Zhu Yuanzhang can raise millions of soldiers without a grain of millet from the people. Why does Chongzhen have no money to pay?

Shortly after the founding of the People's Republic of China, Zhu Yuanzhang once proudly said: I raise millions of soldiers without consuming a grain of rice for the country. How dare Zhu Yuanzhang say so? Because, under the impetus of Zhu Yuanzhang for many years, the Ming imperial government specially reclaimed 89 million mu of cultivated land to ensure military expenditure. What is the concept of this 89 million mu of cultivated land? It means that 1 million soldiers, equivalent to each soldier can get nearly 8 acres of cultivated land.

in the early Ming dynasty, as long as a person was a soldier, the government gave him 8 mu of cultivated land. Moreover, it is glorious for the whole family to join the army, so there are two or three people in each soldier's family who can be exempted from other government duties as Yu Ding, because they need to help the soldiers cultivate this 8 mu of cultivated land. This is equivalent to the government using the right to use 8 acres of arable land for a stable military service.

In other words, whoever is willing to provide the government with a able-bodied man for military service and bear all the expenses and expenses of this soldier can enjoy the right to use this 8 mu of cultivated land, collect the land rent of this 8 mu of land, and thus reduce the right of at least two officers in the family. In this sense, being a soldier in the early Ming Dynasty is not particularly disadvantageous.

Later, after the government distributed all the 89 million mu of land to the families of soldiers, the Ming Empire had a special interest group, military households, for the convenience of management. In this context, the daily expenses of the soldiers in the early Ming Dynasty were actually equivalent to cultivating the 8 mu of land by their own soldiers' families or collecting the land rent for the 8 mu of land to support them. It is precisely because of this that Zhu Yuanzhang dared to publicly declare that he raised millions of soldiers and did not cost the country a grain of rice.

However, with the passage of time, this state-owned asset, Juntun, slowly began to lose. Because, in peacetime, the army is a number. In other words, it's almost enough, and no one will really screen soldiers for eligibility. Of course, if you embezzle military expenses and eat empty salaries, the team can still operate as usual. At least the emperor above will not find anything wrong.

in this context, everyone's resources for the military system are naturally brick by brick, and I will move them one by one. The most common behavior is that officers collude with local officials, casually hang an empty salary, or find some old and weak soldiers to replace them, and then gradually turn these lands into their own private ones.

If this development continues, by the time of Chongzhen, all the 89 million mu of cultivated land has already become the private property of officials. So when there is another war, all military regions are clamoring for no money to pay their salaries, and the emperor wants to trace the related problems, but it is impossible to find out. Because, the source of this kind of thing, it has to be pushed back to more than 1 years ago, how can it be clearly distinguished now? And the people involved in related things are also a sea of people. How can we pursue them?

Therefore, in the end, all the daily expenses of soldiers can only be borne by the national financial revenue. But the problem is, according to the number of soldiers on the roster, the relevant military expenditure is absolutely astronomical, and the fiscal revenue of the Ming Empire at that time had already been exploited by bureaucratic groups to make ends meet.

The more terrible problem is that only God knows how many soldiers there are in a registered team of 1, people, and only God knows how much of the relevant military expenditure will be put into the hands of soldiers. In this context, the central government of the Ming Empire was always short of money, the soldiers were always owed various salaries, and officials and officers at all levels were always asking for money.