Therefore, the Song Dynasty is the smallest in the great unified dynasty of the Central Plains in the past, and there is even a view that the Song Dynasty cannot be regarded as a great unified dynasty at all. The Song Dynasty was essentially an introverted and conservative dynasty: the Song Dynasty not only had the ambition to open up the desert and the western region from the invalid Law, Han and Tang Dynasties, but even lost several territories inherent in the Central Plains Dynasty since Qin Shi Huang mixed with China. Of course, the loss of these territories objectively occurred during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, and the Song Dynasty was only unable to recover these territories.
After the defeat of the Southern Expedition, the Song Dynasty crowned the Vietnamese Lê Dynasty monarch as the king of Jiaotong County, thus recognizing Vietnam as an autonomous vassal state and no longer a territory under the direct control of China. The Sixteen Prefectures of Yanyun in the northeast had been ceded to the Khitans since the Later Jin Dynasty, and although Later Zhou Guo Rong had recovered the three counties of Sanguan and Seventeen Counties, the Song Dynasty had actually lost the best time to recover the entire Yanyun Sixteen Prefectures after the defeat of the Sorghum River. The Dingnan army in the northwest made it a de facto independent regime at this time, and in 1038 this regime evolved into the Western Xia Kingdom.
The Song Dynasty actually formed a pattern of juxtaposition with the Liao and Jin in the north. During the period when the Song and Liao and Jin stood side by side, the Song could not defeat the Liao, the Liao could not beat the Jin, and the Jin could not beat the Mongols, so the Song Dynasty was actually at the bottom of the food chain. When the Mongols began their conquests of the West, the Southern Song Dynasty was not regarded as their main opponent: in fact, the Mongols always regarded the Jinguo established by the Jurchens as one of their main opponents, while the Southern Song Dynasty was regarded as an ally that could be used in the attack on the Jinguo.
However, in the end, the Southern Song Dynasty became the most difficult bone on the road of Mongolian conquest to the outside world: the Mongols sent troops to conquer the Western Liao in 1218 AD, and the result was that they successfully destroyed the Western Liao in that year; in 1219, the Mongols conquered Hua lazimo in the west, and in 1231 the Mongols eliminated the last resistance force of the Khwarazm; in 1235, Genghis Khan's grandson Battu Batu invaded the principalities of The Luosi, in 1243 Batu established the Golden Horde after the end of the Western Expedition; in 1205 Genghis Khan launched the first war against the Western Xia. In 1227 the Mongols finally completed their conquest of Western Xia.
In 1211 the Mongols fought the First Great War with the Jin Dynasty, which they regarded as their main rivals, and in 1234 the Mongols finally completed the War of Annihilation. Looking at the whole process of the Mongols' external expansion and conquest: it took 12 years to destroy the Hua lazi mold; it took 8 years to conquer the principalities of Huluosi; it took 22 years to destroy the Western Xia; it took 23 years to extinguish the Gold; it took 9 years to destroy Dali; and it took 9 years to destroy the Western Liao and the Arab Abbasid Dynasty. The Mongols never thought that it would be more difficult to destroy the Song than to destroy the Jin before the formal confrontation with the Southern Song.
The Northern Song Dynasty was destroyed by the Jin people, so the Song people had to flee to the south to rebuild the Southern Song Dynasty. The Southern Song Dynasty seemed inferior to the Northern Song Dynasty in terms of territory, population, and military strength. For a long time, the Southern Song Dynasty was always in a state of suppression in the war with the Jin Dynasty. It is no wonder that the Mongols had contempt for the Southern Song Dynasty. In 1234, the first great war between Mongolia and the Southern Song Dynasty broke out. In 1276, the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty, Lin'an, fell: Xie Daoqing, the empress dowager of the Southern Song Dynasty, surrendered with the 5-year-old Emperor Gong of Song. In 1279, the Mongols eliminated the last resistance of the Southern Song Dynasty at the Battle of Yashan.
The Mongol-Song War lasted 42 years from the outbreak of the Mongol-Song War in 1234 to the surrender of the Southern Song court in 1276, and 45 years if you count the end of the last resistance of the Southern Song Dynasty in 1279. Of all the rivals conquered by the Mongols, the Song Dynasty took the longest time—almost twice as long as it took to extinguish Xia and Jin. It can be said that the Southern Song Dynasty was the most tenacious opponent to resist the Mongols. Some people may feel that the most tenacious resistance to the Mongols is Japan and Vietnam: no matter how tenacious the Southern Song Dynasty is, it was conquered by the Mongols in the end, but the Japanese and Vietnamese really won the war against Mongolia.
In fact, the victories of Japan and Vietnam are all related to geographical factors: Japan, as an island country, used its geographical advantages to defeat the Mongol army that was not good at naval warfare; Vietnam took advantage of the miasma in the southern jungle to drag down the Mongols. In fact, the anti-Mongolian wars in Japan and Vietnam were far less intense than the wars between the Southern Song Dynasty, Jin, Western Xia, Khwarazm and other countries and the Mongols. Therefore, in general, the Southern Song Dynasty was the most tenacious resistance to the Mongols. This situation is far from what the Mongols had predicted before the war.
It seems that the introverted, conservative and weak Southern Song Became the most tenacious of all the Mongol opponents, and before the outbreak of war with the Mongols, the Southern Song Dynasty resisted the blows of the Jin Dynasty for hundreds of years. The fact that the Southern Song Dynasty was able to persist for such a long time under the blows of the Jin Dynasty and Mongolia showed that the combat effectiveness of the Song Army was actually not as weak as some people thought. Many people's first impression of the Song Dynasty is that it is poor and weak: in fact, the Song Dynasty is neither poor nor weak, and the biggest problem of the Song Dynasty is efficiency - the ruling class of the Song Dynasty is a ruling class that is seriously inefficient.
Since the founding of the Song Dynasty, it has always pursued the established national policy of "guarding the inside and the outside, and strengthening the weak branches": an important reason for the outbreak of the Anshi Rebellion in the Tang Dynasty was that the local feudal towns gradually had the military strength to challenge the central government. Zhao Kuangyin, the grandfather of the Song Dynasty, who took this as a warning, particularly emphasized the restraint between the central forbidden army and the local garrison. Zhao Kuangyin arranged the national army in a 1:1 ratio in Tokyo and various places. The troops guarding Tokyo are called the Forbidden Army; the troops stationed all over the country are called the Van Army.
The Forbidden Army is the most elite unit drawn from the national army. No local van army has the strength to challenge the forbidden army, but the local van army is enough to contain the forbidden army. In this way, if there is chaos in the local garrison, then the forbidden army in Tokyo is fully capable of suppressing it; conversely, if the forbidden generals try to misbehave, then the local garrisons will be enough to contain them. Zhao Kuangyin summed this up as follows: "The soldiers of the Beijing Division are enough to control the Dao, but there is no external chaos; the soldiers of the Combined Dao are enough to be the Beijing Division without internal change."
This experience was enshrined by successive monarchs of the Song Dynasty as the ancestral family law. In order to weaken the power of the military generals, Zhao Kuangyin set up a series of stacked bed frame management agencies in the army: the leading body of the forbidden army was the general leader of the Dian Shuai Mansion, whose supervisor was called the Tai Wei of the Dian Shuai Fu, which was the position held by Gao Li in the Water Margin. Under the Palace of the Commander of the Temple, there are three departments (collectively known as the Three Yas) of the Dianqian Division, the Guards Horse Army Division, and the Guards Infantry Division. The Song Dynasty always adopted the strategy of using literature to control the military in order to prevent the monopoly of military generals, so most of the military generals in the Three Yas were of low rank.
The highest commander of the Department of Guards and Horses was inspected, the highest chief of the Guards horse army division, the guards and the army of the guards, and the highest commander of the guards and infantry departments, the guards and the infantry, were all commanded by the envoys, and most of their subordinates were four or five petty officers. At the same time, the command of the forbidden army was shared between the three chiefs and the Privy Council, and the chief of the Privy Council was mostly civilian officials. The entire Song dynasty of military generals has always been suppressed by the civilian bureaucracy. From Zhao Kuangyin onwards, successive emperors of the Song Dynasty vigorously promoted the system of more shu: troops stationed in the local area for a year or two had to be transferred to other places.
There were Song generation troops who changed defenses all over the country, running back and forth like ants moving. Sima Guang once praised this system for allowing soldiers to work hard, understand difficulties, know battles, and learn mountains and rivers. In fact, the soldiers of the Song Dynasty did take the opportunity to appreciate the great rivers and mountains of the motherland in such a process, but these soldiers who were extremely familiar with the mountains and rivers of all parts of the country were not familiar with their own generals. Generals and soldiers have to move every year or two to change their defenses, so just after mixing with the soldiers, they have to change new soldiers.
The lack of knowledge of the generals and the generals did greatly reduce the possibility of the generals supporting the troops to rebel, but this also led to a great reduction in the efficiency of the army's combat mobilization. The Song Dynasty army's management of a series of stacked bed frame houses greatly dispersed the power in everyone's hands, but this also led to the inability to find a supreme leader in dealing with emergencies such as war. As a result of the established national policy of using civilians to control the armed forces, the military generals were always constrained by the civilian clique when making war decisions. As the saying goes, "a soldier bears a bear, and a bear bears a nest".
The construction of the army system of the Song Dynasty was institutionally at the expense of efficiency. The Song emperors always made it a top priority to prevent the rebellion of military generals, so they had to do everything possible to weaken the power in the hands of these military generals, but weakening the power of military generals was actually at the expense of military efficiency. In fact, the Song Dynasty army was not weak in combat effectiveness, but this high-level institutional design limited the exertion of combat effectiveness. The Problems of the Song Dynasty were at the root of their problems – it was the ruling class that went wrong.
The Song Dynasty was not without famous generals: Yang Ye, Di Qing, Zong Ze, Yue Fei and others were typical of the famous generals of the Song Dynasty. In the Battle of the Tang River in the first year of Emperor Taizong of Song (988 AD), the Song cavalry attacked the enemy position and crushed the Liao army formation, and after the Liao army was defeated, it pursued all the way to the Cao River and beheaded 5,000 horses. In the Battle of Huangtiandang in 1130 AD, the Jin army was besieged by the Song army for more than a month and could not escape. In the Battle of Gaocheng in 1139 AD, the ace elite troops of the Jin army, the Kidnapper Horse and the Tiefutu, were almost completely destroyed.
It can be seen from this that the Song army did not actually win victories in the war against the Liao and Jin, but because the ruling class lacked the determination to resist to the end. Just like Yue Fei once created a great situation after the Battle of Haocheng, but at this time, the rulers of the Song Dynasty began to worry about the monopoly of military generals again. Even if the Song army won a battle on the battlefield, it could not escape this fate that was dragged down by the politics of the imperial court. When the rulers of the Southern Song Dynasty drunkenly dreamed of death and only made Hangzhou a prefecture, there were actually many people like Yue Fei who were determined to restore the Central Plains.
In 1206, the Southern Song Dynasty prime minister Han Nongxin vigorously advocated the resistance to Jin. Han Nong's anti-Jin propositions were not only strongly supported by Lu You, Xin Zhiyi, and others, but also Song Ningzong at that time was also in favor of the Northern Expedition. At this time, the Jin Dynasty was no longer as brave as it once was: the prosperous and rich life in the Central Plains soon corroded the Jurchens. At this time, the Jurchens began to quickly decay and degenerate like the Eight Banners after the Qing army entered the customs, and at the same time, the internal struggle between the royal and noble families of the Jin Dynasty for power and profit intensified.
The problem was that at this time, the corruption and degeneration within the Southern Song Dynasty court, the struggle for power and profit was no less than that of the Jin Dynasty. In 1207, Shi Miyuan, a rebbe attendant, colluded with Empress Yang and others to kill Han Nongxu. Then came the familiar operation: in the first year of Jiading (1208), Song and Jin signed the Jiading Peace Agreement. In fact, the relationship between the Song Dynasty and the Jin Dynasty since the Southern Crossing has been to fight wars and seek peace; to fight again and to seek peace again. This hiatus lasted until the demise of the Golden Kingdom. After all, the Southern Song Dynasty still had a group of loyal civilian generals who were determined to restore the Central Plains.
After the Jing Kang Revolution, the Jin Dynasty actually wanted to take advantage of the victory to completely destroy the Song Dynasty, and it was not so easy for the Jin State to swallow the Song Dynasty in one bite: at the time of the crisis of the home country, the Song Dynasty emerged a number of unborn famous generals such as Zong Ze, Yue Fei, Han Shizhong, Wu Jiu, and Wu Xuan. At that time, the Jin Dynasty had just transitioned from a primitive uncivilized people, and the Jurchens, who still retained some of the more barbaric customs, encountered fierce resistance almost everywhere in the places they passed. The Jurchens were good at archery, but fighting in the densely water-clad Jiangnan region was not their forte.
The Song army even used its superiority in navigation technology to negotiate with the Jin at one point: Emperor Gaozong of Song even gave up his base on land for a time and went directly to the island to negotiate with the Jin people who were not good at naval warfare. The Jin people suffered repeated defeats in the Jiangnan region, where the water network was dense, and Yue Fei and a number of other Southern Song generals began to swing the Northern Expedition. The Jin had to transfer their main forces back to the north in this situation. In 1141, the Jin people concluded the Shaoxing Peace Agreement with the Southern Song Dynasty, and 20 years later, the Jin Emperor Completed Yan Liang again conquered the Southern Song Dynasty, but died in an internal rebellion during the Guazhou River Crossing Battle.
After the rise of the Mongols, the Jin had to draw out a considerable number of troops to deal with the Mongols, so the threat of the Jin to the Southern Song Dynasty was invisibly reduced. However, the Mongols were actually more dangerous opponents than the Jin, but the Mongolian dangerous opponent actually had its own weaknesses. As nomadic Mongols were as bad at fighting in the south as the Jin, the Inner Mongolians lacked effective means of conquering fortified cities for quite some time. In fact, the easiest to conquer by the Mongols were other nomadic peoples.
The Mongol tactics were entirely adapted to the nomadic state of the steppe. The Mongols faced the Turks and the Arabs in the course of their western conquests and used their tactics to the extreme—one of the key reasons why the Mongols were able to break through in Central Asia, West Asia, and Eastern Europe. However, the fortified city guo built by the Han chinese in the Central Plains was a big test for the Mongols who were good at nomadic tactics: at that time, although the rulers of the Western Xia and Jin kingdoms were from ethnic minorities, they actually lived with a large Number of Han populations, so there were a large number of Central Plains-style chengguo in both the Western Xia and Jin Kingdoms.
Each time the Mongols captured such fortified castles, they had to pay a heavier price than attacking the nomadic tribes. Although the city could no longer completely stop the Mongols after the introduction of gunpowder weapons from the Central Plains by the Mongols, it took a lot of time to attack the city even with gunpowder weapons. This is in stark contrast to the overwhelming charge of the Mongols in the steppes of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Compared with the Western Xia and the Jin Dynasty, the Southern Song Dynasty not only had cities and pools to rely on, but also the crisscrossing water network in the Jiangnan region also became a natural barrier for the Southern Song Dynasty.
When Wo Kuotai attacked the Southern Song Dynasty in 1235, he dispatched three large armies: the western road from Shaanxi into the river, the middle road to Xiangyang and Fancheng, and the eastern road to attack Lianghuai. On the two Huai sides, the Southern Song Dynasty almost completely withstood the pressure of the Mongols, and the Sichuan front-line defender Cao Youwen and others were all killed, and the Jingxiangyang line also lost seven seven eight eight. At such a critical moment, a number of famous generals emerged in the Southern Song Dynasty - these people, just like Zong Ze, Yue Fei, Wu Jiu and others in that year, once again played a role in continuing the life of the Song Dynasty.
In 1236, the Song general Meng Jue thwarted the Mongols' attempt to move south at Gangneung. In 1237, Meng Jue defeated the besieging Mongol army at Huangzhou. In 1238, Meng Jue launched a major counter-offensive and took Xiangyang, Suizhou, Jingmen and other places in one fell swoop. In 1239, the Mongols killed Fengjie in Chongqing and prepared to enter Hubei. Seeing the enemy's intentions, Meng Jue led the people to defeat the Mongols at Fengjie. Unwilling to be defeated, the Mongols began to build warships from 1240 onwards, only to be set on fire by Meng Jue. A year later the Great Mongol Khan Wokoutai died.
Although the Mongols were good at fighting, the Mongols did not solve the problem of heirs. Almost every death of the Great Khan caused a new round of power reshuffle within the Mongols. When the news of Wokoutai's death reached the front, the generals almost did not have the heart to fight again, because they were all in a hurry to rush back to the steppe to participate in the Kuritai Conference to determine the next Great Khan. When the Mongols were arguing over the selection of the next Great Khan, Meng Jue led the Song army to counterattack. This time, the imperial court assigned Meng Jue a deputy named Yu Jiu.
After taking charge of the work of recovering Sichuan, Yu Jiu, who was in charge of the recovery of Sichuan, carried out major military, political, and economic reforms in Sichuan. The biggest contribution was to create a mountain city defense system that was very suitable for Sichuan. It was on this defensive system that the Song army maneuvered between Sichuan and Mongolia for nearly half a century. On August 11, 1259, the Mongol Khan Möngke was killed in the course of an attack on the Diaoyu City in Sichuan– a landmark event that reversed the fate of the Southern Song Dynasty and the world. After Möngke's death, civil war broke out between Kublai Khan and Ali Buge around the throne of the Great Khan.
Kublai Khan, who was on the front line of the Battle with the Southern Song Dynasty after Möngke's death, quickly reached a fire line agreement with the Southern Song side: the two sides agreed to use the Yangtze River as the boundary, and the Song Dynasty would provide the Mongolian side with 200,000 taels of silver and 200,000 silk horses per year. Kublai Khan then rushed back to the Mongolian steppe to compete with Ali Buge for the position of Great Khan. The civil war between Kublai Khan and Ali Bugo lasted five years. After the end of the civil war, Kublai Khan gradually resumed his offensive against the Southern Song Dynasty, but Kublai Khan's attack on the Southern Song Dynasty adopted a gradual model. Before this, the Mongol offensive had always been like a raging wind.
Kublai Khan began to change his mind to adapt to Han culture and learn Han culture: he built the Yuan Dynasty as emperor according to the model of the Han Dynasty in the Central Plains, and at the same time used a large number of Han military generals. In the past, the Mongols were preoccupied with conquering more lands, but Kublai Khan paid special attention to the assimilation of governance after the conquest. Kublai Khan also began to train his own water army in response to the fact that the Mongols were not good at water warfare. The progress of this series of work led to the slowdown of Kublai Khan's offensive against the Southern Song Dynasty, but when all this was completed, the end of the Southern Song Dynasty came.