials told these escaped Hu slaves that the Uriankhai nobles Daha were going to slaughter them or even take them back to continue to enslave them and even take possession of their wives and children, and distributed weapons to them, these escaped Hu slaves in the overseas city of Wuhai suddenly turned into tens of thousands of high-spirited cavalry.

Gui Yong, deputy commander of the Ming frontier army in Hetao and Wuhai, also led a thousand Ming troops to the outer city. Among them, five hundred musketeers were already in position with their muskets fired, grenades were unpacked and stacked against the city wall, the dust covers on the city gate cannons were removed, the shrapnel shells were unpacked, and the gun barrels were cleaned.

But the Ming army had not yet launched an attack.

According to past experience, as long as these escaped Hu slaves could defeat their masters, the Ming army naturally would not have to do it themselves.

The reason why the Ming army was in a state of emergency preparedness was naturally to prevent the escaped Hu slaves from being defeated by Daha, and also to prevent these escaped Hu slaves from rebelling.

However, these escaped Hu slaves did not rebel. Although the Ming army had to be wary of these foreigners, in fact these escaped Hu slaves had no intention of helping their masters to seize the Ming Dynasty's Wuhai City, because the Mongolian nobles did not cultivate this awareness in them. Moreover, they had already regarded this place as their home and settled their wives and children here.

Mongolian tribes were also divided into many levels. Nobles and commoners could naturally share the benefits through looting, but slaves did not have this right.

Under the deliberate propaganda of the Ming government, the escaped slaves of the Hu people became more aware of the misery they would suffer if they continued to go back as slaves. Therefore, they all rode their horses recklessly and rushed towards the cavalrymen who were harassing them.

Zhang Cong also personally beat the drum and shouted: "People who do not want to be slaves, kill them for me, repel the robbers, defend your homes, and defend your families!"

After Zhang Cong shouted like this, the morale of the escaped Hu slaves who rushed out of the barbed wire gate one after another became higher.

"Bastards! Bastards! These damned fugitives! Kill them, my Uriankhai warriors!"

Daha looked at the tens of thousands of escaped slaves wearing the cheap wide cloth shorts and jackets of the Han people, riding their horses and charging towards him like lightning, so he also led his cavalry to charge over.

The two iron streams collided violently. These fugitive slaves who had been brainwashed by the Ming government only had hatred for the Mongol cavalry, so they killed very bravely. In addition, the Ming government would give them pensions and even insurance, so they were not afraid of death. Even if they were alone, they dared to break into the Wuliangha cavalry camp. "What's going on? What kind of magic potion did these Han people give them? How come these slaves who usually don't even dare to fart are so fearless!"

Daha looked at his elite cavalrymen who were knocked to the ground one by one by several escaped Hu slaves. He was very confused for a moment. If he had known that these lowly slaves had such strong fighting power, he would never have dared to enslave them.

Although the tens of thousands of cavalrymen composed of these escaped slaves from the Hu people were not very skilled in the operation of the conventional cavalry weapons of the Ming Dynasty, namely the short crossbow, and did not form intensive killing power, they relied on their fearless spirit to defeat the Daha cavalry. They were so bloodthirsty that they kept chasing after them, killing almost all of the Daha cavalry.

The Uriankhai cavalry, who could no longer endure this desperate fighting style, were still killed by these escaped Hu slaves after they dismounted and surrendered, and they were killed in retaliation. Basically every Uriankhai Mongolian cavalryman was hacked to death with swords.

Until there was no Wuliangha cavalry left alive outside the barbed wire of Wuhai City and blood flowed like a river outside the city, these escaped Hu slaves came back one by one, numbly returned their weapons to the Ming government, and then went to collect their silver. Those who died in battle would receive an extra pension, and those who were wounded would also receive an extra silver. Some of the recently emerging insurance companies would also handle the compensation on the spot.

It seemed as if these escaped Hu slaves were doing work for the government.

But Zhang Cong was not happy about this. He said unhappily, "Go and call Prefect Wang. Who told them to kill all the Wuliangha cavalry captives? Wuhai City is in great need of captives to serve. Doesn't he know that? Then the civil servants behind the major business houses will impeach Prefect Wang for inciting public opinion to kill captives indiscriminately, and I will have to plead for him! Give orders that from now on, those who offer captives will be rewarded with 20 to 50 taels of silver for each captive, depending on the value of the captives!"

Zhang Cong never expected that the method he casually thought of to increase the number of laborers would trigger a wave of human trafficking in the era of primitive accumulation of capital in the Ming Dynasty.

Some Mongols who were not captives or other non-Han people, such as the Jurchens and Ewenkis from Liaodong, and even Koreans, were also captured by some bandits and presented to the government as captives.

The government could only identify prisoners through basic features such as clothing and language, so they naturally had no idea whether they were prisoners or not. In addition, as production scale expanded, labor was needed, especially prisoners who were free labor and could be enslaved for a period of time. Therefore, the government did not conduct strict inspections and basically accepted as many prisoners as were offered.

There were even some poorer ethnic minorities who were willing to be bought at low prices by merchant groups specializing in human trafficking, and then brought to the Ming Dynasty and sold to it as captives.

Sometimes a piece of cloth could buy a strong foreigner, and then he could get thirty or fifty taels of silver from the government. This was naturally a huge profit. After all, with the mechanized production of the Ming Dynasty's weaving industry, the price of cloth was now so low that it was not worth a penny.

Some nobles also began to become professional human traffickers, plundering weak and ethnic minority people and then selling them to the Ming Dynasty as captives.

In short, after these people offered their captives to the Ming Dynasty through various means, the number of prisoners of war in the Ming Dynasty increased sharply.

As a result, in one year, the Ministry of War reported to Zhu Houzhao that the number of newly captured prisoners of war in the Ming Dynasty was as high as over three million!

This made Zhu Houzhao himself unbelievable, because the Ming Dynasty had not fought a large-scale war in this year, but it was able to capture more than 3 million people? ! But even if it was a large-scale war, it would be impossible to capture more than 3 million people! Zhu Houzhao had to admit that the Ming Dynasty had indeed changed!
This chapter was updated late this morning, sorry

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(End of this chapter)