Troop Mutinies
Troop mutinies were generally tied to military maladministration of various sorts. Recognising the importance of distant frontier posts and their undesirability from the perspective of most soldiers, government authorities often tended to be lax in enforcing regulations for frontier commands.
As a result, sometimes troops became indolent and accustomed to easy, unsupervised life in the barracks. When ordered to take up new posts or actually perform their required duties, they could become surly and in several cases, including the Datong Mutiny of 1524, they killed both their commanders and civilian authorities.[220] Government responses to such actions varied according to the administration in charge. In the Datong Mutiny, one investigative official actually favoured leniency, as did the Jiajing Emperor himself, who blamed the (slain) provincial governor for inciting the disturbance. Thus, following the path of benevolence, he wanted to merely arrest the ringleaders and pardon the rest of the mutinous soldiers. When this strategy failed, however, the government responded by crushing the revolt with excessive force.[221] The same was true in the Ningxia Mutiny of 1592, one of the so-called Three Great Punitive Campaigns of the Wanli Emperor. In this case Pubei, a Mongol defector who had served the Ming loyally in positions of increasing authority for some twenty years, lured a number of Mongol chieftains to support his uprising with vague promises of restoring the Mongol Empire, though in fact it appears that Pubei himself was lured into the mutiny by Chinese officers.[222]From the government's perspective, troop mutinies were dangerous in that those involved possessed military skills and an intimate knowledge of government institutions and suppression tactics. Another disturbing aspect of troop revolts was the possibility that the troops themselves could claim to be acting legitimately and in accordance with proper principles and standards of conduct, potentially undermining the authority of the state - they could claim to have killed corrupt government officials on behalf of the emperor. Leaders of troop mutinies, not unlike other rebels, often went to great lengths to obtain seals of authority, essential to lending themselves an aura of legitimacy. Finally, troop mutinies could be exceedingly difficult to put down if the rebels attracted local backing and managed to entrench themselves in staunch defensive positions. Lengthy sieges were costly in both lives and materiel. And of course the outbreak of a mutiny often meant execution for the superior officers of a garrison whether by the mutineers themselves or by government authorities later.
More on the topic Troop Mutinies:
- Warfare in the Ming-Qing Context
- Antony Robert, Carroll Stuart, Pennock Caroline D. (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 3: AD 1500-AD 1800. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 710 p., 2020
- Europeans did not deploy everywhere the full battery of institutions and techniques noted in chapter 12.
- The Eastern Empire and the Reconquest of the West
- 39 Nations Afloat