Charles V had no time to pay attention to Wang Ji for the time being. He had been at war almost all these years, and the Spanish royal family was already deeply in debt.
Spain first fought France, fighting all the way to the outskirts of Paris, and then the war reached a stalemate. Just as he was preparing for a long siege, the German Protestant nobles made trouble again, so Spain withdrew its troops from France and went to Germany to fight.
Although the war was victorious, the Elector of Saxony and the Count of Hesse were imprisoned. However, these two victories were not profitable and instead cost countless people money and food.
Nowadays, the Italian states and the Ottomans are ready to make moves, and Charles V has set his sights on the Mediterranean.
In addition, Prince Henry and Princess Mary both returned to Europe last year.
They really can't wait.
Prince Henry did not borrow troops, because borrowing troops would require a lot of transportation fees. He bought 5,000 flintlock muskets on credit from Wang Yuan, which were antiques that had been replaced by untouchable Indian soldiers.
However, the flintlock musket is far more advanced than the European matchlock gun!
After secretly transporting the musket, Henry did not take it to France, but hid it in the Medici family's warehouse.
When he arrived in Paris, Prince Henry found that his father was seriously ill and spent at least ten days a month in bed. His brother Francois, on the other hand, was obsessed with literature and art, and interacted with a group of cultural people all day long.
Prince Henry found his old lover. He had many old lovers, but this was his true love.
Diana de Poitiers, who came from a noble family, was Henry's mother's maid, a widow 20 years older than Henry, and was also Henry's childhood teacher. She even participated in Henry's birth ceremony. Prince Henry's martial arts duel
When I was married, my wife's ribbon was not wrapped around my arm, but my old lover's ribbon was wrapped around my arm.
After some exchanges with Diana, Prince Henry knew who his brother's favorite mistress was.
He handed a bottle of poison to Diana, who deliberately curry favor with the eldest prince's mistress and had banquets with the two of them several times. Finally one night, the eldest prince died suddenly in his mistress's bed, and the murderer was "obvious"
It's the favored mistress.
Henry didn't know the name of this poison, but he searched for it in the Ming Dynasty for several years and spent fifty taels of silver to buy it.
The eldest son suddenly died of poisoning. The king immediately ordered a strict investigation, but the queen stepped forward to intervene.
This queen is the stepmother of the two princes. No matter who succeeds to the throne, she has nothing to do with her. Her only biological son died of illness two years ago.
However, the old king was seriously ill and dying, the eldest prince was poisoned and died, and Prince Henry was the only heir. She secretly accepted Henry's bribe, ordered the investigators to perfunctory the matter, and finally placed the crime on the eldest prince's mistress.
After another six months, the old king finally died of illness, and Prince Henry successfully ascended the throne as King Henry II of France.
After Henry became king, the first thing he did was to transport back 5,000 flintlock muskets, equip his own army and conduct training.
The second thing was to set up a "court of fire" to try and burn Protestants to death. Any ministers or nobles who opposed him would be burned to death as Protestants.
The third thing is to strengthen the cooperation between France and the Ottomans. The two countries jointly seek to seize Spanish territory in Italy.
The fourth thing is to support Princess Mary as Queen of England.
Coincidentally, the two kings of France and England died of illness one after another in the same year.
After the death of King Henry VIII of England, his only son Edward VI succeeded him, and the government fell into the hands of the Regency Council composed of Protestants.
Princess Mary secretly collaborated with the Catholic nobles and launched a coup with the support of the Privy Council. After furthering her studies in the Ming Dynasty, this princess became more ruthless than ever in history. She strangled her eleven-year-old brother to death with her own hands and married her younger sister to a Frenchman.
count.
The sister who was married off by Mary was none other than Queen Elizabeth, the "grandmother of Europe" in history and the founder of the British Empire on which the sun never sets!
Immediately, Queen Mary ordered the arrest of Protestants across the country and declared her marriage to distant China. The child she brought back from China was her son with the Ming Emperor. Anyone who dared to resist her rule would surely incur the wrath of the Chinese emperor.
(Zhu Zaiyi:????)
Henry II of France immediately recognized Queen Mary I of England, and the two countries immediately announced a formal alliance.
At this time, Wang Ji started fighting with the Hanseatic League, and Queen Mary responded immediately.
She did not declare war on the Hanseatic League, but raided the Hanseatic League's last trading post in London, and then had the British navy attack the Hanseatic League merchant ships and seize a lot of goods to ease the British royal family's finances.
Wang Ji continued to fight like a mad dog.
He first occupied the cities along the Baltic Sea and attacked directly to the border with Brandenburg and Poland. Then he returned to the south and attacked Magdeburg all the way.
Magdeburg, a commercial city in the Hanseatic League, has a population of more than 50,000. It was once known as the "Protestant Fortress". A group of businessmen took the lead in supporting the religious reform in order to get rid of the church. They were the first in Europe to publish Martin Luther's religious works.
city of.
Unfortunately, today's "Protestant Fortress" has become Geneva. Magdeburg has no religious significance, and no one came to rescue it after it was besieged by Wang Ji.
The merchants of Magdeburg were very discerning and handed over eight thousand taels of gold as a ransom and agreed to Wang Ji sending officials to govern the city. In fact, as long as they did not die and their property was not damaged, with their local influence,
Are the officials sent by Wang Ji still obedient?
Based on this consideration, many commercial cities later were willing to pay ransom and submit to Wang Ji.
In later generations, a quarter of Germany's territory would nominally share the title of King of Northern Europe. However, in addition to paying taxes every year, most cities remained unchanged.
It can no longer expand. After occupying these merchant autonomous cities, if it continues to expand, it will have to annex other principalities. If it does not rely on marriage and annexes principalities purely by force, it is likely to become a public enemy of Europe.
Wang Ji captured a grand duke, but instead of taking the opportunity to invade, he asked the other man's family to send him a ransom.
What really stopped Wang Ji was the internal affairs issue, which was too much to digest at once.
He redrawn the administrative territory
The province of Finland remains unchanged, the province of Norway remains unchanged, and the province of Schleswig remains unchanged.
The Swedish province was divided into two and the Danish province was divided into two.
Added the new province of Bremen and added the new province of Stettin.
The capital of the Kingdom was moved from Copenhagen to Hamburg, and "Hamburg-Lübeck" was a centrally administered area.
The name of the United Kingdom of Northern Europe will definitely be changed in the future, but that will have to wait until Wang Ji becomes emperor.
He doesn't even care about the development of agriculture now, and is carrying out environmental improvement work in the new capital city of Hamburg. The streets are full of feces and urine, and there is also feces floating in the Elbe River. This stuff was left in the Ming Dynasty and would have been transported out of the city and sold to farmers.
.
But European agriculture is terrible!
Let’s put it this way, in the late Ming Dynasty, the land rent required by Jiangnan tenants per acre to the landlord was twice the amount of grain produced per acre in Britain during the same period...
If we follow the original historical course, it will take another hundred years for China's advanced agricultural tools to spread to Europe. As for the technology of using human and animal excrement to fertilize, Europeans do not want to believe that the French king during the Qing Dynasty was still in the palace.
Peeing on the wall.
Wang Ji sent a fleet to Daming, and his goods were only timber and copper mines. As for the return trip, of course he had to buy tea, silk and porcelain, but he also had to buy farm tools and hire some farmers to teach him planting techniques.
Only by developing the population and then improving education can we truly prosper.
In the winter of this year, King Henry II of France, King Mary I of England, and King of Northern Europe Wang Ji met in the French port city of Le Havre and formally announced an alliance among the three countries to jointly deal with Spanish expansion.
Henry II took the lead in provoking conflicts and sent troops to intercept and kill Spanish civilians on the border between the two countries.
Spain actually endured it because it had no money to fight and waited for the colonial treasure fleet to return in a few months.
Wang Ji developed internal affairs with peace of mind, adopted a large number of orphans, and taught them Chinese. Ten years later, these orphans will hold military and political positions, and the outstanding ones will be sent to study at Peiyang University in India.
As for the Han and Japanese who followed Wang Yuan on the expedition, they were all assigned land in the newly occupied territories. The land originally belonged to nobles and merchants. Some of these followers were former farmers, and they would probably teach European tenants how to farm.
In addition, Wang Ji also wanted to recruit a group of kitchen households from the Ming Dynasty to cook salt on the Baltic Sea coast.
Northern Europe is rich in herring. Two hundred years ago, herring was the main financial source of the Hanseatic League.
However, the salt used to process herring is shipped from elsewhere, and it can easily get stuck in the neck.
Northern Europe is rich in wood and charcoal. Charcoal is burned on site to boil sea salt and then used to process herring. The salt cooking and pickling herring industries will become pillar industries.
Farming, farming, farming, Wang Ji decided not to expand his territory for ten years.
When he expanded again, the principalities of Saxony and Brandenburg were annexed.