However, just over a hundred years later, the once invincible Mongolian fighters are not what they used to be. By the end of the Yuan Dynasty, the Ming army led by Zhu Yuanzhang, the Ming emperor, almost easily defeated the Yuan army and drove the Mongolian rulers back to the Mongolian plateau. Why did Mongolian fighters suddenly fail?
Some people think that the Ming army was able to quickly defeat the Yuan army because of the extensive use of firearms. In fact, the speed of loading gunpowder into firearms at that time was too slow and the accuracy was not high, even worse than bows and arrows. So it is not objective to show that military firearms defeated Mongolian fighters.
In fact, the rapid decline in the combat effectiveness of Mongolian fighters was mainly caused by the internal political chaos in the Yuan Dynasty. From the beginning of its establishment, the Yuan Dynasty wavered on an important issue, that is, which route to take. Yuan Shizu's Kublai Khan admired Chinese civilization very much, and the title of the Yuan Dynasty was taken from the sentence "To make great efforts to do the Yuan Dynasty, all materials should be started" in the Book of Changes. Therefore, during his reign, the Yuan Dynasty carried out the policy line of accepting and popularizing China culture.
Kublai Khan was a powerful ruler, so no Mongolian aristocrat dared to challenge his authority. He wants to take the China route, so everyone has to follow him. However, after Kublai Khan's death, the situation changed greatly. The Mongolian rulers in the Yuan Dynasty had a fierce conflict on the route. One faction adheres to the policy of giving priority to Mongolia; Another school thinks that we should continue Kublai Khan's line, take China as the foundation and adopt Confucianism to govern the country.
The Mongolian rulers of these two factions have gone from endless arguments to fighting and killing each other. Before Kublai Khan died and ascended the throne in Yuan Shundi, there were nine emperors in the Yuan Dynasty in just 39 years. The instability of the central political situation directly led to the rapid decline of the overall strength of the Yuan Dynasty, and the Mongolian fighters with strong combat effectiveness and strict military discipline began to corrupt.
At the end of the Yuan Dynasty, peasant rebels broke out all over the country, but the highest ruling class in the Yuan Dynasty was still busy with internal struggles. Thus, a very strange phenomenon appeared: in the north, the rulers of the Yuan Dynasty were busy killing each other; In the south of the Yangtze River, Zhu Yuanzhang, Chen Youliang, Zhang Shicheng and other peasant rebel leaders are attacking each other to seize territory.
Finally, after Zhu Yuanzhang successfully unified Jiangnan, he began to assemble troops for the Northern Expedition. At this time, the internal struggle of the Yuan Dynasty was still not over. The Ming army swept across the north, and the powerful Mongolian fighters could no longer resist the offensive of the Ming army and were quickly beaten out of the water. This is also the verification of a sentence: people are scattered, and the team is not easy to bring. No matter how powerful the power is, if it can't be gathered together, it is just a mob.