The news of the Habsburg family wanting to form a marriage alliance with the Great Ming caused all the elder statesmen in the Ming court to feel that the Habsburgs were dreaming big.
In terms of beauty, could the women of the Habsburg family compare to the beauties of the Central Plains? As the Emperor of the Great Ming, Zhu Jinsong's consorts were all chosen after countless selections, with only a few selected every three years. Did the Habsburg family think they could compete?
In terms of talent, the elder statesmen of the Ming court looked down even more on the Habsburg family. After all, Louis XVI had married a daughter from the Habsburg family before, and this daughter had earned the moniker "Madame Déficit" in France, single-handedly causing the French treasury to incur billions of francs in foreign debt.
What about bloodline?
Only animals cared about bloodline!
Even if bloodline was important, weren't the daughters of the Central Plains all from royal or noble lineage? The Habsburg family, from a barbaric land, dared to contend with the noble daughters of the Yanhuang bloodline?
In short, they were looked down upon in every way.
Of course, looking down on the Habsburg family was one thing, but being interested in the Bavarian region attached to the marriage alliance was another matter entirely.
Therefore, Zeng Cheng couldn't help but cautiously advise Zhu Jinsong, "If the Habsburg family can offer Bavaria for a marriage alliance, then if the Bourbon family forms a marriage alliance with Your Majesty, won't they also have to offer a territory?"
"I believe, Your Majesty, why don't you bear some hardship and bring back a few more European empresses, and then strive to have more sons? Then the Great Ming will be the father of all of Europe!"
As Zeng Cheng finished speaking, Liu Huaiwen's eyes also lit up. "I second that – although Bavaria isn't very large, if we have more countries involved in marriage alliances, these vast lands added together might not be a small amount."
"Moreover, as long as the countries involved in marriage alliances are numerous enough, our Great Ming will have enough territory in Europe. Once these territories are connected, then all of Europe will belong to our Great Ming!"
"The most crucial point is that acquiring these territories would only be a slight hardship for Your Majesty, and our Great Ming wouldn't have to fight a war in Europe with real swords and guns. The saved money can be used for the construction of railways, roads, power lines, and power stations."
Zeng Cheng added with lingering enthusiasm, "Many European ladies have arrived in the capital recently, with golden hair and blue eyes, possessing quite a bit of exotic charm – I finally understand now, when our ancestors fought in the Western Regions back then, it certainly wasn't for a few pounds of dried grapes."
Zhu Jinsong's expression turned dark at a visible speed.
Look at these gentlemen in the Great Ming court, what kind of upright gentlemen are they?
"Don't even think about it!"
Zhu Jinsong reprimanded them indignantly, "The Western Regions are the Western Regions, and Europe is Europe. I will not agree to a marriage alliance with Europe – you only see the exotic charm, but have you smelled that odor they carry?"
After righteously lecturing Zeng Cheng and the other elder statesmen, Zhu Jinsong's tone shifted. "Speaking of the Habsburg family, I suddenly remember, doesn't the ancestral land of those Yi Ci Le Ye people seem to be near Europe?"
At Zhu Jinsong's words, Zeng Cheng and the other elder statesmen were momentarily bewildered.
As for where the ancestral land of the Yi Ci Le Ye people was, Zeng Cheng and the other elder statesmen, if not entirely clear, at least knew it was not in Europe.
Therefore, when the Emperor Zhu suddenly mentioned the Yi Ci Le Ye people and their ancestral land being in Europe, they suspected he was hatching some mischief!
After thinking for a moment, Zeng Cheng tentatively asked, "Does Your Majesty mean to support those Yi Ci Le Ye people in returning to their ancestral land? To let them re-establish their kingdom?"
Zeng Cheng did not wish for Zhu Jinsong to support the restoration of the Yi Ci Le Ye people.
As the Prime Minister of the Great Ming court, Zeng Cheng had already learned about the history of the Yi Ci Le Ye people and what troublesome things they had done in history when Zhu Jinsong ordered them to be "sent back to their ancestral land."
In the beginning, those Yi Ci Le Ye people had poor judgment and were ungrateful, their words constantly belittling Greek culture to such an extent that they were dissed by Alexander and even relegated to the status of pariahs by him.
It wasn't until Pompey led the Roman legions to conquer Israel that the Yi Ci Le Ye noble Hyrcanus sought refuge with Caesar.
This time, the Yi Ci Le Ye people had made the right gamble.
Caesar not only granted the Yi Ci Le Ye people high honors but even allowed them to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem – this broke the Roman Empire's rule that forbidden conquered cities from having walls.
However, the Yi Ci Le Ye people were truly good at courting disaster: the Yi Ci Le Ye people originally had their own settlement within the Roman Empire – the province of Judea. But during the reign of Roman Emperor Trajan, the Yi Ci Le Ye people took advantage of the emperor's eastern expedition, which led to the drawing away of nearby Roman legions and a lapse in defense, to launch a rebellion.
This was not particularly unusual, as provincial rebellions were common during the Roman Empire period. However, what the Yi Ci Le Ye people did next was absolutely shocking: after defeating the small number of defenders, they began to indiscriminately slaughter innocent civilians of other ethnic groups!
Roman historian Dio documented this tragedy: they even ate the flesh of their victims, tore out their tendons, smeared their bodies with their blood, and wore clothes made from their skin; many were sawn in half from head to foot, others were thrown to beasts, or forced to fight each other like gladiators, with a total of 220,000 people killed. The Yi Ci Le Ye people carried out massacres in many places, such as Salamis, Cyprus, and Libya, where the main inhabitants were not Romans.
Even more astonishingly, after narrowly winning a small-scale battle against superior numbers, these Yi Ci Le Ye people directly declared themselves "God's chosen people," began to proclaim the nobility of their bloodline, and concurrently disparaged and attacked the Romans.
However, the timing of this uprising was also their retribution, as it coincided precisely with the reign of Trajan, the "Eternal Emperor" of Rome.
When Trajan withdrew two legions to reinforce the area, the ferocious Yi Ci Le Ye people were quickly brought back to their original form. The enraged Romans, from Mesopotamia along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean to Egypt, found the Yi Ci Le Ye people easily defeated.
During this process, the Yi Ci Le Ye people became like rats crossing the street. No other ethnic group was willing to help them; instead, it became a great reckoning of all ethnic groups against the Yi Ci Le Ye people. The residents of Cyprus, who had been massacred by the Yi Ci Le Ye people before, began to seek revenge: the Yi Ci Le Ye people were forbidden from residing on the island, and even Yi Ci Le Ye survivors of shipwrecks were executed upon discovery.
Thus, the first uprising of the Yi Ci Le Ye people was suppressed.
Within a few years, the Yi Ci Le Ye people once again clashed with the Roman Empire. The Yi Ci Le Ye people gave their money to their church and refused to pay taxes to the government. After the so-called uprising occurred, the Yi Ci Le Ye people again turned their massacre targets into believers of Christ – in plain terms, it was the Yi Ci Le Ye people who escalated the conflict between themselves and the Roman Empire into a conflict with pagans. The ancient Roman historian Dio Cassius described these Yi Ci Le Ye people as "madmen."
Unfortunately, this "uprising" coincided with Hadrian, another of the "Five Good Emperors" after Trajan. Hadrian mobilized seven to twelve Roman legions, a total of 120,000 men, to suppress the Yi Ci Le Ye rebellion and retaliate. Later, learning from the lessons of Trajan's reign, he completely abolished the province of Judea and dispersed all of these Yi Ci Le Ye people.
From then on, these Yi Ci Le Ye people, with betrayal in their bones, began their history of "wandering through Eurasia," and later a group of Yi Ci Le Ye people ran to Kaifeng in the Song Dynasty and settled down.
Of course, if these Yi Ci Le Ye people only had a bad reputation in history, Zeng Cheng would not have been so disgusted with them. However, as the old saying goes, mountains and rivers are easy to change, but people's nature is hard to alter, and another saying goes, a dog cannot change its habit of eating shit – the troublesome things that these wandering Yi Ci Le Ye people who settled in Kaifeng later did were equally disgusting!
This matter had to start from when Zhu Jinsong defeated the Great Qing.
Zhu Jinsong had always been a very democratic emperor, emphasizing that he was the lord of all people – according to Emperor Zhu's vision, all people who had settled in the Central Plains, as long as they acknowledged themselves as subjects of the Great Ming, would all be treated as subjects of the Great Ming, completely abolishing the concept of ethnicity, and all would be written as Han.
But the Yi Ci Le Ye people disagreed.
Many Yi Ci Le Ye people were only willing to enjoy all the benefits except for military service, such as land distribution, housing, free schooling for their children, the same tax rates as Ming merchants, and the same qualifications for official positions, but they were unwilling to acknowledge themselves as part of the Great Ming, nor were they willing to obey the government's arrangement to disperse their residences, citing that Tiaojin Hutong was their "ancestral land."
Even now, the Yi Ci Le Ye people from Europe are still unwelcome, because these Yi Ci Le Ye people are always profit-oriented, which greatly annoys Ming merchants.
After all, although Ming merchants also value profit, they at least know how to maintain their dignity.
Even before Zhu Jinsong completely defeated the Great Qing, the reputation of these Yi Ci Le Ye people was not good – for example, they engaged in usury and always portrayed themselves as persecuted victims, while completely ignoring the disgusting things they had done.
It was precisely because of this that when Zhu Jinsong ordered people to send all these Yi Ci Le Ye people back to their true "ancestral land," there was no resistance. Zeng Cheng, who greatly disliked the Yi Ci Le Ye people, did not want Zhu Jinsong to support their restoration.
However, what Zeng Cheng did not expect was that Zhu Jinsong had no intention of supporting the restoration of the Yi Ci Le Ye people at all.
Zhu Jinsong smiled and said, "I have paid some attention to the Adolf who served as an envoy from the Habsburg family to the Great Ming – this fellow is indeed an art student, but when he was young, he planted cotton for the Yi Ci Le Ye landlords."
"To put it bluntly, this fellow was bullied by the Yi Ci Le Ye landlords since childhood, to the point where his fingers were somewhat deformed and would tremble from time to time."
"What do you think would happen if we supported this fellow to ascend to power in the Habsburgs, or rather, in Austria, and how would he treat the Yi Ci Le Ye people in Austria?"
Upon hearing Zhu Jinsong's words, Zeng Cheng and the other elder statesmen's eyes lit up.
How would Adolf treat those Yi Ci Le Ye landlords?
Isn't that obvious!
Zhu Jinsong continued, "Of course, supporting only one Adolf is not enough. After all, the Yi Ci Le Ye people have been mingling in Europe for so many years, they are unlikely to have no foundation."
Zeng Cheng immediately bowed and said, "Perhaps we could also include Louis XVI, George III, and Paul I?"
Yes, France, England, and Russia also disliked the Yi Ci Le Ye people. The French imperial tutor Voltaire had criticized the Yi Ci Le Ye people, the English literary giant Shakespeare had named the Yi Ci Le Ye people as representatives of greed and cunning in his works, and Tsar Ivan IV upon his ascension had unceremoniously likened Jews to "poisonous importers and pests of Christianity."
Even the leader of the Protestant Lutheran Church, Martin Luther, wrote in "The Jews and Their Lies," "These Jews are so desperate, wicked, venomous, and devil-possessed… They make us work and toil to earn money and property, while they themselves sit by the stove, lazy, sleeping, roasting pears, eating, drinking, and enjoying themselves… They have become our masters, and we have become their servants."
Given the current image of these Yi Ci Le Ye people in Europe, it is likely that as long as Adolf took the lead, other European countries would eagerly follow suit.
However, Zhu Jinsong shook his head with a smile and said, "What's the hurry? I said that supporting only one Adolf is not enough, because the Yi Ci Le Ye people are very good at portraying themselves as the weak. If Adolf were to rashly target those Yi Ci Le Ye people, he might instead fall into a disadvantage."
Hearing this, Zeng Cheng finally understood.
As the saying goes, killing the heart is the ultimate punishment. Simply supporting Adolf to target those Yi Ci Le Ye people would of course not be enough, after all, those Yi Ci Le Ye people are not easy to deal with; with a twist of the tongue, they could turn black into white and the dead into the living.
Therefore, the key was to expose the true colors of those Yi Ci Le Ye people.
This was not difficult for Zeng Cheng, the Prime Minister of the Great Ming.
It was just that Zeng Cheng found it difficult to understand why Emperor Zhu of the Great Ming had suddenly set his sights on the Yi Ci Le Ye people.
Although these Yi Ci Le Ye people were indeed hateful, their existence was not without benefits for the Great Ming – a large part of the blood that these Yi Ci Le Ye people siphoned from Europe flowed into the Great Ming through various trades!