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Introduction
In the era of cold weapons, the cavalry was just like the tanks in World War II . Later, the atomic bombs were as powerful as and the atomic bombs were able to change and influence the situation on the battlefield.
The Qin Dynasty was the king of the world, and the ancestors of Qin were horse herders. As the Han and Tang Dynasties were strong, there was a constant supply of good horses from the Western Regions. Needless to say, the Yuan Dynasty later, the cavalry swept the world, and the Ming and Qing Dynasties were also famous for their martial arts on horseback.
And the Song Dynasty , the country was in the 320th year of Zuo, and there were battles almost all the way. So what was the condition of the most basic condition of its cavalry-the war horses?
1. Youyun Sixteen States lost its inheritance, and the source of war horses is empty.
"Since ancient times, when discussing military affairs, horses must be the first thing."
Where do horses come from?
"The northern land of Hebei is born from horses."
In ancient my country, horses mainly came from Hebei, northern Shaanxi, and Gansu.
However, the founding of the Song Dynasty did not achieve the completeness of the territory.
Ever since the Shi Jingtang of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms became the son emperor and gave up the Youyun Sixteen States, these horse-producing lands have been under the control of the ethnic minority regimes. Not only was the barrier of the Great Wall lost, but the most important source of horses for the cavalry was also lost.
This is equivalent to directly limiting the quantity and quality of the Song Dynasty's war horses, and then the quantity and quality of the cavalry. The combat power of a country is in danger. At the beginning of the Song Dynasty, in the northern Liao Kingdom , wars between the two countries continued:
"No horses came south, and they prepared armored cavalry to conquer the western regions."
In 1111 AD, the territory of the Northern Song Dynasty and its surrounding areas
Later, Xixia was established. The eastern part of the northwest region was occupied by Xixia:
"The thieves of Xixia have never used horses and goods to cross border counties."
Therefore, horses in the Song Dynasty could only be bought from the west of the northwest region. Such a miserable situation can be called desperate.
The Western Regions of the Tang Dynasty were the source of good horses. However, after the Anshi Rebellion, the war horses in the northwest gradually had nothing to do with the Central Plains. The ethnic minority political power born there began to use the horses there to conquer all directions.
Having lost the natural source of war horses, the rulers of the Song Dynasty had no choice but to start elsewhere. The horse prison was a unit for raising horses in ancient times. In the Song Dynasty, the construction of the horse prison was deeply loved and relied upon by the court.
According to statistics from the book "Research on Animal Husbandry in the Song Dynasty", there were 81 horse guards nationwide in the Northern Song Dynasty and 835 in the Southern Song Dynasty. However, most of the areas where these horse prisons are located are mainly agricultural, which makes it difficult for them to give birth to good horses.
In the territory of the Tang Dynasty in 682 AD
"The twelve prisons in the north of Henan Province have 1,640 horses per year, and 264 can be given to cavalry." How can this be such a miserable word?
Moreover, the establishment of horse prisons in these places also involves the conversion of farming to grazing in these places. This is really contrary to natural principles. It is not only difficult to quell the cowardice of the Song people, but also difficult to clear the hearts of the rulers.
The Song Dynasty had money, which was not only used to communicate state affairs, but also to purchase war horses and organize the army.
Tubo , Dangxiang, and various ethnic minorities in the northwest were the suppliers of war horses to the Song Dynasty. Before Song Zhenzong , the Song court mainly bought horses in today's Shaanxi, Ningxia, Sichuan, Shanxi, Gansu and other places.
After the rise of Dangxiang, Song Ting had fewer places to buy horses. Some statisticians believe that there was a time when basically half of the war horses in the Song Dynasty were purchased from Liangzhou, which is today's Wuwei, Gansu Province. A single source like
is both helpless and dangerous. Later, Liangzhou returned to Xixia, and the Song Dynasty had no choice but to purchase Sichuan horses. However, the Sichuan horses were short and had poor load-bearing capacity. The cavalry of the Song Dynasty was deeply constrained by them, which greatly reduced their combat effectiveness.
Later, war horses were purchased on the northwest border, which once became an important source of war horses. It can be seen that there are many twists and turns here, and it is difficult.
This is especially true in the Northern Song Dynasty, not to mention the Southern Song Dynasty. The Southern Song Dynasty, which could only obtain inferior war horses from the southwest, made its cavalry even more vulnerable. Even so, the number of war horses cannot be guaranteed. It is really God's fault.
2. Good horses are hard to find, and their numbers are comparable.
In view of the shortage of sources of war horses, even the highest number of war horses in the Song Dynasty was only more than 200,000. Emperor Gaozong of the Tang Dynasty raised "706,000 horses", a gap of three times. This was still the peak number in the Song Dynasty. In other times, it was even less.
.21 million is the number in the early Northern Song Dynasty. When Song Renzong, there were hundreds of thousands of horses, and by the end of the Northern Song Dynasty, there were 90,000 horses.
During the Shaoxing period of the Southern Song Dynasty, the number of horses was only 13,000. Such a country with such fighting power could not be defeated or destroyed.
In this way, the shortage of horses became the norm in the Song Dynasty. During wars, war horses had to be sent to important theaters first. During the Song Shenzong period, only three-tenths of the cavalry could fight. "The horse army is too numerous to be elite, and one battalion may have dozens of horses." Shenzong issued an order, saying that for the war horses to be purchased, those with higher martial arts skills would be given priority in supplying them.
In the late Northern Song Dynasty, among the 3,000 cavalrymen of the Song Army, only 300 had horses. Therefore, in the Song Dynasty, those who could have war horses were those with strong martial arts skills.
In the Southern Song Dynasty, there was a huge difference between the actual number of war horses and the registered number, only about 1/3 of the number. The places where horses were born were further away, and transportation was more difficult. The cavalry was even more unsustainable, and it was difficult for a clever woman to make a meal without rice. While the number of
is worrying, the quality of the war horses is also mixed, and it is hard to say that they are inferior.
The better war horses in ancient times were more than four feet four inches, about 1.36 meters today, but the height of the Song Dynasty war horses was between 1.27-1.46 meters. It can be seen that there is considerable room for inferiority. The horses in the Southern Song Dynasty were even shorter and thinner. Among the fifty horses purchased, there were three or four good horses and twenty good horses.
In addition to the height and strength of the horse, the age of the horse is also one of the criteria for measuring the quality of the war horse. The emperors of the Northern Song Dynasty paid special attention to this point, and issued special decrees to stipulate the age for purchasing war horses in each dynasty. This shows that the imperial court attached great importance to war horses.
If the Northern Song Dynasty could effectively control the quality of the war horses purchased and their age was relatively qualified, then the Southern Song Dynasty could no longer establish a solid foundation for national security based on the age of the war horses.
War horses in the Northern Song Dynasty were generally between three or four to twelve years old, and were classified as young and middle-aged war horses. However, the Southern Song Dynasty needed to order the purchase of war horses between the ages of 4 and 8. The reason was that horses in the South were no longer competent for combat work after they were over eight years old. This also limited the number of war horses that could be used in the Southern Song Dynasty.
The quality of horses in different parts of China is very different. In the Song Dynasty, the best war horses came from Fugu, Gansu, followed by Huanxian and Qingyang in Gansu today.
In the Southern Song Dynasty, horses were divided into four classes. The first-class horses came from the Xia Kingdom, the second-class horses came from the northwest Tibetans, and the third-class horses came from Sichuan. The horses of the ethnic minorities in the south were of the worst quality and could not be used on the battlefield.
Generally speaking, the quality is better towards the northwest, and the quality is worse towards the southeast. Southwest war horses are almost unable to go on the battlefield. Therefore, the quality of the war horses that the entire Song Dynasty could produce by itself was really not high.
The quality was not high, and the quantity was not enough. This was a hardship for the military and civilians of the Song Dynasty. Such an unbearable strategic resource reserve environment was really difficult to meet the needs of a big country. Therefore, the Song people racked their brains and could only look for places and methods to make up for it.
Taking good care of and feeding the war horses has become the top priority of their work.
3. The raising of war horses is the key, but the horses are in the grassland
The Song court did its best to raise and care for the war horses, because there were many pastures to raise horses within the territory, and the resulting forage supply turned out to be a major burden on the Song Dynasty's finances.
Because there are no advantages of natural grassland, all the conditions of natural grassland need to be compensated by financial, human and material resources. In the Song Dynasty, there were more than 20 grasslands in the suburbs of Kaifeng, and there were thousands and tens of thousands of trucks transporting fodder every winter, and the grassland accumulated in mountains.
The money spent every year on raising horses has reached a point where normal taxes are unaffordable.
Horse breeding, management and medical treatment also received great attention in the Song Dynasty. Specific methods were even issued directly by the imperial court to each army. Methods for treating horses were written down in books and communicated among ministers. All management had regulations and regulations.
Sick horses were sent to two types of horse prisons, the upper prison and the lower prison, according to the severity of their condition. There were also medical horse hospitals in the Southern Song Dynasty. It can be seen that the imperial court attached great importance to it and the treatment of war horses in the Song Dynasty.
In the Song Dynasty, there were rewards and punishments for the treatment of horses. Those who were treated well were rewarded, and those who were treated poorly were punished. It can be said that it was not without details. The soldiers of the Song Dynasty also specialized in raising horses. If there were 2,700 war horses, then the soldiers raising horses would recruit more than 2,000 people.
But how can human power be worth the power of heaven and earth in some situations? Raising good horses requires space, and it needs to be vast, with good breeds of horses, and a cold and suitable climate.
The Guanzhong area was once heavily used to raise horses in the Han Dynasty, but this also caused environmental pressure. By the Song Dynasty, the places naturally suitable for raising horses were basically gone, and the climate was naturally not favorable. The types of horses were not controlled within the territory, so the sources were mixed and cannot be guaranteed.
So the artificial horse breeding business of Song Dynasty became an unnatural undertaking, doing twice the work with half the work. Wang Anshi once calculated that it costs the government 500 yuan to breed a horse, which is much more than the cost of buying horses from ethnic minorities.
In desperation, the helpless Song Dynasty even came up with the idea of letting the people raise horses to share such a heavy burden. This was naturally laborious and thankless.
Due to the lack of natural pastures, the quality of horses in the Song Dynasty deteriorated as they were raised, and each generation was inferior to the last.
In horse breeding, purebred horses are of good quality, and their offspring rarely show signs of degradation. However, many horses in the Northern Song Dynasty were bought from different places. This resulted in a situation where the pedigree of the horses could not be guaranteed, and crossbreeding led to degradation. There was even the dilemma of being inferior to a donkey.
Summary
During the Song Dynasty, there were constant wars and constant battles with surrounding ethnic minorities. However, one of the most important war preparations in the war, the war horse, turned out to be a huge military constraint for the Song Dynasty. Whether it was congenital or acquired, the Song Dynasty's war horses became a major reason for the Song Dynasty's military weakness.
Regardless of quantity and quality, or the desire to use manpower to make up for innate breeding, the Song Dynasty really suffered a big loss when it came to war horses, which resulted in poor cavalry and consumed a large amount of national resources.
Compared with Han, Tang, , and other dynasties, which had innate advantages, the seemingly inconspicuous war horse actually became a huge wave that was difficult to overcome in the historical waves of the Song Dynasty.
References:
"History of the Song Dynasty"
"Three Books on the History of Governance"
"Research on Animal Husbandry in the Song Dynasty"
