In the 13th century, the Mongols once displayed military talents that shocked the entire world and created an unprecedentedly large Yuan Dynasty empire. However, this powerful empire did not last long and ended early. Why?
One of the points is that cultural backwardness leads to political backwardness.
Although the Yuan Dynasty established by the Mongols expanded outwards, it did not have any political ideals or any motivation for noble sentiments. The purpose of the Yuan Dynasty's outward expansion was only to plunder wealth and satisfy the desire for conquest. Moreover, the entire society of the Yuan Dynasty suffered from moral decline, corruption, lewdness, and blind superstition of monks. This directly led to the collapse of the originally huge empire building of the Yuan Dynasty.
In addition, the taxes were very heavy, which promoted corruption and left the court with no politically useful talents.
The corruption of Yuan Dynasty officials began before they took over the Central Plains. The most famous corrupt official among them was Ahema. During the Wokuotai period of Emperor Taizong of the Yuan Dynasty, the central government's finances were mainly managed by Semu people. Ahema is one of them.
He designed various plans for Yuan Shizu to plunder people's wealth, such as cleaning up household accounts, monopolizing patents, and issuing banknotes indiscriminately. While ruthlessly plundering for the imperial court, he also plundered wealth for himself. At that time, Kublai Khan was eager to make the country rich. When he saw that Ahema was very successful, he granted Ahma greater rights and obeyed his words. Ahema has been in power for a long time, and he has become more and more wanton, greedy and arrogant. He promoted traitors, conspired and colluded, seized fertile farmland, and secretly accepted bribes. On the surface, he enforced the law strictly, and the government and the public were talking about it.
Severe corruption in the Yuan Dynasty led to repeated peasant uprisings in various places. In Shandong and Hebei alone, there were more than 300 peasant uprisings, ten times more than the peasant uprisings under the Northern Wei Dynasty in the sixth century. Mongolian rule The cruelty of the Xianbei rulers was even more severe.
Later, wars everywhere would inevitably lead to famines, droughts occurred on a large scale, and the land was red for thousands of miles. The worst was in the lower reaches of the Yellow River, where famine drove people crazy and attacked each other to cook food. The rivers overflowed, and hundreds of thousands of hungry people with nowhere to flee became an endless source of troops for the armed masses. Finally, the hungry peasants organized themselves and attacked the Yuan rulers.
So the reason why the Yuan Dynasty perished so quickly was actually because there was no reasonable rule. The debauchery of the Yuan Dynasty rulers has been completely socialized throughout the Mongolian aristocracy. Socialized debauchery is destined to accelerate the demise of this dynasty. Emperor Yuan Shun had no way and no way to stop this kind of debauchery from destroying the country.
This is the final result of corruption. Not only Emperor Yuan Shun, but any last emperor is unable to save the dynasty in the face of extreme corruption.