The History of China - #166 - S. Song 9: The Enemy of My Enemy...

Episode Date: May 19, 2019

The Jin Empire is all at once ripped apart from 4 different directions all at once: Shandong rebels from the east, Khitan from the northeast, Mongols from the northwest, and Tanguts from the West. So they decide to go the only direction left… and invade Southern Song. Time Period Covered: 1208-1217 CE Relevant Historical Figures: Song: Emperor Ningzong Chancellor Shi Miyuan Minister Zhen Dexiu Jin: Prince Wei Emperor Xuanzong Commander Hesheli Zhizhong Councilor Zhuhele Guoleqi Mongol: Genghis Khan Red Jacket Rebels: Yang the Saddler Khitan: Yelu Liuge, puppet-Emperor of Liao Dazhen Kingdom: Heavenly King Puxian Wannu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered, follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over ten generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era, then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast. Hello and welcome to the History of China.

Episode 66, The Enemy of My Enemy. Last time, we left off at the conclusion of the short but fierce clash between the Southern Song and the Jin Dynasties of China, which ended in 1208 in what effectively amounted to a stalemate between the two powers. Though the Song government was forced to deliver the already dead and rotten heads of the two ministers deemed responsible for Chinese aggression against their northern neighbor, and had agreed to substantially up their annual tribute in exchange for peace, no significant territories were exchanged, and the two Far Eastern powers presumed their long-standing, if uncomfortable, acceptance of one another's coexistence. With the violent death of the bellicose chancellor Han Tuozhou at the hands, fists, and boots of the palace guard corps, and the installation of the much more even-handed and moderate successor,

who may or may not have played a significant role in Han's assassination, a minister named Shen Mi Yuan as his new hand of government. As it stood then, the Song seemed to be well poised to resume their tripartite existence alongside Jin to the north and Western Xia to the south. They were the richest and most economically dynamic empire among the Asian powers, and second place wasn't even close. They had the most people, the best lands, and the greatest minds and talents working for them. Though they were paying out a yearly tribute to the Jurchen emperor up in Chengdu, they more than made it back with their trade surplus of the highest quality silks, rice, porcelain, and other fine goods that could be produced nowhere else but the Middle Kingdom. It wasn't ideal, it wasn't all under heaven. But it was all going to be okay.

And then, the entire world exploded. Now, let me just take a moment to say what you're about to hear might seem rather cursory, and that's because it is. What I'm about to cover in about, oh, five or so minutes, I've spent months rendering out in loving detail in THOC's paid feed as of the now two and counting bonus episodes that focus on this conflict from the other side of the Gobi. I've got almost an hour and a half of content about the Mongols' strike southward, first against Western Xia, and in this latest episode, absolutely gutting the Jin Dynasty. So if you'd like a more complete account, I encourage you to head over to patreon.com slash thehistoryofchina, after this episode of course, and sign up for as little as one dollar an episode. You won't regret it. Okay, shameless self-plug over. Anyways, here's the abridged version. Beginning in the year 1209, the Mongols appeared like phantoms out of the

swirling sands of the impassable Gobi Desert. First, they had laid waste to the Tangut kingdoms of Western Xia, which had at last purchased peace through their king nominally submitting to the authority of the Mongol ruler, this Chengji Shihan. Prior to their capitulation, the Tanguts had reached out for aid from their easterly neighbor and suzerain, the Jin Emperor, only to be met with stony refusal. The Jin, by that point, had more than enough on their plate, by their own reckoning at least. Famine, flooding, rebellions, ethnic strife, palace intrigue. With an imperial half-wit in command, and to top it all off, the uncertainty of whether this recently struck peace with the Song would hold or re-erupt into yet more conflict along the southern border. They quite simply could not afford to go antagonizing this clearly formidable steppe army,

even if that meant leaving their client state of Xia to twist in the proverbial wind. This had, of course, rather irked the Tanguts, and when they'd concluded their peace with the Mongols and switched allegiances accordingly, they were all too happy to begin taking their anger out against their erstwhile protectors, the Jin. But if the Jin imperial court had thought that remaining resolutely neutral in the face of Mongol attack against their ally would preserve the peace on their own behalf, they could scarce have been more wrong. Claiming a blood feud stemming from some long-forgotten wrong allegedly committed by the Jin against some petty tribal chieftain or another,

within a year, the Mongol army, though a meager force of just 65,000 to 70,000 horse riders, had ramped up their raids along the Jin border territories, and then broken into a full-scale running invasion of the northern territories. The sheer speed with which the steppe riders moved, and the ferocity with which they fought speed with which the stepwriters moved and the ferocity which they fought was something the likes of which neither the Jin soldiers nor their Jurchin overlords had ever seen in living memory, and they had no effective counter to it. Davis

writes, quote, the Mongols had an unbeatable strategy. In wars against the Song, the Jin armies had proven most effective when they overwhelmed the Song with massive attacks against a few strategic areas, creating a shock that often paralyzed the defenders. In contrast, the Mongols preferred to scatter their armies and conduct a large number of smaller campaigns. This diminished the risk of large, decisive battles, while helping to identify and exploit the enemy's vulnerable points. It was, in effect, like a fully armed and armored knight, complete with shield and battle hammer, trying to face off against a swarm of angry bees. Formal hostilities commenced in 1211, with the Mongol force crossing south of the Gobi and penetrating the Jin borders.

And over the course of the subsequent two years, the northern nomads would systematically deconstruct the foundations of the Jurchen regime, extending at last as far south as the Jin's central capital, Zhongdu, which is modern Beijing, while plundering the lands of its wealth, food, and people. Though safe behind their high city walls, and though they outnumbered the Mongol force many times over, the Jin armies could not develop a suitable defense against Mongol tactics. In the midst of this, the Jin ruler, known as Prince Wei, incompetent as he was unpopular, responded with a self-imposed isolation, locking himself away in his palace while the realm came apart at the seams around him, and sparking panic across the capital. Though the imperial

troops would be able to put these rebellions down, it came at great cost, the largest of which would result in the killing of more than 30,000 of the capital's own citizenry. In the summer of 1213, then, Prince Wei was himself assassinated at the hands of a palace coup led by decorated Kaishi war veteran and second-in-command of the entire empire, He Shili Zhezhong. Though another member of the ruling Wanyan clan was installed as emperor, many suspected that Commander He Shili actually sought to usurp the throne for himself. Within months, then, the leader of the coup against Prince Wei would himself be at the receiving end of an assassination plot.

None of this, mind you, did anything but sow more chaos and uncertainty into the Jin government and military structure, and it all happened at just about the worst conceivable time. Just as Commander He Shili met his untimely end, the Mongols had returned and surrounded the central capital, laying it to a three-month-long siege. From Davis, quote, the summer assault on Zhongdu was so frightful that to forestall a mass exodus, the Jin government prohibited all males from leaving the city. A Song embassy within 30 miles of the capital was ordered to return south without delivering its precious tribute. The siege lasted three months and effectively made Emperor Xuanzong

a prisoner in his own capital. At the end of the three-month siege, the Jin Emperor at last relented, offering up tremendous sums of gold, silks, horses, and people as a tribute payment, and formally submitting to the Mongol Great Khan as a vassal. Satisfied, Genghis Khan returned north with his armies, leaving the Jurchen leader to figure out how to pick up the pieces. First and foremost, he and his high officials concluded, was that they needed to get out of the clearly indefensible Zhongdu and make for the south to the southern capital of Kaifeng. This they did, in the summer of 1214, leaving the central capital under the protection of its 20,000-man garrison and the subsidiary garrisons surrounding it.

It would prove to be the worst mistake the Jin Emperor would ever make. When word reached the Mongol Khan, who had summered on the southern edges of the Gobi while waiting for the weather to permit a crossing back to Mongolia, that the Jin Emperor had fled south, Genghis flew into a rage. This, as he saw it, was nothing short of a betrayal of the highest order. The Jain ruler clearly meant to gain a more favorable position for himself and his people, and from his southern capital, plot an inevitable counterattack. In this, he was likely correct.

In any event, so far as the Mongols were concerned, this was a direct violation of the treaty that they had just concluded, and hostilities were recommenced immediately. Wheeling his 70,000-strong mounted force back around, they separated it into three forces to once more ravage across the countryside. Cities that had been taken before were reoccupied and sacked, and many of the northern Jin bastions that had avoided Mongol hostilities up until this point, such as the northern and eastern capital cities,

were now taken in brutal fashion. Zhengdu itself was made a horrific example of. After a six-month siege, the city gates were finally opened in early 1215, and the city and its populace put to sword and flame, with scarcely a soul being left alive by the end of the month-long sacking process. Reports came back telling that, once the Mongol troops had stacked and counted the bodies of the slain denizens of the once-mighty capital, they had been left in piles outside the city so high that the rotting bones were months later mistaken from afar as

snow-covered hilltops. Down in southern Song, those receiving such reports could scarcely believe what they were being told. Quote, developments in the north moved with such astounding speed that the Song court and violence going on north of the Yellow River, but one of the most pressing questions facing the Song government was, well, what do we do with all these payments that keep getting returned? Indeed, for almost three years now, the Song annual tribute payments had been uniformly turned back from their scheduled delivery to the Jin capital. So did that mean that they didn't want them? Is all this cash ours to keep and use? No, Chancellor Shen Miuyan insisted. They were still the tribute payments agreed to, and that needs must be upheld and honored, regardless of what might be happening in the north. Doing any less would be

an obvious breach of the treaty provisions between Song and Jin, and could well trigger a new bout of war between the two states that the Song could scarcely afford at this point. We all saw how well that last war went, after all. Thus, the returned tributary payments were to be put away in storage and marked for later delivery, rather than returned to the treasury coffers. They'd have a nice cold pint and wait for all this to blow over. Not everyone, it must be said, was wholly on board with Chancellor Shih's display of timidity, or his refusal to act more decisively in gearing up and mobilizing the Song army for war, be it against the Jin, or as seemed increasingly likely as further reports arrived regarding the state of the North,

potentially against these Mongol invaders. The most outspoken of the Song officials against the continuation of the tribute payments in any form was Zhen Dexiu, who argued that in essence, the winds of change were afoot, that the Song was not helping itself by continuing to pretend that things were just going to go back to normal. He should know, as he was probably one of the best informed of the court regarding the conditions in the north, having previously served as ambassador to the Jin, and having seen the level of distress and wide-scale unrest across the north. And that had all been before the Mongol had even begun ripping it apart. He predicted the imminent demise of the Jurchen regime, and urged his fellow ministers to begin preparations for an inevitable showdown with the Mongols. The 1214 flight of the Jin Emperor and his retinue to Kaifeng threw the issue into an even starker relief when, once having settled at their quote-unquote southern capital, they demanded of the Song government payment in full for their three years of missed tribute.

Not only that, but they were demanding additional back payments for the time delayed, even though it had been the Jin themselves who had delayed it. For ministers like Zhen, however, the final straw was the emotional issue of the location. Kaifeng, as you'll no doubt remember, was no alien regime's city. It had once been the Song dynasty's seat of power, and to be expected to present tribute payments to a foreign occupier in their own former capital was an act of supreme humiliation and an unpardonable indignity to the dynasty's illustrious ancestors. Such was the mood across Song that one of the few voices to speak out in favor of continuing to honor the terms of the treaty with Jin,

the minister named Qian Xingjian, took his life into his own hands in so doing. He wrote a proposal that was novel for the time and eminently pragmatic, that made the case that Song must defer, quote, any policy response until the outcome of the conflict in the north was more certain, end quote. For the time being, he urged Chancellor Shi to maintain the tribute payments to the Jin, thereby assisting them in their fight against the far greater threat to stability in the region, the Mongols. For this, and I must say, in retrospect, entirely reasonable proposal, students of the Imperial University held demonstrations against Qian, loudly demanding his execution as a traitor of the people.

Probably one of the only people who did receive opinions like Qian's well was one of the only people who mattered, Shi Miyuan, who stayed the course of remaining scrupulously neutral and avoiding any provocation of the northern regime. In so doing, he managed to undermine his own political position at home and abroad. By 1214, southern Song was the only significant power of the region that still deigned to maintain tributary relations with the Jin at all. As the conflict with the Mongols wound on and the Jurchen's grasp of even holding on to its own territories became even more tenuous, both the Tangut leaders of Western Xia as well as the Koreans of Goryeo had severed formal ties with the reeling dynasty and concluded separate peace deals of their own with the

rising Mongol powerhouse. That same year, the Xia had sent an emissary to Song, seeking to discuss a possible alliance against the Jin, but such overtures were studiously ignored by Chancellor Shi, who would still risk no diplomatic breach. The following year, the Song would dispatch an emissary to Kaifeng, seeking a reduction in the tribute payment, only to be laughed out of the Jurchen court at such a suggestion. The year following, the southern state would turn away reportedly more than 100,000 ethnic Han deserters of the Jin army seeking asylum in the south, once again on the grounds of not wishing to jeopardize the terms of the treaty.

Again from Davis, quote, Ironically, such extraordinary accommodations coincided with the further decline of Jin power. The Mongols, having seized Chengdu in spring 1215, led their armies to within seven miles of Kaifeng. The Jin were demoralized, beset with defections throughout the north and conspiracies directed against the throne. Even so, Shen Mian would stay the course, convincing himself that, somehow, remaining neutral and in good faith of his government's treaty with the reeling Jin state would spare his nation further suffering. But in that hope, he was about to be proved dead wrong.

Because in 1217, it would not be the Song, but the Jin, who broke the Treaty of the Kaishi War, and launched a last, desperate invasion of the South. 400 years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the centre of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Listen to Season 1 to hear about England's first attempts at empire building, in Ireland, in North America, and in the Caribbean, the first

steps of the East India Company, and the political battles between King and Parliament. Listen to Season 2 to hear about the chaotic years of civil war, revolution, and regicide which rocked the Three Kingdoms and the Fledgling Empire. In Season 3, we see how Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell ruled the powerful Commonwealth and challenged the Dutch and the Spanish for the wealth and power of the Americas and Asia. Learn the history of the crumbling Jin Dynasty to see what, apart from the Mongols themselves, was taking place that would in short order drive them to such desperate action. And we'll start in the closest of these regions, Shandong. Shandong is the peninsula that juts out from north-central China into the Yellow Sea,

and is the final outlet into the Pacific of the Yellow River. Though it had long been the bread basket of the north, as I've stated earlier, for the past several decades the region had been ravaged by a series of devastating climatological disasters. The Yellow River had repeatedly flooded and changed its lower courses, resulting in widespread destruction and famine across not just the region, but the empire as a whole. It's hardly surprising, amid such trying times, that since 1206, the area had been roiled by a series of increasingly large-scale revolts against Jin rule and occupation. This reached its first climax in 1214, when the leader of the strongest of these factions, a man known as Yang the Saddler, was proclaimed emperor of the easternmost part of Shandong, with his capital at a small fishing village called Penglai. Though the Jin government

was by this time more than over its head against the Mongol armies, it refused to stand idly by and let such an event occur with no response. Zhengdu dispatched an expedition against the Saddler King, and after a scant three months captured and executed Yang, putting an end to his would-be kingdom by the sea. Yet though Yang was killed, the unrest persisted across Shandong, continuing on in the inaccessible mountainous regions of the east. The guerrilla fighters would adopt the color red for their uniforms, leading them to become known as the Hong Ao Jun, or the Red Jacket Army. Herbert Frank writes of the Red Jackets, quote,

Red had always been a suspicious color in China, signaling good luck and hope. The choice of the color red had, in all probability, nothing to do with the insurgents' pro-Song feelings. Red was the emblematic color of the Song, correlated with the element of fire. Nor can we assign any religious or sectarian motivations to the various rebel leaders. The aims and objectives of all these mercenaries who disturbed Jin rule in Shandong seems to have been purely selfish and secular. Each of them tried to carve out for himself a region in which to build up a center of local power. In later traditional Chinese historiography, and in modern times, i.e. the CPC,

the Red Jackets movement has frequently been labeled as nationalistic and patriotic, and as indicative of anti-foreign feelings among the lower classes. The Shandong insurgents were not, however, motivated by such modern concepts as nationalism, but rather were simple adventurers who tried to ally themselves with whichever major power could enhance their own prestige and emoluments." They were, in effect, mercenaries. And in more normal times, each would have been either crushed or bought out by the Jin one after the next. But with the chaos now unfolding across the empire with the Mongol explosion, they were able to succeed and, at least to a limited extent, thrive in eastern Shandong,

thus removing it and its resources from Jurchen control at a time when they were needed the most. Moving further north and east, the vast stretches of Manchuria, the very birthplace of both of the last two northern dynasties, the Liao and Jin, would likewise fall away from the Jin emperor's control amidst the Mongol invasions. As their ancestral homeland, the loss of the region was of course embarrassing, but it was also debilitating. Large numbers of Jurchen and their close kin still lived across the region. The northernmost reaches of this region had already seceded from the Jin by 1214, but the southern reaches, particularly the area closest to the Yellow Sea in the Korean border called Liaodong, was still firmly under Jin control by the time

Xuanzong and his retinue decided to flee Chengdu. Had they opted, as one minister had urged, to withdraw east to the eastern capital, the Aoyang, rather than south to Kaifeng, well, playing with historical counterfactuals almost never leads anywhere conclusive, but the case can be made that such a course of action might have given the reeling Jin government a significantly stronger redoubt against further Mongol aggression, rather than sandwiching themselves between the Khan and the Song.

The northern reaches of Manchuria had fallen out of the Jin orbit during the Mongols' first major incursion into the Jin Empire. One of the invasion forces' primary missions during that smash and grab had been to seek out potential weak points in the empire, and in particular, suss out just how loyal the Khitan tribes were to the dynasty that had overthrown their own just a century prior. The Mongols were not disappointed, and found widespread support among the Khitan clansmen for the idea of reclaiming what was theirs and making Liao great again. Thus, in 1212, one of the surviving clansmen of the formerly ruling Yalu clan, a man named Liu Ge, rose with his Khitan army of combined infantry and cavalry to reclaim northern Manchuria with the Khan's blessing and

support. The following year, Genghis would enthrone him as the emperor of Liao, and he would prove his bona fides the year after when he resoundingly defeated a Jin expedition sent to bring the region back to heel. This reconstituted Liao puppet state, under Mongol rule, would survive in fact for two more decades until 1233, when the Mongols at last destroyed it and absorbed it into the greater Mongol Empire. The commander of that failed punitive expedition against Ye Lu Liu Ge and the Liao puppet empire, a commander named Pu Xianwan Nu, would, after the emperor's flight south from Zhongdu in 1214, take the remnants of his force and attempt to carve out a state of his

own in southeastern Manchuria, again called Liaodong, with the eastern capital, Liaoyang City, as his own headquarters. In the spring of 1215, following the central capital's destruction and sacking by the Mongols, Wan Nu proclaimed himself the independent and as the new heavenly king, or Tianwang, of Dazhen. Frank writes of this unique state name, quote, This name was not a geographical name, as practically all Chinese state names had been before this, including the Jin itself. Dazhen is a highly literary expression, standing for gold in Taoist texts. This name, therefore, was meant to proclaim that Wanyu regarded himself as the true successor of the jinn, and to underline this point, he would also adopt the clan name of Wanyan,

the ruling house of jinn. Heavenly King Wanyu would have a rather fraught relationship with his Mongol neighbors and overlords. At least three times in the course of his about two decades in power over Dazhen, which he would later rechristen as Eastern Xia or Dong Xia as of 1217, he would submit to Mongol suzerainty and be confirmed or reconfirmed in his position, only to a few years later break out in revolt time and again, one time abandoning the son he'd sent to the Great Khan as hostage, and another time forced in defeat to flee to an island for more than a year before finally being able to return to the mainland.

Yet, in one form or another, Wan Nu and his kingdom would continue on up until 1233, when it was finally destroyed and annexed by the Mongols. For Jin, or what was left of it in any case, the loss of not just their central reaches, but Manchuria itself was particularly devastating because it cut them off from their main region of horse and cattle raising lands, as well as, as I mentioned before, the friendly allied Jurchen people who populated that area. This loss, along with the main grain production regions in Hebei and

Shandong, would indeed prove fatal to the Jin Empire, though they'd managed to limp on as a crippled, though still dangerous, rump state around Kaifeng until 1234. You may have noticed a pattern emerging here when discussing these three states and their endpoints, Liao, Dazhen, and Jin, in that they all ceased to exist within a year of one another. That's certainly no coincidence. The reason all three would be allowed to persist as thorns in the Khan's side for that long was that, having crushed all of their capacities to threaten his flank, Genghis Khan was quite distracted beginning in 1219

with a series of Western adventures, beginning with a monumental miscalculation by the Emir of Khwarizmia. That will be the focus of the next bonus episode. The loss of all of these territories had reduced the once mighty Jin Empire into a rump state by 1215. It now consisted of only the regions directly surrounding their last remaining capital, Kaifeng, along the Yellow River, and hemmed in on all sides by hostile

foreign powers, many of them enemies of the Jin's own making. They were the Mongols, Xixia, the Shandong Red Jackets, and of course, to the south, Song. All this in just the span of four years. It was something almost no one would have dreamed even possible, much less imminent, in 1211. Yet now, here they were. Faced with such a tremendous, inconceivable reversal of fortune, some might have dug in, fortified, or heck, tried to play nice with the giant state to the south, who even now seemed too cowed to do anything but continue to play the dutiful, subjugated state delivering its annual tribute by the wagon full year after year. Maybe convince the Song that they were all in this together, against this existential threat that these demons streaking out of the Gobi posed to all of us. If you thought

that, you'd be reasonable, wise, and definitely not anywhere near the levers of state power in Kaifeng circa 1215. Because the Jin court wasn't about that life. They weren't going to make friends with the Song Chinese or play nice with them. They were going to make up for their losses in the north by taking them from the south. So we're going to finish out today with an overview of their rationale for, and the initial stages of, what would ultimately prove to be the last war between Southern Song and the Jin Empire. Then, next time we'll pick up with the war itself, concluding with the final destruction of the Jurchen state that had ruled for a little over a century across northern China. Alright, so the reason cited by the Jin officials in their declaration of war to the Song government

was that the Southern Empire was being held responsible for the incitement of, and ongoing support for, banditry and rebel activity within the Jian borders. The Song, of course, denied any such surreptitiousness, but they weren't really fooling anyone, especially along the eastern seaboards, in places like Shandong, for instance. These rebels and outlaws routinely identified with the Song rulers of the South, identified proudly as Han Chinese, and claimed to act as a loyalist Song force. Every once in a while, the Song government would half-heartedly catch an official who'd either just been too flagrant about it, or just got his unlucky number pulled, and punish him to, you know, keep up appearances that they were totally against any such rebel action,

sapping the Jin's strength, and they all waggled their collective fingers and the official was solemnly demoted or exiled or perhaps even occasionally executed. But it was little more than kabuki theater. Everyone knew it, and the under-the-table support went on undeterred. In fact, the name by which these rebel armies were commonly referred to within the song itself was as Zhongyi Jun, the loyal and righteous armies. So that's what the jian told the song about why they were now going to war, as the entire north burned down behind them. Internally, however, the jian ministers could hardly have cared less about a little song tomfoolery at this point.

No, they had what seemed to be the arch-demon of hell breathing right down their collective necks, and they were desperately trying to formulate a plan to run as far and fast away as possible. For the moment, the Privy Councilor, Juhala Golachi, advised a two-pronged strategy. First, harden and strengthen their defensive lines to hold the Mongols back as long as possible in the north. That would mean, however, that the Jinn would have to pick and choose where they would make their stands. They could not guard the entire border. They didn't have enough men, otherwise they risked being spread too thin and punched through anywhere by the steppe cavalry. Thus, they would only pick

the strongest, best cities to defend, and all those other ones were just going to have to deal with the storm coming themselves. That, hopefully, would buy them enough time to get the court an even better line of protection, namely distance. From Davis, quote, By attacking the Song, the Jin could avoid confrontation with the Mongols while expanding its influence south of the Huai River in preparation for further retreat. End quote. At first, Emperor Xuanzong of Jin rejected this advice, thinking it would be amazingly stupid to pick another fight while trying to flee from a first, especially since they were now smaller, poorer, and much less numerous than they'd been back in 1207,

back when they'd only managed to fight the Song to a stalemate. However, in 1216, a brief, catastrophic sallying out against the Mongol army convinced Tranzong that, whatever the outcome might be in the south, it was a far cry better than the assured destruction he faced by turning back north, or staying where he was. At last, he accepted Counselor Juhela's plan, and in 1217, hostilities were formally opened against Southern Song. The Song response was weak and non-committal, and intentionally so. Hoping to contain the conflict,

the Song court instructed border officials to confine themselves to defensive actions only. Chancellor Shi Meiyuan waited two months to declare war, and he did so only after much prodding. Even after finally acknowledging that there was going to be a war and no, ignoring it was not going to make it go away, Shi Meiyuan proved notably indecisive and non-committal, as usual. In fact, he annoyed his army commanders to no end by refusing to organize the Song military response under any kind of centralized imperial command structure, but instead allowing the regional force commanders to basically all do their own things. While this did allow,

ultimately, for a degree of flexibility and rapidity in response to regional crises, it was done so much less for any such strategic reason, and far more because chancellorship didn't want the quote, personal responsibility for the outcome of any specific battle or campaign, end quote. Ah yes, the old, hey, it can't be my fault if I just don't make any decisions, school of leadership. Nice going, Xim Yuan.

All right, that's where we're going to leave off today, but next time, the Song and we're going to leave off today, but next time, the Song and Jin are going to square off one last time in a conflict that will stretch on for almost a decade, and really end only when the Mongols finally remember that, oh yeah, they left something undone back east. As one final little sign-off, I'd just like to note that this is the first episode being recorded on my brand new listener-paid-for microphone. It's still even got that just-out-of-the-box smell.

So thank you again to everyone who has made this by possible. I certainly hope your ears notice the difference. Thanks for listening. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. When a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans. I'm Tracy.

And I'm Rich. And we want to invite you to join us as we take an in-depth look at this pivotal era in American history. Look for The Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts.