The fleet sailed northeast along the Bay of Biscay, and for a day and night, before they had eaten at noon the next day, they could already see the land in the distance.

Chen Jiujing was careful in his voyage, this was not the first time he had been to the coast of France, and the last time he had arrived, he had led his fleet to the northwest of Brest, an important military fortress, and had naturally returned with a feather.

Having learned the lesson of last time, this time he lowered his goals.

Naturally, there were almost no enemies on the coast, and only one Calais ship was encountered patrolling during the voyage, and there was no doubt that the kind of galleys that could be seen from the bow and the stern full of oarsmen's heads were no match at all, and the mast was damaged by the heavy artillery of the Rokko battleship from a distance, and the oarsmen rowed for a long time, but they were surrounded before they escaped to the shore.

Juan and Franco's two battalions of mercenaries disembarked at the set goal, one with three companies of nearly 1,000 men scattered to the villages on the north and south coasts, and the other, although only one company but well-armed and on foot, went straight to the east road to find the villages and monasteries.

The fleet, with a Liujia ship as the core, five thousand ships to escort, and more than 40 large and small shark ships, carried more than 4,000 troops from the Baishan Battalion and the Xiguo Siyong Battalion to continue sailing north.

Over the next half day, they attacked and burned two very small shipyards; Destroy 12 large and small civilian ships, merchant ships, and warships found along the way, and the night after the process is over, they are discovered by the garrison of a castle built on a cliff wall, and then the Rokko flagship and five thousand ships return fire on the fortress.

The fortress's shore defense stone guns and mortar cannons were very powerful, but the range was not as good as the sixteen heavy guns placed in the bottom warehouse of the Rokka-kor ship, and the special large Franc aircraft had enough range but insufficient power, and the fortress fell to the upper hand in a short period of artillery battles.

In the dark night, Chen Jiujing couldn't even see the whole picture of the fortress clearly, and could only think that it was smaller than the common acropolis in the south of the Ming Dynasty and about the same size as the Japanese fortress, so he had the mentality of giving it a try, and bombarded five salleys with gunwales.

When he realized that even if he breached the fortress, his men would not be able to climb the cliff to capture it, so he stopped wasting ammunition and delaying time, and continued his journey north.

The fortress will definitely send riders to gallop through the night, and more and more enemies will receive the news, which will be detrimental to his attack.

However, on the morning of the third day, the castle welcomed another wave of people who wanted to try their luck, the mercenary group of Xiyong Bingying Juan under Chen Jiujing.

They plundered all the way, the harvest was delivered to the ship in a cart, and they followed Chen Jiujing by land and water, only to find a castle of the Earl with half of the wall blown down, and after a tentative attack, it was found that even after the attack, there were only a few dozen defenders gathered.

They were just in time, when most of the Protestant nobility in the territory had died in the Sixth War of Religion, and the young heir had been summoned to Paris to join the Knights of the Holy Spirit, where he wore the Order of the Blue Belt and indulged in endless gatherings.

Before the siege began, the defenders surrendered.

But on the other side, in the harbor west of Bordeaux, the siege had just begun.

"The enemy received the news earlier than we planned, we have seven ships to take away half of the enemy's fleet in the bay, Aji, you disembark from the land to support Carlos, Guzmán, Salazar on land, make some movement outside the port, let their sailors also leave the ship, we can take the port in one fell swoop."

The battle for the port had already begun, and the city of Bordeaux was connected to the northern seaport, which had to be reached by the Gironde River for 200 miles, but there was another bay port in the west of the city, only 60 miles from the city.

Chen Jiujing was going to attack this port, in the south of the port, he put all the mercenaries except Aji down the ship, let them attack the port by land, the fleet sailed to the bay, but he didn't expect that when he was only thirty or forty miles away from the bay, he suddenly found that for some reason, the French had hoarded thirty warships and armed merchant ships in this bay.

The Grand Fleet took advantage of the telescope to turn around far to the west, and only assigned one Thousand Grain Ship to lead six shark ships of all sizes to approach the bay, and after a short engagement, they fled westward.

A dozen French warships obediently chased them out.

Then he returned and unloaded the Ajibu mercenaries on the shore, and sent more than a dozen boats with only sailors and no passengers to support the advance convoy, while most of the sergeants waited for the night offshore.

Early the next morning, Carlos divided his troops into two routes, one to encircle the fortress and dig a trench for a long siege, and the other to raid the surrounding villages and clear the fields, making a feint to prepare for a general attack.

The flagship began to lead a large army into the bay, rammed and burned the ships, and bombarded the defenders with naval guns.

But I didn't expect the French to build a city wall and fortress on this side of the coast.

In terms of building fortifications and making artillery, the French were not weaker than the Spanish, and even the craftsmanship of making artillery was more serious than theirs.

It's not that the French themselves don't know how to use the phalanx, mainly in the soldiers, their soldiers and the Spanish legionnaires come from different ways, the infantry is trained around the core knights of the battle, not the legionnaires with professional soldiers as the core, cavalry as the supplement, and the infantry does not have professional phalanx training, so the knights are always bullied by the phalanx composed of muskets and spearmen in the fight.

Despite his noble status, the Iron-clad Knights may not be able to win a battle with the vast number of light cavalry honed by Spain in the Moorish Wars.

But they still have enough ability to defend one place.

The artillery bombardment on the first day was too close to Chen Jiujing's troops, and six small shark boats were sunk and two large shark ships were also injured, so they had to withdraw from the range of shore artillery, and before they could rest, the French fleet that had gone to sea the day before was pursued and returned by the ships all over the body, and then was caught in the bay by the front and rear.

The destruction of the fleet had taken a toll on their morale, and the defenders were ready to break through as the heavy artillery unloaded from the Yiyimen ship on the third day of the siege was brought in by mercenaries from the direction of the coast.

The bad thing is in the breakthrough of the siege, the army is not superior, and the fortress can still be defended, isn't it looking for a beating when you go out of the city?

As a result, more than 400 people were routed outside the city, and the more than 300 defenders who remained in the castle were completely hopeless, and the Baishan battalion on the bay also disembarked and coordinated the attack, and took the port on the fourth day of the attack without any effort.

However, in two days, before they could load all the georgettes, cured meats, wine raisins, and some weapons and equipment that were to be shipped out of the port, Franco sent his elite cavalry to the east, and the defenders of Bordeaux came.

They named the commanders of these mercenaries.

The Ming army immediately reorganized its armament and laid three lines of defense on both sides of the forty-mile road between the port and the Bordeaux reinforcements, and at the end was the Baishan battalion and more than 2,000 soldiers from Carlos and Guzmán; In the middle were the two thousand mercenaries of Aji, Juan, and Salazar, one on the left and one on the right, with the road as the central axis, separated by twelve miles, leaving the middle empty.

The front line of defense was naturally Franco's 200 or so people, and Chen Jiujing did not personally go to the French formation to see it, which was too stupid.

He just asked people to get the flag of the ship that sank the French pirates in the Caribbean Sea, sent his cronies to send it, and asked him to tell the French commander-in-chief: Send this flag to Paris and let Henry III know that this is the revenge of the Oriental Military Government of the Ming Empire for the actions of the French islands.

At the same time, an order was conveyed to Franco: "West, run." ”