Trịnh lords

Trịnh lords Chúa Trịnh 鄭主 Trịnh clan
1545–1787
Trịnh clan mansion, painted in 17th century
Capital	Đông Kinh
Common languages	Vietnamese
Religion	Neo-Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism
Government	Monarchic feudal stratocracy
Lords
• 1545–1570	Trịnh Kiểm (first)
• 1786–1787	Trịnh Bồng (last)
History
• Established	1545
• Disestablished	1787
Currency	Văn
Preceded by Succeeded by Revival Lê dynasty Mạc dynasty Tây Sơn dynasty

Trịnh lords (Vietnamese: Chúa Trịnh; Chữ Nôm: 主鄭; 1545–1787), also known as Trịnh clan or House of Trịnh, were a noble feudal clan who were the de-facto rulers of northern Vietnam (namely Đàng Ngoài) while Nguyễn clan ruled the southern Vietnam (namely Đàng Trong) during the Later Lê dynasty . Both of two rulers referred to themselves as Chúa (lord) and controlled their countries while the Later Lê emperors did not have any real power, only maintained their title. ^[1] The Trịnh lords traced their descent from Trịnh Khả, a friend and advisor to the 15th-century Vietnamese Emperor Lê Lợi. The Trịnh clan had officially 12 lords that ruled Northern Vietnam and the royal court of Later Lê dynasty for more than 2 centuries.

Founding of Trịnh clan

Strengthening of Trịnh family's power

Elimination of Nguyễn clan

Vietnam circa 1540, showing the Mạc in control of the north (pink) while the Nguyễn-Trịnh alliance controls the south (yellow). Champa (green) was a vassal state

In spite of the threat of Mạc dynasty in the north, the priority of Trịnh Kiểm was eliminated the power of Nguyễn clan. He ordered people to murder the oldest son of Nguyễn Kim (Nguyễn Uông). The second son of Kim, Nguyễn Hoàng feared that he would face the death like his brother so he requested Trịnh Kiểm to let him move to the south to guard the Thuận Hóa province. Trịnh Kiểm was afraid of gossip against him if he murders both brothers. Beside that, Thuận Hóa had a far distance from the capital city and it would be more opportunity for Trịnh Kiểm to control the whole government. Eventually, Trịnh Kiểm accepted to let Nguyễn Hoàng to guard Thuận Hóa. Trịnh Kiểm established Trịnh lords regime and firmly manipulated the Lê dynasty government whereas Nguyễn Hoàng escaped to Thuận Hóa province and install his own regime Nguyễn lords in the south to against the rule of Trịnh family in the north.

Lê –Mạc civil war

The Trịnh take power

In 1545, Nguyễn Kim was assassinated by an agent of the Mạc. Trịnh Kiểm took this opportunity to assert control over the Nguyễn-Trịnh army. The Trịnh captured more and more of Vietnam from 1545 onwards (nominally fighting on behalf of a new Lê Emperor). Kim had two sons. The younger, Nguyễn Hoàng, was put in charge of new southern provinces of Vietnam in the year 1558. He was to rule the southern lands for the next 55 years and his descendants ruled them for the next 150 years.

In 1570, Trịnh Kiểm died and was succeeded by his second son Trịnh Tùng. Tùng was a very vigorous leader and he captured Hanoi from the Mạc Emperor in 1572. However, the Mạc Emperor (Mạc Mau Hop) recaptured the city the next year. The war continued at a low level for two decades, the Trịnh gradually gaining strength, the Mạc gradually weakening. In 1592, Tùng launched a major invasion and again captured Hanoi. This time the Royal (Trịnh) army captured the Mạc Emperor and executed him. Over the next few years the remaining Mạc armies were defeated in battles. In this "mopping-up" campaign, the Trịnh were helped by the Nguyễn army.

As the years passed, Hoàng became increasingly secure in his rule over the southern province and increasingly independent. While he cooperated with the Trịnh against the Mạc, he ruled the frontier lands as a king. With the final conquest of the north, the independence of the Nguyễn was less and less tolerable to the Trịnh. In 1600, with the ascension of a new Emperor, Lê Kinh Tông, Hoàng broke relations with the Trịnh-dominated court, although he continued to acknowledge the Lê emperor. Matters continued like this until Hoàng's death in 1613. The historical victory of the Trịnh' over the Mạc was a common theme in public Vietnamese theaters.^[2]

The Trịnh–Nguyễn War

Vietnam circa 1640, showing (roughly) the areas controlled by the Trịnh, Nguyễn, Mạc, and Champa

The model of naval battle ship during Trịnh's era in XVII.

In 1620, after the enthronement of another figurehead Lê Emperor (Lê Than Tông), the new Nguyễn leader, Nguyễn Phúc Nguyên, refused to send tax money to the court in Đông Đô. In 1623, Trịnh Tung died, he was succeed by his oldest son Trịnh Tráng. After five years of increasingly hostile talk, fighting broke out between the Trịnh and the Nguyễn in 1627. While the Trịnh ruled over much more populous territory, the Nguyễn had several advantages. First, they initially were on the defensive and rarely launched operations into the north. Second, the Nguyễn were able to take advantage of their contacts with the Europeans, specifically the Portuguese, to produce advanced cannons with the help of European engineers (for more details, see Artillery of the Nguyễn lords). Third, the geography was favorable to them, as the flat land suitable for large organized armies is very narrow at the border between the Nguyễn lands and the Trinh territories – the mountains nearly reach to the sea. After the first offensive was beaten off after four months of battle, the Nguyễn built two massive fortified lines that stretched a few miles from the sea to the hills. These walls were built north of Huế (between the Nhật Lệ River and the Sông Hương River). The walls were about 20 feet tall and seven miles long. The Nguyễn defended these lines against numerous Trịnh offensives that lasted (off and on) from 1631 till 1673, when Trịnh Tạc concluded a peace treaty with the Nguyễn Lord, Nguyễn Phúc Tần, dividing Vietnam between the two ruling families. This division continued for the next 100 years.

The Long Peace

Silk painting of Trịnh Đình Kiên (1715–1786) in 18th century, exhibited in Vietnam National Museum of Fine Arts.

The Trịnh lords ruled reasonably well, maintaining the fiction that the Lê monarch was the emperor. However, they selected and replaced the emperor as they saw fit, having the hereditary right to appoint many of the top government officials. Unlike the Nguyễn lords, who engaged in frequent wars with the Khmer Empire and Siam, the Trịnh lords maintained fairly peaceable relations with neighboring states. In 1694, the Trịnh lords got involved in a war in Laos, which turned into a multi-sided war with several different Laotian factions as well as the Siamese army. A decade later, Laos had settled into an uneasy peace with three new Lao kingdoms paying tribute to both Vietnam and Siam. Trịnh Căn and Trịnh Cương made many reforms of the government, trying to make it better, but these reforms made the government more powerful and more of a burden to the people which increased their dislike of the government. During the wasteful and inept rule of Trịnh Giang, peasant revolts became more and more frequent. The key problem was a lack of land to farm, though Giang made the situation worse by his actions. The reign of his successor Trịnh Doanh was preoccupied with putting down peasant revolts and wiping out armed gangs which terrorized the countryside.

Business by the Dutch East India company was ceased with the Trịnh lords on 1700.^[3][4]

Tây Sơn Revolt

Lord Trịnh Sâm and Lady Đặng Thị Huệ having a tea party at Tả Vọng pavillon.

Depiction of 17th century Vietnamese vessels' basic configuration

The long peace came to an end with the Tây Sơn revolt in the south against the Trương Phúc Loan, the regent of the Nguyễn Lord, Nguyễn Phúc Thuần (1765–1777). The Tây Sơn rebellion was looked upon by the Trịnh lord, Trịnh Sâm, as a chance to finally put an end to the Nguyễn rule over the south of Vietnam. As was usual, a dynastic struggle among the Nguyễn had put a weak 12-year-old boy in power. The real ruler was the corrupt regent named Trương Phúc Loan. Using the evil rule of the regent as an excuse for intervention, in 1774, the hundred-year truce was ended and the Trịnh army attacked. Trịnh Sâm's army did what no previous Trịnh army had done and conquered the Nguyễn capital, Phú Xuân (modern-day Huế), early in 1775. The Trịnh army advanced south but after some fighting with the Tây Sơn, a truce was reached. This truce allowed the Tây Sơn army to conquere the rest of the Nguyễn lands. The Nguyễn lords retreated to Saigon but even this city was captured in 1776 and the Nguyễn clan was nearly wiped out. However, the Tây Sơn were not willing to be servants of the Trịnh Lords and after a decade consolidating their power base in the south, the chief Tây Sơn brother Nguyễn Huệ marched into north Vietnam in 1786 at the head of a large army.

The Trịnh themselves were fatally divided at this time by a struggle for power following the death of Trịnh Sâm in 1782. The Trịnh army refused to even fight the powerful army of Nguyễn Huệ. The new Trịnh lord, Trịnh Khải, fled from his rebellious army and then committed suicide after being captured by a small band of rebellious peasants. The last Lê Emperor, Lê Chiêu Tông, fled to China and formally petitioned the Qianlong Emperor of the Qing Empire, for aid against the peasant usurpers. The Qianlong Emperor responded by sending a large army into Vietnam to restore the Lê Emperor. The Qing army captured Thăng Long in 1788. The last Trịnh lord, Trịnh Bong, took the position as de facto ruler but this was short-lived. Nguyễn Huế was able to rally his forces and, like Lê Lợi before him, he inflicted a crushing defeat on the Qing army. The Qing forces retreated, leaving Nguyễn Huệ (now calling himself Quang Trung) in control of a united Vietnam. The Lê family fled north to China along with the Trịnh family. About 100 years later (after the French took Vietnam as a colony), the last of the Trịnh returned to Vietnam as ordinary citizens.

Relations with the outside world

Map of Vietnam in the 18th century, published by a Dutch company in Amsterdam around 1760.

In 1620, the French Jesuit scholar Alexandre de Rhodes arrived in Trịnh-controlled Vietnam. He arrived at a mission which had been established at the court in Hanoi around 1615 (Tigers in the Rice by W. Sheldon (1969), p. 26). The priest was a significant person regarding relations between Europe and Vietnam. He gained thousands of converts, created a script for writing Vietnamese using a modified version of the European alphabet, and built several churches. However, by 1630 the new Trịnh lord, Trịnh Trang, decided that Father de Rhodes represented a threat to Vietnamese society and forced him to leave the country. From this point on, the Trịnh Lords periodically tried to suppress Christianity in Vietnam, with moderate success. When the Nguyễn successfully used Portuguese cannon to defend their walls, the Trịnh made contact with the Dutch. The Dutch were willing to sell advanced cannons to the Trịnh. The Dutch, and later the Germans, set up trading posts in Hanoi. For a time, Dutch trade was profitable but after the war with the Nguyễn ended in 1673, the demand for European weapons rapidly declined. By 1700, the Dutch and English trading posts closed forever. The Trịnh were careful in their dealings with the Ming dynasty and Manchu-led Qing dynasty of China. Unlike the Nguyễn Lords who were happy to accept large numbers of Ming refugees into their lands, the Trịnh did not. When the Manchus conquered China and therefore extended the Qing Empire's borders to Northern Vietnam, the Trịnh treated them just like they had treated the Ming Emperors, sending tribute and formal acknowledgements of Qing authority. The Manchus intervened twice during the rule of the Trịnh Lords, once in 1537, and again in 1788. Both times, the Manchus sent an army south because of a formal request for help from the Lê emperors – and both times the intervention was unsuccessful.

Assessment

The Trịnh Lords were, for the most part, intelligent, able, industrious, and long-lived rulers. The unusual dual form of government they developed over two centuries was a creative response to the internal and external obstacles to their rule. They lacked, however, both the power and the moral authority to resolve the contradictions inherent in their system of ruling without reigning. (Encyclopedia of Asian History, "The Trịnh Lords").

It does seem the case that the Trịnh had lost nearly all popularity in the last half of the 18th century. While the Nguyễn lords, or at least Nguyễn Anh, enjoyed a great deal of support – as his repeated attempts to regain power in the south show – there was no equivalent support for the Trịnh in the north after the Tây Sơn took power (Vietnam, Trials and Tribulations of a Nation D. R. SarDesai, pg. 39, 1988).

Chronological list of Trịnh lords

• Trịnh Kiểm – Ruled 1545–70. He was the founder of Trịnh lord. He ruled across the reigns of three figurehead emperors Lê Trang Tông (1533–48), Lê Trung Tông (1548–56), and Lê Anh Tông (1556–73). He has never declared himself as Trịnh Lord during his reign, therefore he was not officially the first Trịnh Lord. Died 1570.
• Trịnh Cối Ruled 1570–70. The eldest son of Trịnh Kiểm, ineffective, lost to the Mạc, deposed shortly thereafter by his younger brother Trịnh Tùng. Due to his betrayal, Trịnh Cối was excluded from Trịnh family and not considered as a Trịnh Lord.
• Trịnh Tùng – Ruled 1570–1623. A most active and successful leader. He was the first official Trịnh Lord. He ruled across the reigns of several nominal Emperors: Lê The Tông (1573–99), Lê Kính Tông (1600–19), and the first reign of Lê Thần Tông (1619–43).
• Trịnh Tráng – Ruled 1623–57. He ruled across the reigns of several nominal Emperors: Lê Chân Tông (1643–1649), and the second reign of Lê Thần Tông (again: 1649–62).
• Trịnh Tạc – Ruled 1657–82. He ruled over the reign of figureheads Lê Huyền Tông (1663–71), Lê Gia Tông (1672–1675) and Lê Hy Tông (1676–1704).
• Trịnh Căn – Ruled 1682–1709 with the name/title "Định Nam Vương".
• Trịnh Cương – Ruled 1709–29 with the name/title "Hy Tổ Nhân vương ". Ruled across the reign of Lê Dụ Tông (1705–1728) and Hôn Đức Công (1729–32).
• Trịnh Giang – Ruled 1729–40 with the title "Uy Nam Vương". He ruled over the reign of Lê Thuần Tông (1732–1735) and Lê Ý Tông (1735–40) but was deposed due to poor leadership.
• Trịnh Doanh – Ruled 1740–67 with the title "Minh Đô Vương". He ruled across part of the reign of Lê Hiển Tông
• Trịnh Sâm – Ruled 1767–82 with the name/title "Tĩnh Đô Vương". He ruled across part of the reign of Lê Hien Tông (1740–1786).
• Trịnh Cán – Ruled September – October 1782, defeated by his half-brother Trịnh Khải.
• Trịnh Khải – Ruled 1782–86 with the name/title "Đoan Nam Vương".
• Trịnh Bồng – Ruled 1786–87 with the name/title "Án Đô Vương ". He was the last Trịnh Lord. In power only briefly due to the Later Lê dynasty reclaiming its power; he later disappeared.

See also

• List of Vietnamese dynasties

References

External links

• List of the Trịnh lords and the nominal Lê emperors
• Encyclopedia of Asian History, Volumes 1–4. 1988. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. – "Trịnh Lords" Article by James M. Coyle, based on the work of Thomas Hodgkin.
• The Encyclopedia of Military History by R. Ernest Dupuy and Trevor N. Dupuy. Harper & Row (New York).
• Coins of Vietnam – with short historical notes
• Southeast Asia to 1875 – by Sanderson Beck
• World Statesmen.org – Vietnam
• Tay Sơn Web Site by George Dutton (has a great bibliography)
• A glimpse of Vietnamese history – contains some errors