Jack Weatherford

by The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire

  No formal vote would be held at the khuriltai; the nomads voted by coming or by not coming. Their arrival constituted an affirmation of support for Genghis Khan and the new government; not coming made them his enemies. Most of the people had fought on his side; some had fought against him. Many had achieved victory with him, and others had been defeated by his Mongol soldiers.

  The site for this gathering was chosen with care. He needed a large, wide area with enough water and grass for thousands of animals.

  Genghis Khan selected the open steppe between the Onon and Kherlen rivers, south of the sacred mountain Burkhan Khaldun, where he often hid from enemies and found a spiritual refuge. The Mongols inhabited the northern edge of the steppe and the southern side of the more forested hunting areas, and Genghis Khan wanted the meeting to be held in the territory of his birth and the land of his ancestors.

  Although the site may have met the specific material requirements, it was a highly unusual place, even a strange one, for the tribes to be asked to gather. No important khuriltai had ever been organized in this area on the mountainous border of the steppe. For thousands of years, back through the great tribal empires of the Turks, Uighurs, and Huns, the focal point of steppe life had been farther to the west near the complex of rivers known as the Orkhon, which formed a more natural crossroads of nomadic routes. From this junction the Huns set out on their treks to distant Europe and India. Here the tribes had always traded foreign goods with the outside world and one another; here they had embraced foreign religions, first Manichaeism and later its twin, Christianity. The tribes along the Orkhon once had small cities, temples, and even a little agriculture. They erected monuments inscribed in Chinese and ancient Turkish nearly five hundred years before the Mongols’ rise to prominence. In his choice of venue, away from the older cultural center, Genghis Khan violated steppe tradition and showed how different he planned the future of the tribes to be.

  Since no large khuriltai had been held in the area of Burkhan Khaldun, it had to be prepared for the thousands of people who would be coming there for the first time. Preparations began well before the thick pavement of ice across the Kherlen and Onon began to break into large chunks and melt. Parties of men were sent into the forests in the mountains to chop down tall pines and drag them back to the staging ground with oxen teams; these trees would be trimmed into poles to hold up the large ceremonial tents for the summer activities. Piles of wood and hills of dung had to be gathered up to dry, in order to fuel the many fires that would be needed.

  The main routes leading toward the meeting ground had to be cleared of animals, to maintain grass corridors through which the participants might pass with their herds. Closer to the area, even larger tracts had to be vacated; this measure would ensure that when the melting snow allowed the first blades of grass to appear, animals would not immediately nibble them away. The broad pastures would become the feeding grounds for the herds that would accompany the nomads.

  Large iron cauldrons had to be hauled in from miles around on carts pulled by oxen and yaks. These were the largest metal objects on the Mongolian Plateau; some were large enough to cook a whole horse or ox. Each was a treasure, and gathered together they not only provided the means for cooking food for thousands but made an impressive display of wealth and the organization needed to create and move it. If the people would come, the pots would remain cooking over the fires night and day.

  For many miles around the assembly area, soldiers organized and prepared the grounds where the nation would camp. The Mongols used the same simple arrangement, whether for a small cluster of three gers or an assembly of thousands. The main ger stood in the middle with the others arranged in wings to the east and west. A series of twelve additional camps, each laid out on the same pattern, encircled the main camp for a total of thirteen. Each of Genghis Khan’s four wives and his mother had her own separate court with retainers and guards.

  Despite all the preparations, the outcome could not be determined. Could he do all that he promised? Would they have enough faith in him to try out his new government, his new nation? Would they come?

  Even if they had already sworn allegiance to Genghis Khan and promised to attend the khuriltai, any clan could easily abstain at the last minute. They could gather their gers and animals and flee to some remote steppe beyond the reach of Genghis Khan. If necessary, they could take refuge with a surrounding nation, such as the territories controlled by their Chinese, Turkic, or Tibetan neighbors south of the Gobi, where Genghis Khan’s power did not yet reach.

  The assembly would do much more than merely give the people a leader; it would reshape their identity. In order to prevent former enemies from conspiring against him, most of Genghis Khan’s subjects would be separated from their kin and assigned to groups of strangers, moved from their old homeland and assigned unknown territories, and in some cases have their names changed. The anticipated reorganization only heightened the uncertainty over who would come.

  As spring turned to summer, the first few families began to arrive with their animals. They came in their carts pulled by oxen and yaks, riding their horses and camels, bringing a small flock of animals to supply their needs for the summer, but not so many that they would destroy the pastures. Their animals bore brands and earmarks from the farthest reaches of the steppe: symbols of the sun and moon, fire and water, the cardinal points and stars emblazoned on the hindquarters of their horses and on their banners.

  The relatives of the Mongols came, and the families of Genghis Khan’s wives arrived. The Turkic tribes and the Tatars of the steppe came dressed in felt with ornaments of exotic turquoise and coral. Delegations from the Siberian Forest People came dressed in fur and deerskin, as did the western tribes with their hunting eagles and the eastern tribes with their snow-leopard pelts, antelope-skin blankets, and bearskin rugs. The Onggud came across the Gobi mounted high on their camels and bringing garments of embroidered silk and the softest camel wool, more beautiful than anything ever seen in this remote hinterland.

  The shamans came beating their drums and twirling wildly so that the long ribbons attached to their clothes seemed to lift them off the ground and made them appear to be flying in the wind. Young boys came with their heads freshly shaved for the summer and riding the finest horses, which they planned to race in the summer games that would celebrate the new nation. The girls came with pails of milk into which they dipped a long stick to throw milk into the air. Old men came with their magical rocks that they could clap together and control the weather, ushering in the ideal mixture of sun and occasional rain.

  Perhaps weary from generations of feuding and anxious for peace, or perhaps just fearful of the power of Genghis Khan if they rejected him yet again, the leaders of virtually every tribe on the Mongolian Plateau arrived. They came as Tatars, Naiman, Merkid, Jurkin, Kereyid, and dozens of other names, but all those ancient and exalted designations would now be abandoned if they chose to become vassals of Genghis Khan. From this summer forward, they would all be a part of the nation that they had despised, derided, and scorned for so long: Mongol.

  The people celebrated with great feasts of meat, an endless supply of fermented milk, and the usual Mongol sports of horse racing, archery, and wrestling. As the people amused themselves, Genghis Khan attended to the deadly serious business of organizing his army into the supreme weapon with which he would conquer the world. He created the new law and established a supreme judge to preside over its implementation. He rewarded his friends, allies, brothers, mother, and even strangers who had performed outstanding services for him.

  Oddly, one of the first pressing pieces of business was a divorce, and even stranger was the reluctance with which Genghis Khan felt compelled to make it. His former ally Jaka Gambu had perceived Genghis Khan as the means by which he, Jaka Gambu, would replace his brother Ong Khan as the supreme leader on the steppe. Although he had married his daughter Ibaka to Genghis Khan, Jaka Gambu had no intention of sharing power, and after the defea
t of Ong Khan, the two allies quickly turned against each other. The marriage had been made for political reasons, and when Jaka Gambu betrayed the Mongols, Genghis Khan’s marriage with the rebel’s daughter needed to be broken for political reasons.

  In separating from her, Genghis Khan made one of the most emotional statements recorded in his life when he said, “You have entered into my heart and limbs.” He had to divorce her to show that even the Great Khan obeyed the laws and yielded his personal desires to the needs of the state. “I did not say that you have a bad character,” he explained to her, nor that “in looks and appearance you are ugly.” He made the best possible marriage he could for her outside of his family by marrying her to one of his top generals and closest friends. “I present you to Jurchedei in deference to the great principle.” To show the sincerity of his words and his high regard for her, he allowed her to keep her rank as queen, and he ordered his family to always honor her fully as a queen, as though she were still married to him. He ordered that even after his death they should treat her as his queen so they would remember that they, as he, must obey the law. “In the future, when my descendants sit on our throne, mindful of the principle regarding services that have thus been rendered, they should not disobey my words.” As a further kindness toward Ibaka and her sister Sorkhokhtani, he allowed the latter to remain married to young Tolui, a decision that would later have dramatic consequences for the imperial dynasty.

  Having punished one rival, Genghis Khan set about rewarding those who had been most loyal to him. His most pressing task as the new ruler of all the tribes was to divide up all the conquered lands and assign rulers to them. He did not give these lands to his sons or his generals; he gave all of them to his wives.

  Each wife would rule her own territory and manage her own independent ordo, “court” (sometimes written as ordu). Borte Khatun received most of the Kherlen River, much of which had once belonged to the Tatars, with her ordo at Khodoe Aral near the Avarga stream that had formerly been held by the Jurkin clan. Khulan Khatun received the Khentii Mountains around Mount Burkhan Khaldun, which was the Mongol homeland. Yesui Khatun received the Tuul River, including the summer ordo of the Kereyid ruler, Ong Khan. Her elder sister, Yesugen Khatun, received the Khangai Mountains, which had been the territory of the Naiman.

  Genghis Khan handed over the already conquered territories to his wives because now he was about to begin a new round of conquests, and for this he needed a new set of allies. A major part of the work that summer consisted in granting new marriages, ratifying marriages that had already been agreed to, and formally sanctifying some that had already occurred. He had won the wars by fighting, but now Genghis Khan sought to ensure peace through a thick network of marriage alliances. Traditionally, steppe khans took a wife from each of their vassal clans, but Genghis Khan never had more than four wives at a time. Borte always remained the chief one, and her children assumed precedence over all others.

  Rather than taking a large number of wives, Genghis Khan sought to make marriage alliances for his children instead. Having twice failed to negotiate new alliances through marriages to his eldest son and daughter, he returned to a safer option. He negotiated another union with an already trusted ally, Botu of the Ikires, who had married Genghis Khan’s sister, Temulun. Genghis Khan arranged for his eldest daughter, Khojin, to marry Botu.

  This time Genghis Khan had no trouble negotiating marriages for his sons and daughters. He married three of his daughters to Mongols in the traditional system of qudas, marriage alliances. The three grooms were related to his mother, Hoelun, and his wife Borte. In addition to Khojin, a daughter married a relative of his wife Borte, and his fifth daughter, Tumelun, married another of his mother’s relatives, though this marriage caused some confusion for chroniclers because of the similarity of her name to Genghis Khan’s sister, Temulun.

  Most of the participants in the khuriltai of 1206 came from the steppes, but a few delegations from the world beyond also participated; among these were Genghis Khan’s newfound allies, the Onggud. The fortuitous meeting with the merchant Hassan at Baljuna had evidently made as deep an impression on the Onggud as it had on Genghis Khan, because some of them also became his followers. The decisive test for this impromptu alliance between the Mongols and the Onggud had come in 1205, two years after the Baljuna rescue. After rallying his followers to defeat the Tatars and the Kereyid, Genghis Khan faced only a single powerful confederation left on the steppes, the Naiman. The Naiman leader dispatched envoys to Ala-Qush, an Onggud leader, to woo him away from Genghis Khan and join them in a war against the upstart Mongols. Such an alliance might have been able to crush the newly emerging nation from opposite sides, or at least keep it from expanding further. Ala-Qush not only rejected the Naiman offer of an alliance but sent envoys to warn Genghis Khan of a planned Naiman trap.

  According to tradition, when the Onggud envoys approached the camp of Genghis Khan, they brought with them a gift from civilization; this time it was wine made from grapes, a commodity previously unknown to the Mongols, but one destined to have a major impact on them and the success of their world empire. In recognition of their unique relationship, Genghis Khan agreed to a future marriage between his daughter Alaqai Beki and the son of Ala-Qush of the Onggud.

  After the earlier failed marriage negotiations for his offspring, Genghis Khan always married his daughters to only the most trustworthy of allies. He never permitted one to marry a rival, nor did he allow them to marry any of his generals or other subordinates. Despite the emphasis on rising in rank according to merit and deeds, he maintained strict lineage segregation. His daughters married men from the aristocratic lineages of the steppes, and later he extended this practice to the ruling lineages of specially chosen neighboring kingdoms.

  Genghis Khan’s sons also married women from the same quda alliance lineages as his daughters. In addition, the sons, and Genghis Khan himself, sometimes took a different type of wife from the royal wives and daughters of defeated tribes. In each case, Genghis Khan and his sons married a widow or daughter of the dead khan, thereby unmistakably demonstrating that the men of Genghis Khan’s family had replaced those former rulers. Thus Genghis Khan took two Tatar queens and a Merkid princess as wives, while arranging for his eldest and youngest sons to marry the Kereyid princesses who had been Ong Khan’s nieces.

  As part of the wedding ceremony, a Mongol bride stood in front of her new ger and put on the boqta, the tall headgear of a queen. She also put on all her jewelry. Before entering the ger, she walked between two large fires that sanctified her so that she might enter her marriage in the purest possible state. The marriage happened without much ceremony, but for eight days afterward, people brought presents to the couple. On the eighth day, the family would host a grand feast. As described by Pétis de la Croix, “These feasts seldom end without some quarrel, because they are too profuse of their liquors.”

  The husband had to have a place prepared for his new wife. In one episode in which a khan brought in a new queen for whom he had not yet prepared a home, he sought to bring her to the ger of his senior wife. Out of hospitality for the younger woman, the elder queen did not at first object and she went to sleep, apparently without suspecting that the couple might try to consummate the marriage at that time.

  However, during the night the khan became amorous with his bride. The older queen, sleeping nearby, awoke. “How shall I watch you two enjoying each other in bed?” she angrily asked them.

  Although it was night, the senior queen ordered them out. “Leave my ger!” Since there was no other ger in the vicinity, the khan and his younger wife had to spend the night outside in the open. The next day, the khan was able to make arrangements to move the young queen in with some of his relatives until he could prepare her a place of her own. In the ger, the wife ruled even if her husband happened to be a khan.

  Her first felt home came from her husband’s family, but through the years she would gradually add to it by unrolling the
insulating blankets, called the “mother felt,” and pounding in new wool to make a series of fresh coverings, called the “daughter felts.” In this way her hands, her perspiration, and her soul became a part of the felt, and the ger became more and more hers. Eventually, her sheets of daughter felt would help to make new gers for her daughters-in-law; in this way, from generation to generation, the walls of each generation would be made from all the women who had married into the family through all the generations.

  During the festivities and business of the summer of 1206, Genghis Khan gave a lengthy speech praising young Altani, who had saved the life of Tolui, and arranged for her marriage to Boroghul, one of the orphans whom his mother had adopted. Of his three brothers, four sons, and four stepbrothers, Genghis Khan singled out only Boroghul as a baatar, or hero. When he was a young warrior of about seventeen years old, Boroghul had rescued Genghis Khan’s third son, Ogodei, from the battlefield, after the prince had been shot and fallen off his horse, passing out from a lack of blood. Despite the close presence of enemies, Boroghul nursed Ogodei through the night, continuously sucking the blood from his neck and thereby preventing infection or blood poisoning. When dawn came, Boroghul loaded Ogodei onto his horse and, holding him tightly, managed to evade enemy patrols, bringing him safely home to his father.

  The speech about Altani’s bravery and the shorter mention of Boroghul’s similar courage not only highlighted their status as heroes, but it also gently reminded Genghis Khan’s own sons of their lack of achievement. His sons, even in adulthood, were still the objects of rescue, not the rescuers. They depended on others for heroism that they still had not shown. Sadly for Genghis Khan, they never would.