The Beginnings of Violence and Conflict: The Rise of the Mac

After roughly three-quarters of a century of stability, economic growth and assertive military campaigns under the aegis of the new Le dynasty (1428­1788), the dawn of the sixteenth century saw renewed turmoil for the Vietnamese realm.

2 G. Dutton, ‘From Civil War to Uncivil Peace: The Vietnamese Army and the Early Nguyen State (1802-1841)', South East Asia Research 24.2 (2016), 167-84.

The first serious threat to the now destabilised dynasty was launched in 1516 by a mystic named Tran Cao. He emerged from the coastal areas of the Red River Delta and attracted a significant armed following by claiming connections both to the earlier Tran dynasty (1225-1400) and the ruling Le dynasty. Just as potently, Tran Cao claimed to be a reincarnation of the Hindu god Indra. His further assertion that he was the fulfilment of a local prophecy that a new leader would emerge from the east (of the capital) only added to Tran Cao's multiple claims of political legitimacy, which culminated in his declaring himself king. His armies quickly moved towards Thang Long, threatening the imperial seat. Although their initial efforts to take the royal citadel were repulsed, Tran Cao's forces eventually entered the capital where they destroyed the Le dynastic temples and declared a new reign. Supporters of the Le quickly recovered from the assault and drove Tran Cao and his army out of Thang Long, The rebel leader, however, merely retreated a short distance to a position north of the city, where he transferred authority to his son, who continued to control a significant amount of territory for the next five years.

Tran Cao's uprising represented only a prelude to an even more serious challenge that soon followed. A senior court military official by the name of Mac Dang Dung (1483-1541), frustrated at the infighting and incompetence in the palace, gradually positioned himself to take power from the increasingly inept and politically crippled Le emperors. After manoeuvring through the labyrinth of political contenders and demonstrating his military prowess over the course of the late 1510s and early 1520s, in 1527 Mac Dang Dung finally swept aside the Le rulers in favour of creating a new dynasty.^[684] That his family, like that of Tran Cao, came from the eastern coastal areas may have allowed Mac Dang Dung to tap into earlier beliefs in the rise of a saviour from the east. Just as importantly, the Mac accession to the throne represented the rise of a new regional force on a political landscape that to this point had been dominated by elements either from Thanh Hoa to the south or the Red River heartland itself. Mac Dang Dung set about consolidating his imperial author­ity, reimposing order in a capital beset by chaos, and seeking to revitalise a commitment to Confucianist principles. As he did so, however, the new Mac emperor had to contend with the rise of new challengers, ones unhappy with the overthrow of the Le, and with the emergence of a ruling family that represented a different regional base and ideological orientation.

The most prominent challengers to the new Mac regime were members of the Trinh and Nguyen families, politically powerful clans based in the Thanh Hoa region to the south of the Red River area. Both families' political fortunes were closely connected to their earlier support for Le Loi, a fellow Thanh Hoa noble and founder of the Le dynasty. As such, these families were committed to restoring the Le, reasserting the supremacy of Thanh Hoa regional interests, and by extension reclaiming their own prestige and authority.

Although the Nguyen/Trinh/Le force began its attacks on the Mac from a position of marginality in the Lao territories, its claims to stateness lay in the person of the Le ruler and the nominal survival of the Le regime. Having carved out a base for their challenge to the Mac, the Nguyen and Trinh mounted a sustained attack upon the Mac court. What had begun as a desperate act of self­preservation and loyalty to the idea of the Le dynasty by the Trinh and Nguyen families became a large-scale military campaign. By the 1550s the loyalist alliance had established its state credentials by regaining control over large amounts of territory in the regions of Nghe An and Thanh Hoa. The war now pitted well- entrenched states against each other, each representing a particular form of political organisation and ideological orientation. The war ground on with varying degrees of ferocity for the next half a century, the two sides each having solid resource and population bases and readily defensible territories. This prolonged conflict marked the beginnings of a period in which the Vietnamese populations and territories were divided among a sequence of contending states, a process that would not be resolved until the Nguyen's eventual triumph over their Tay Son rivals in the early years of the nineteenth century.