Chapter 30: The Third Year of Yonglu (II)
Before Li Sanbao made the crossbow, Wan Ji put forward a request to Li Sanbao, the range should exceed the iron cannon as much as possible, and it is inevitable that there will be damage when used on the battlefield, so the parts on the crossbow machine are best universal, such as several crossbows are broken, and by reassembling them, you can get a new crossbow and continue to use it. Pen & Fun & Pavilion www.biquge.info not only saves resources, but also can ensure combat effectiveness to the greatest extent.
Li Sanbao understood the meaning of Wanji, and finally took half a year, in 1557, produced the first detachable, universal parts of the hand crossbow, in 1558, has been equipped with 200 crossbows for the standing army, and the production of more than 5,000 crossbow arrows, basically there will be no more demand in the short term.
It should be mentioned that the original samurai of the Kuroda family, standing ashigaru are unwilling to use crossbows, these two hundred crossbows are ashigaru, which are forced to recruit peasant soldiers and a small number of ninjas by the Kuroda family, these two hundred people have no resistance to crossbows, and they can become standing ashigaru, which is already a very happy thing for them, who cares about the spirit of bushido, what deviant.
These ashigaru were all farmers before, or ninja status, so they cherish the current ashigaru identity, at least there is a way to go up, everyone is serious about practicing the use of crossbows, and cherishing the weapons in their hands, and the training effect does not need to be supervised at all.
The height of the Kuroda family is 11,000 stones, and Wanyoshi has all the agricultural knowledge he remembered in his previous life, such as two-season crops, three-season crops (two-level crops plus soybeans), intercropping, terraces, and small fish ponds in the mountains, and the Kuroda family has about 30,000 koku in a year, just counting the real height obtained on the land, which is not counting the commercial income of Kuroda Castle and the income of Himeji Castle.
In particular, the newly occupied land of the Kuroda family was mainly on the coastal plains, which was extremely suitable for farming, and in addition to the three castles and two castles left by the Kuroda family, all the other castles on the land were abolished, and a lot of arable land was invisibly increased.
Coupled with the oceanic climate of Yibao County, the fertility of the land has become higher and higher under the scientific cultivation in recent years, and the output is also increasing.
Some of the low mountainous areas in the territory were also utilized, and in addition to the terraced fields, some of them were used to grow cash crops such as tea and oranges.
At the same time, in order to develop agriculture and prevent flooding, under the auspices of Yasui Doton and his brother Yasui Michibu, who had just joined the family, ditches were dug to divert water from several tributaries of the Ichikawa and Yumezen rivers in the domain, and embankments and bridges were built along the rivers. In normal times, ditches can facilitate the irrigation of farmland on both sides, and in the event of flooding, they can channel water conservancy and reduce crop losses.
In a hill near Kuroda Castle, Li Sanbao found a kaolin that could be used to make porcelain, which was a luxury item that could be sold at a high price in the island country. So the Kuroda family sent people to the slave market in Sakai Town to find the Ming people who had burned ceramics, but the people who burned ceramics were not found, but the bricks were found two, and the dead horses were used as live horse doctors, and after wasting a lot of manpower and material resources, they were really burned by these two people to make beautiful porcelain, and these two people also changed their fate and helped the Kuroda family add another source of income.
In the past few years, the Kuroda family has also had a major project, which is to build and renovate the roads in the territory, and by inviting farmers during the slack time, Yasui Doton presided over the construction of roads connecting Himeji Castle, Kuroda Castle, and Oguchi Castle, as well as from Kuroda Castle to the north and south, making it easier to march and do business, and some villages in important locations close to minerals and specialty production areas have also built roads, and the traffic situation in the entire Kuroda domain has been renewed.
At the time of the reconstruction of Kuroda Castle, that is, when Manyoshi returned home from Gosho Castle for the first time, he proposed Rakuichi Rakuza, abolished all tax collection checkpoints in the domain, abolished the exploitation of the merchants, and only charged a certain fee for transactions in the castle town, so as to enliven commerce and prosper the economy. Kuroda was a little resistant at first, but thinking that Kuroda Castle basically didn't have a castle town anyway, this policy could at least accumulate some popularity. Unexpectedly, after only one year of implementation of this policy, Kuroda Joshita Town became one of the liveliest and most prosperous castle towns in Sanyo Province. Because most of the heavy taxes and fees could be waived, some small merchants simply moved their shops to Kuroda Castle, and some large merchants in Sakai Town also established branches in Kuroda Castle.
The rapid development of Kuroda Castle Town, even beyond Himeji Port, so the Kuroda family immediately began to implement the same policy in Himeji Castle, and the two castle towns brought the Kuroda family a lot of income, but also brought more channels for the Kuroda family to sell and buy necessities, such as the Kuroda family's Kuroda ware, because of its fresh and elegant appearance, it became the famous porcelain sought after by the upper class society in Kyoto and Sakai Town. Another example is the leather products of Himeji Castle, which have also opened up sales channels with the entry of merchants.
The Kuroda family has almost squeezed out all the output that can be obtained from the limited territory through various means, and of course, if a way to make money can be found in the future, the Kuroda family will continue to squeeze new sources of wealth.
Because of the rapid increase in economic strength and the fact that there was a surplus of grain in the granary every year, the Kuroda family began to absorb a large number of displaced people from the neighborhood from 1555. In the past few years, the Miyoshi family in Kinai, the Hosokawa family, and the Rokkaku family, including the unlucky shogun's family, have been fighting back and forth; Mori, Ouchi, and Niko are also entangled, corpses are everywhere, and the people are displaced, and Harima Province is located right in the middle of the two main battlefields, and it is not affected by the war, so it seems to have become a paradise for the displaced people.
By the time of the New Year of 1560, the population of the territory had exceeded 30,000, according to the data reported by Konishironzo. You must know that the entire Harima country is less than 400,000 koku, the theoretical population is more than 300,000, but the actual population is only about 180,000, like Akamatsu Masahide originally sat on 70,000 koku land, but the population is less than 30,000, and of the population of less than 20,000, more than 4,000 people have now become the lords of the Kuroda family. It was not easy for the Kuroda family to use one-fortieth of the land in Harima Province to feed one-sixth of the population, and to feed a large number of samurai and standing ashigaru.
The number of people under the Kuroda family is increasing, and the population of the Kuroda family is also increasing. Mrs. Iwa gave birth to a son and two daughters in seven years, the son was the later Kuroda Hyogo Suke Ritaka, the youngest name was Haraji, and the two daughters were named Miaoharu and Miaoyuan; Mrs. Kamiyoshi gave birth to a child, the future Kuroda Repair Ryori, whose young name is Saburo Zuo; Mrs. Musato gave birth to a boy and a girl, the boy is Kuroda Shosuke Naoyuki, the young name is Kichijomaru, and the daughter is called Haruse.
At the same time, Wanji's three uncles all got married, and Koji Takahisa had a son, Neponmaru; Itetomo married the main room of Ishikawa Zhiqing, and accepted Ishikawa Zhiqing's son as his adopted son, named Iwata, and later got another son, named Shinsuke; Matsui Shigetaka has only one daughter for the time being, named Tsukihime.
Like Himeji Castle, in the castle town of Kuroda Castle, a longhouse area was also planned for ronin samurai, craftsmen, craftsmen, and ninjas to rest, and in recent years, the only person who can be named by Manyoshi is Otomo Otomo's retainer Otani Moriji, who later became the father of the famous Otani Yoshitsugu. Because of the civil strife in the Otomo family in recent years, many of the retainers of the Otomo family left Bungo and went to other countries, and Otani Moriji was among them.
In addition, after Otani came to the Kuroda family in 1556, he married a local woman and gave birth to a son the following year. Wanji is worried that after changing his wife, this son of Moriji Otani is still not the Yoshitsugu of Otani in history.
The others were hired as ordinary ronins and craftsmen, who became the common equipment of the family, or craftsmen without samurai.