Prolonged sieges of cities almost always gave rise to extreme situations of famine and epidemics that ended up decimating the population -sometimes also the besiegers- and generating extreme behavior motivated by necessity.
One of the most execrable behaviors, due to its status as an ancestral taboo for Man, is the resort to cannibalism , which we discussed earlier in an article dedicated to the taking of Maraat during the First Crusade. Another one that caused a great impression was the one that took place in the Battle of Suiyang , China, during the An Lushan Rebellion .
This insurrection took place in the second half of the 8th century , at the time of the Tang dynasty . The Tang had succeeded the Sui and gave China a period of splendor; expansion of borders, introduction of horse archers in the army, official adoption of Buddhism, development of printing…
A golden age of literature and the arts, and the development of an efficient civil service were some of the characteristics of the Tang dynasty -especially its best representative, the emperor Li Shi Min , also known as Taizong- that favored the enrichment of the people and an extraordinary increase in their standard of living.
But after the boom usually comes the decline and this appeared in the middle of the mentioned century in the form of military decline and economic instability. The local caudillos took advantage of the general impoverishment to concentrate the lands in their hands and progressively increase their power to the detriment of the central one until one of them was considered strong enough to lead a coup d'état supported by the court, taking advantage of the defeat of the imperial army before the Arabs in the Battle of Talas and the consequent abdication of Xuanzong in his son Suzong.
It was about An Lushan , a ruler of Sogdian and Turkic descent who declared himself emperor in 756 and conquered the eastern capital, Chang'an, founding the Yan dynasty . Being at the height of his power, in January of the year 757 he was assassinated by his own son, An Qingxu .
But the parricide did not carry out the crime out of loyalty to the Tang but to take the place of his father in front of them, so he continued the fight by ordering the general Yin Ziqi lay siege to the city of Suiyang, which was the key to dominating the entire region south of the Yangtze River .
A colossal army of one hundred and thirty thousand men, the result of bringing together the contingents of Ziqi and another rebel soldier named Yang Chaozong surrounded the city. Aware of his plight, the governor, Xu Yuan , asked General Zhang Xun for help , very prestigious for his participation in the Battle of Yongqiu and that he agreed to send it to him; even so it was only possible to gather seven thousand troops. Xun was in charge of organizing the defense while Yuan, an administrator, took care of the quartermaster.
The Yan army surrounded Suiyang and met with stiff resistance in which the unusual tactics devised by Xun stood out, such as beating drums at night to simulate attacks and forcing the besiegers to be constantly on guard, interrupting his sleep.
After a while, the Yan soldiers grew complacent and ignored the drumbeats, a moment the insiders took advantage of to go out on a devastating raid. However, the overwhelming number of enemies lowered the effectiveness of these actions, so Xun planned to kill Yin Ziqi to deliver a blow that would truly affect his morale.
Since it was not easy to recognize him from the walls, he ordered his archers to shoot bushes instead of arrows; the besiegers, surprised, ran to show his general those unusual and inoffensive projectiles, betraying his position and causing, without intending it, the identification of him by the archers, who shot at him and this time with arrows. One hit his left eye, leaving him out cold for a while.
Those daring blows and the fruitlessness of the attacks, which caused him to lose twenty thousand men in just two weeks, certainly affected the spirit of the Yan army, which had to withdraw to rest. Of course, he returned two months later and with new troops to cover casualties.
Xu Yuang hadn't been idle either and started asking for help to the surrounding provinces in order to gather supplies with which to last a year. However, the governors were reluctant to collaborate , either because they sympathized with the rebels -who used to treat them fairly well and keep them in their posts if they surrendered-, or because they were afraid of them -when they resisted things changed radically- or because of Zhang Xun's jealousy, so that when Suiyang was besieged again, it hadn't gotten any food.
In fact, when summer arrives the shortage was so large that the daily rations were reduced to a small cup of rice mixed with tea leaves, bark and paper that could only be supplemented by eating grasses, roots and every available animal:first the already unnecessary horses, then other lesser ones - birds, rats - and finally even the insects.
Aware of the dramatic situation in the city, Yan Ziqi ordered direct attacks, some aimed at knocking down the walls and even ripping out the gates by hooking them to carts, but all were repulsed.
After a month, the unique dietary supplements mentioned were exhausted and emissaries had to be sent to break the siege and ask for military and food aid from other places .
It is said that one of these envoys, the heroic officer Nan Jiyun , managed to reach Linhuai but the governor was not very cooperative, although he offered him a banquet; outraged, Jiyun refused the invitation and cut off his finger to leave it as a demonstration of his failed mission (according to another version, he bit it). That act changed the governor's mind, and he agreed to let him take three thousand warriors.
However,only a third managed to circumvent the fence and enter Suiyang. On the other hand, those reinforcements came in handy to cover casualties, but not only did they not solve the pressing problem of food, but they aggravated it because there were a thousand more mouths what to feed; But the defenders of the city hoped that the emperor would send them help, since the fall of the city would mean a strategic catastrophe.
It was then, faced with the absolute lack of something to put in their mouths, when the Chinese chronicles outline the resort to cannibalism . "The inhabitants gave her children to eat and cooked the corpses (...) Zhang Xun He took out her concubine and killed her in front of her soldiers to feed them" tell the Tang books, ordering them to eat his meat in the face of his reluctance, to later do the same with his servants and continue to do so with those who were not combatants, such as the elderly, women and children.
It is difficult to verify the figures and conditions cited in the aforementioned book, which speaks of twenty to thirty thousand people devoured Well, a good part of them would surely correspond to those who fell in the fight or those who died from various causes. The truly surprising thing is that, it seems, everyone accepted the terrible initiative as a necessary evil , without complaining or trying to organize a mutiny in favor of surrender.
The fact is that Suiyang finally fell in October of that year and when the Yan army entered there were only four hundred defenders left. , all fainted, without the strength to face them. Yin Ziqi, who admired the courage shown by Xu Yuan and Zhang Xun, tried to convince them to join his side, but faced with a resounding refusal, he ended up executing them. next to the officers of him.
With that victory, the rebels took over southern China for two years, but in the meantime, the time gained by Suiyang's resistance and depriving them of aid allowed Emperor Suzong have resources to gather troops until they reach a sufficient number to face them and counterattack. Thus, he changed the hitherto victorious march of the Yan rebellion and crushed it definitively in the year 763.