There are few elite horses in the south, but why did Xu Da defeat the Yuan cavalry with elite cavalry?

War horse is the key weapon for cavalry, and cavalry is the key weapon for nomadic people to defeat agricultural civilization. Han can use the strength of the whole country to train elite cavalry to expel Huns, and the weakness of the Northern Song Dynasty was also due to the seizure of horse-raising land in sixteen states of Youyun. So Zhu Yuanzhang defeated the elite cavalry of the Yuan Dynasty many times in the process of establishing the Ming regime. Where did the horse come from? There are three main aspects: first, defeat the captured horses; 2. Horse farms scattered all over the country in Yuan Dynasty; 3. Horses smuggled by horse dealers; Let's talk separately.

First, defeat the captured horse.

Zhu Yuanzhang's earliest position was in Chuzhou. After reading Ouyang Xiu's Preface to Drunk Pavilion, everyone knows that there is a saying that Chu people are surrounded by mountains. At that time, the best way to fight against the Yuan army and its servants was in the mountains, because it made it impossible for the cavalry of the Yuan dynasty to expand, which was beneficial to the armed forces of the Han nationality. In the process of defeating the Yuan Army, various insurgents began to seize a large number of horses of the Yuan Army, especially in the Yuan Army, the popularity of military horses was still very high. If a visionary leader organizes and trains a number of small-scale cavalry units, at this time, although the number is small, the focus is on organizing and training cavalry generals. Once a large number of horses are obtained, the cavalry can be expanded. It can be said that the first horses of Zhu Yuanzhang's cavalry were sent by the transport battalion chief of the Yuan Dynasty.

Second, the horse farms scattered all over the country in the Yuan Dynasty.

As a riding nation, the Yuan Dynasty attached great importance to raising horses. There are 14 official horse farms in China, covering almost the most important pastoral areas in the country. And not only that, in places that are not suitable for raising horses in the south, farmland is arbitrarily occupied as a racecourse to raise horses. Not counting this, some nobles in the Yuan Dynasty circled the cultivated land to raise horses. In addition, folk horses were raised. Of course, the number of horses in the Yuan Dynasty was amazing, and historical records recorded at least100000 horses. Moreover, at that time, the Yuan Dynasty was threatened by other khanates since Kublai Khan, and was forced to raise horses more crazily all over the country. In the History of Yuan Dynasty, it is recorded that "the Yuan army took private fields for grazing and never returned", and that "Kuo Duan raised horses and camels in Chimu, and they were distributed in the county at a constant age".

In this case, once the Yuan Dynasty entered the era of peasant uprising and warlord scuffle, other forces could easily be supplemented by horses. For example, Zhu Yuanzhang got a large number of high-quality horses after his raid on Huaixi, because the Yuan Dynasty had a "Luzhou Racecourse" in Huaixi, which was relatively large in the whole country. At the same time, he also got excellent cavalry generals like Xu Da and Chang Yuchun, which is inseparable from the local horse-raising custom in Huaixi since the Yuan Dynasty. What is popular in a certain place is easy to produce talents.

Third, horses smuggled by horse dealers.

Because there was a system of "buying horses with people" in the Yuan Dynasty at that time, officials would buy horses, so there were many horse owners among the people. Of course, I dare not smuggle horses privately at ordinary times, but once I enter troubled times, I won't care so much. Isn't Zhang Shicheng a smuggler? It's not surprising that there are horses. It was a huge profit. The History of Yiyang also records that at the end of Yuan Dynasty, a horse dealer from Gansu trafficked a batch of horses from Da Yue (now Iran) through Yiyang and went to the military supplies office of Hongdu Prefecture in Jiangxi Province to do military horse business. It shows that there were still many foreign businessmen trafficking military horses to the Yuan Dynasty. This shows that at that time, in the battle of the separatist forces in the Yuan Dynasty, horses suffered great losses and needed to be supplemented from the outside. In order to strengthen the construction of his own cavalry, Zhu Yuanzhang also bought a large number of horses from the people, and even went to an island country like Ryukyu to buy horses. He did not hesitate to transport them back by manpower, which shows that he had done his best to defeat the Yuan Army.