Chapter 40: The Great Chaos

No one remembers that the first black smoke over the city of Lima was rising on the first day of the first month of the 11th year of Wanli.

No one knows how terrifying Lima is at night, with masked warriors in armor roaming the streets, climbing over walls and courtyards to storm the mansions of nobles or merchants, killing people and stealing goods and disappearing, leaving nothing but a mess in their wake.

The inhabitants of Lima City are clearly divided, and the grievances have been accumulated for a long time, and at this time they erupt like a flood of fierce beasts, and countless clashes occur every day, and no one can change this sign until a large number of Ming troops are stationed in the city.

At this moment, the large-scale entry of the Ming army is obviously an impossible thing, Chen Mu and Deng Zilong's troops are still continuing to advance on land, and the small towns and tribes along the way need to be pacified, and they will not be stationed in Lima City until at least March.

But the city can't wait that long.

The people in the city couldn't wait that long.

The Spanish Legion, who had no intention of expending their efforts in the suppression of the riots, were themselves participants in the revelry, and despite their disrupted formations and extremely low morale, they were the most experienced group of people in the whole of Lima who had been robbed.

The Ming army was unable to restrain the town, Lima City was too large and their troops were too small, and the port was only stationed with more than 400 people, and they were unable to control the chaotic situation despite their best efforts.

The Ming army's garrison in Lima City was busy counting real estate, and after the overseer Du Tong personally observed, he divided the open space near the port in the northwest of the city into several pieces, two for military camps, and took two vertical and two horizontal streets in the northwest of Lima City and assigned four hundred households to lead troops to station, fortify on the spot, and demarcate a huge security zone.

Even in the midst of it, most people are unable to see the impetus for further development, and even worse, sometimes even if they see how things are going, they are unable to do anything to change them.

The Spaniards of Lima City are in such a predicament at this moment.

The vast majority of the nobles were reluctant to go to sea on Ming ships, not because of the Ming army, but because many people saw that the current chaos in Lima City was due to the Spanish legions who would be on board with them.

Since the first fire in the city burned and the legionnaires unleashed their demons, dozens of nobles' mansions have been attacked in the days, and even the estates outside the city have not been spared, and many have begun to wonder if the long voyage back to Spain was safe – in the face of the worst reality, they don't even think that the change of hands of Lima City is a bad thing.

At least the arrival of the Ming army gave them a place to ask for help.

In the eyes of the Spanish aristocracy, neither the angry indigenous mob in the city, nor the legionnaires who were soldiers during the day and thieves at night, did not dare to enter the Daming District.

It's not that no one has tried to storm the area where the Ming Banner Army is stationed, at the beginning, there can be cannon sound in those streets every night, people can find new corpses on the streets every morning, the Ming army is responsible for killing and burying them, they are only responsible for taking away the weapons and armor on the corpses and valuable things, and the remaining corpses get up early and knock on the door to the nearest house, so that they can go and pull the corpses out of the city with a cart.

Outside the city, there was a large pit dug by the Western army on the orders of Toledo.

Ironically...... The pit was dug by Spanish soldiers, and most of the outlaws who were pushed and pulled into the pit by residents with carts were Spaniards, and more than half of them were Spanish soldiers.

At the beginning, when the chaos in the city first occurred, the native slaves who were detained by the Ming army in the process of registering the cabin had nowhere to go, and there was no place for them in the city, and the outside of the city was even more chaotic than the inside of the city, so they could only pretend to have the courage to ask the Ming army for help.

In fact, even they themselves did not expect the Ming army to provide them with any substantial help, in the education of the Spaniards in recent years, the indigenous people of Peru were told that the Ming people are devils who eat people and do not spit out bones, and the Ming Banner Army is one of the best, and their terrifying record seems to confirm this statement from the side.

The reason why they asked for help from the Ming army was only because they were close to the Ming army's station, and far away from any church, and the streets were not very peaceful now, and no one dared to go that far.

But they didn't expect that although most of them couldn't speak well, the Ming army allowed them to enter the garrison, although the attitude of the flag army was definitely not amiable, but sometimes they showed impatience due to busy affairs - due to Du Tong's excessive caution, there were few flag soldiers who landed, but they had to face affairs far beyond their ability.

These young men of the Ming Dynasty, who were boring and practicing killing techniques, were holding back a nameless fire in their hearts during this time.

But even so, there is a difference between the Spaniards treating them as animals and objects.

In fact, Du Tong drew a boxy area in the northwest of the city in order to settle the people in the chaos while setting up a port garrison.

Those houses were of no use to the Banner Army, and they were temporarily relocated until the Oriental Marshal Chen Mu ordered the reorganization of the Lima garrison on the spot, and it was likely that they would go elsewhere or return to Changsheng with the military transfer in a few months.

Many people already have families in Changshengdu, and although they only have a monthly salary of two or three thousand Tongbao, they can save money for food and shelter, and many of them are rewarded for their excellent training...... At first, it was to reward silver, and later to reward Tongbao, and now there are more and more local people who often win, and the military government began to appreciate the fields.

There are not many fields to enjoy, but there is a training examination school every three months to six months, and many people can obtain land from it, ranging from three acres to thirty acres, and they have no time to take care of these fields.

Many of them already resembled the victorious local garrisons.

However, those houses were very important to the people, Du Tong stayed in Jiexian for a long time, and the generals of the Oriental military garrison on the west coast assumed that the enemy was the Western Peruvian army, and he received a lot of reports from Chang Sheng about the behavior style of the Western army.

Their legions were not well paid, and angry Spanish soldiers could easily plunder their own towns, which they had done in the Netherlands years earlier.

The problem of arrears is common, not only in Spain, France, and even in the Ming Dynasty, as long as there are arrears in financial difficulties, but the degree is different, the common point is that the arrears will be opened from the beginning, and they will only owe more and more, and it is difficult to stop it, unless there is a large enough external stimulus.

For example, in the last two years, thanks to the Mingxi trade, the salaries of the Spanish native army have gradually made up for some of them, but the Peruvian mountains are far away, and as before, these soldiers are poor, and the noble officers are deliberately fueling the trouble, they dare not risk being killed to fight the Ming army, but they do not mind leaving the Ming a destroyed town.

It's just the Spaniards who were robbed and killed in the process...... The aristocratic officers can choose to add fuel to the fire and let this carnival that belongs to the bottom begin, and it is not up to them when it ends.

In this case, the Ming army stationed in the street near the Armed Square became the most popular position.