Li Zicheng's Dashun Army factions merged, with a total strength of nearly one million.

Even Li Zicheng's own army has at least two hundred thousand.

With so many troops, eating and drinking Lazar every day is a huge consumption. If they don't receive food, will they eat dirt?

At the beginning of the Li Zicheng uprising, no grain was collected.

Why? There are large families who eat and fight local tyrants to divide the fields.

When there was a famine in the north, the government's finances were bare for years and it was unable to pay for the disaster relief.

But this does not mean that this place is poor and white, and there are still many landlords and rich households.

One of the characteristics of the rich landlords in ancient times is that they like to reserve grain and gold and silver, and some generations have been like this.

They don't need to invest, so the materials they earn are kept at home.

These are personal property, and the Ming government can't move them.

Therefore, in the end, during the Chongzhen period, the imperial court collapsed because of its inability to pay, and prayed for donations from the aristocratic family, and got 65,438+100,000 taels of silver.

But Li Zicheng beat local tyrants in Beijing, and * * * won seven thousand two hundred silver, which is the reason.

Wherever the rebels in Li Zicheng went, they killed the imperial clan of the Ming Dynasty first, then robbed the landlords and rich families of grain and silver, and those who dared to rebel were executed on the spot.

In this way, the insurgents got a lot of materials and there was no problem in dealing with them.

However, anyone with a discerning eye can see the limitations of this method.

Because the landlords and rich households in a place are limited, their materials may have been preserved for several generations and cannot be regenerated.

Once robbed, it will become a piece of pure land, and it can no longer provide supplies.

So Li Zicheng must be like Huang Chao and others, moving around and grabbing new areas everywhere.

This way of fighting is called "fishing after exhaustion". Hens that lay eggs will die sooner or later if they are cooked and eaten.

By the middle and late period of the uprising, Li Zicheng's hungry people had reached 500,000. It is difficult to maintain so many people by grabbing places.

In desperation, Li Zicheng once tried to establish a base area in Luoyang, that is, let the hungry people farm and pay rent, businessmen pay taxes in business, and soldiers reclaim land.

But these things cannot be done overnight. Before long, Beijing was breached, Li Zicheng was defeated, and these actions of establishing base areas were finished.

In Beijing, Li Zicheng's troops robbed everywhere, even burning and looting. Because there were already too many troops at that time, they were still limited to robbing landlords and rich households. For example, although there are 70 million taels of silver, there is not enough food, so it has developed to rob even ordinary people.

At that time, ordinary people in Beijing generally had a little money at home, much richer than farmers, and had something to rob.

As a result, smoke filled the air, and the people soon lost their support for Li Zicheng and thought they were robbers.