by The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire
At the marriage of each of his daughters, Genghis Khan issued a nuptial decree making clear her responsibilities and, more important to everyone else, what her rights and powers would be. He spoke the words directly to his daughter (or in a few later cases had the text read to her on his behalf), but the true audience was not the daughter as much as the people whom she would soon join. He made no such proclamations at the weddings of his sons, and conferred no special powers or responsibilities on them beyond the normal expectations of a husband at marriage. The series of speeches to his daughters, however, provide cogent insight into his thinking and to the role that they would play in the empire. As a hint at just what innovative type of empire he intended to create, he conferred no powers on his sons-in-law in these decrees, and in fact chose not to mention them by name or address any comments to them.
Persian and Chinese chroniclers recorded the speeches for the later marriages, but the speech to his first daughter, Khojin, was apparently lost or possibly censored. One small speech survived from this time, attributed to Genghis Khan at the marriage of Altani. These words reflect his thinking at the time of his first daughter’s marriage, and it is likely that he spoke similar words at her wedding.
When Genghis Khan arranged each of these marriages, he proclaimed equality between bride and groom. He conveyed his concept of the state and its government, as well as the relationship of husband and wife, through an important Mongol metaphor: Through marriage, the couple would become two shafts of one cart. As Genghis Khan described it, “If a two-shaft cart breaks the second shaft, the ox cannot pull it…. If a two-wheeled cart breaks the second wheel, it cannot move.”
When moving, the cart transported a family’s possessions, but when stationary, the cart served as the family pantry, warehouse, and treasury. The nomads stored most of their possessions in the cart so that they would be already packed and ready to flee at the first sign of trouble. As an extension of a married woman’s ownership of the cart, the wife handled all issues related to money, barter, or commerce. From the first recorded observations, Mongol men showed an aversion to handling money and conducting commercial transactions. “The management of the man’s fortune,” according to Persian reports, “belongs to the women: They buy and sell as they think fit.”
Repeatedly, when Genghis Khan wished to make an alliance with another man, he used this same imagery of the couple pulling one cart. His nuptial decree at Altani’s marriage showed a creative innovation in the cart metaphor. Genghis Khan changed the system of dual leadership from two men, who called each other brother or father and son, into an image of man and woman, such as Boroghul and Altani. In this way, he sought to replicate the spiritual tradition of supernatural harmony through Father Sky and Mother Earth. Henceforth the husband would go to war, and the wife would be left in charge of running the home and, by extension, almost every aspect of civilian life. The system made perfect sense in the Mongol cultural tradition. Soon after making the nuptial speech to Altani and Boroghul, Genghis Khan sent the husband away on a military mission.
In describing his daughters and their husbands as two shafts of one cart, Genghis Khan made clear that an ancient division of labor applied to a new set of military and political goals. While the husband commanded the soldiers on defensive maneuvers or on military attack campaigns, the wife commanded the tribe at home. Genghis Khan had well-founded and unshakable faith in his daughters and the other women around him. “Whoever can keep a house in order,” he said, “can keep a territory in order.” As the military campaigns grew longer, the division of labor solidified into a division of command authority. At its heart, the dual-shaft system functioned quite simply. She ruled at home; he served abroad.
Even in matters of sexuality, the Mongol woman exhibited more control. Mongol men were considered sexually shy at marriage, and part of a wife’s duty was to coax her husband into his role. Unlike other men whom the Mongols encountered, such as the Turks and Persians, who had a reputation for sexual skill and boldness and were the source of much good humor, the Mongol man was deemed to have other interests and responsibilities. Yet, if his wife could not persuade him to perform his marital role adequately, she had every right to publicly seek redress. In one later episode of a marriage arranged for a famous wrestling champion, Genghis Khan’s son Ogodei asked the wife about her husband: “Have you had a full share of his pleasuring?”
She responded disappointedly that her husband had not touched her because he did not want to sap his strength and interfere with his athletic training. Ogodei summoned the wrestler and told him that fulfillment of his duties as a husband took priority over sporting activities. The champion had to give up wrestling and tend to his wife.
Sex within marriage was more easily regulated than love. Mongols recognized the importance of love, and they always hoped for it within marriage. One of the traditional nuptial speeches used in the twentieth century compared the marriage of Genghis Khan’s daughters to the union of dragons and peacocks: “The dragon who growls in the blue clouds, the peacock who dances chanting in the green yard … Even when they are far apart—their songs of desire are closely united.”
Duty outranked love, and the baatar always chose duty to family and country over love. Genghis Khan and Borte married for love, but none of their children had that opportunity. Each married for reasons of state, with the hope that love might develop from it. The emotional sacrifice demanded by Genghis Khan of his sons and daughters, however, was minor compared to that paid by the men who married his daughters.
The daughters of Genghis Khan bore the title beki, an honorific designation applied to either a prince or princess. The men who married them, however, did not receive the title khan or beki. They received the special title of guregen, generally meaning “son-in-law,” but in this case the meaning was more akin to “prince consort.” A man held the title only because of his marriage to the Great Khan’s daughter. If he lost her, he lost the title. Because the guregen could be so easily replaced, the chronicles often merely used the title rather than the name. For most practical purposes in daily Mongol life, it mattered little which man was actually filling the post at the moment. If one died, another quickly stepped into his place. Usually the replacement would be a son, brother, or nephew of the last husband.
The guregen occupied a unique position within the Mongol imperial system. Despite the high prestige of his close kinship to Genghis Khan, he rarely held any influential military or civilian office. Genghis Khan kept the guregen literally close at hand; most of them received appointments within the keshig, the royal guard, and thus became intimate parts of Genghis Khan’s personal camp. Those with superior ability became the leaders of their own military units, composed of about one thousand warriors from their own tribe or related clans, but under close supervision and never too far away from Genghis Khan. In this way, the best warriors in the guregen’s tribe were always separated from the majority of their tribe. A guregen had no chance to rise up within the hierarchy and no chance to wield independent power or launch his own campaigns. He held a prestigious but hardly enviable position in Mongol society.
The guregen served under their father-in-law, according to the tradition of bride service that Genghis Khan had revitalized and strengthened. Instead of herding the father-in-law’s goats, camels, and yaks, these sons-in-law became herders of men; they would serve in Genghis Khan’s army and fight in his wars. Genghis Khan often sent his guregen on the most dangerous missions, however, and they tended to be killed at a high rate. Most of them never had the chance to return home for very long. Being a son-in-law to Genghis Khan was not merely an apprenticeship phase, as it would be for a small herder; for these men it became a brief, but usually lethal, career.
A tribe acquired prestige and material benefits if Genghis Khan chose to marry one of his daughters to its leader. For the son-in-law, however, the honor was almost certainly a death sentence as well. He served virtually as the sacrificial victim in exchange for his trib
e’s prosperity. He would give his life in battle for Genghis Khan, and in return his tribe would benefit and his own offspring would be rewarded. A guregen entered into a harsh bargain.
Genghis Khan also used the marriages of his sons to further integrate the nation and to increase his own power within it. His sons, however, did not go to do bride service for their new in-laws, in part because they had too many wives and could never complete the task. Genghis Khan’s daughters-in-law also came to live with the royal family, just as the sons-in-law did. Unlike the guregen, who lost what power he had over his tribe and was destined to quickly lose his life, the daughter-in-law acquired a much more important position. She became a beki, a title of honor previously used primarily for powerful men, or she became khatun, a queen. This was certainly more than a mere honorific.
These khatuns functioned as the ambassadors of their tribes. They handled negotiations, served as the communications network, and hosted visitors from their own group. As Genghis Khan’s father-in-law said, his tribe’s daughters acted as their “intercessors.” Although not residing with her tribe, each khatun served as its queen away from home, representing the tribe in the court of Genghis Khan, where all major decisions were made. The tribe’s success depended on her success.
The position of each wife within this ambassadorial corps reflected not only her personal relationship to her husband but also the diplomatic status of her tribe. The queens sat in careful arrangements by tiers, and where one sat relative to the other queens in the court rituals determined and publicly illustrated her tribe’s position in the Mongol nation. Over the decades, the power of these daughters-in-law as queens would grow steadily until a generation after Genghis Khan’s death, when they would become the contenders for the highest office in the land.
Khatun is one of the most authoritative and magnificent words in the Mongolian language. It conveys regality, stateliness, and great strength. If something resists breaking no matter how much pressure is applied, it is described as khatun. The word can form part of a boy’s or girl’s name, signifying power and firmness combined with beauty and grace. Because of the admired qualities of khatun, men have often borne names such as Khatun Temur, literally “Queen Iron,” and Khatun Baatar, “Queen Hero.”
The Mongols recognized the role of the father as the provider of sperm, which created the bones of a new child, but the mother gave meat and blood. Thus male lineages became known as the yas, meaning “bone of the father,” while the larger kinship system was known as the urug, meaning “the womb.” Genghis Khan gave his royal family the name Altan Urug, the Golden Womb.
Repeatedly in Genghis Khan’s genealogy, the paternity of a child was in doubt. One of the most important ancestors of the Mongols, Alan Goa, had three sons after the death of her husband, but she insisted to all her sons that it did not matter from which father they came. The origin of a child’s bones played a less important role than the womb from which the child sprang.
When Genghis Khan’s wife Borte conceived her first child close to the time of her kidnapping, Genghis Khan insisted that, aside from the mother, it was no one’s business how she became pregnant. “It happened,” says the chronicle repeatedly. “It happened at a time when men were fighting; it happened at a time when men were killing. It happened at a time when the starry sky twisted in the heaven, when the nation twisted in turmoil, when people could not rest in their bed, or birds in their nest.”
All that mattered was the parent’s success in raising the child. The Secret History eloquently described a mother’s devotion to her children: “She choked on her own hunger in order to feed them. She worried constantly how to make them into adults. She cleaned them and pulled them up by their heels to teach them to walk.” It took the effort of a mother to transform boys into men. She “stretched them by the shoulders to pull them up to become men. She pulled them by their necks. She pulled them up to the height of other men. She did these things because she was the mother with a heart as bright as the sun and as wide as a lake.”
Outlawing the sale or barter of women marked Genghis Khan’s first important departure from tribal practices regarding marriage, and gradually through a series of such changes he transformed the social position of his daughters, and thereby of all women, within his burgeoning empire. His laws regarding women did not spring from an ideological position or special spiritual revelation so much as from personal experience and the practical needs of running a harmonious society. The natural accord between male and female, the sky and the earth, the sun and the moon had a practical application in the relations of men and women in the family and in society.
Genghis Khan was certainly ambitious and had much larger desires in the world than merely uniting the warring tribes of the steppe. Yet, in order to expand his empire, he needed someone to rule the newly conquered people. He had to leave someone in charge. Ideally, he would have had a stable of talented sons and given each one of them a newly conquered country to govern, but his sons were simply not capable. Without competent sons, he could leave a general in charge, but Genghis Khan had been betrayed too many times by men inside and outside his family. He probably knew well the result of Alexander the Great’s overreliance on his generals, who subsequently divided the empire among themselves as soon as their leader died.
The women around Genghis Khan motivated him, and he constantly strove to make them happy. “My wives, daughters-in-law, and daughters are as colorful and radiant as red fire,” he said. “It is my sole purpose to make their mouths as sweet as sugar by favor, to bedeck them in garments spun with gold, to mount them upon fleet-footed steeds, to have them drink sweet, clear water, to provide their animals with grassy meadows, and to have all harmful brambles and thorns cleared from the roads and paths upon which they travel, and not to allow weeds and thorns to grow in their pastures.”
Genghis Khan’s mother and wives were too old to take command of these new nations and to enjoy the full benefits of what he had to offer, but he had a new generation of women who seemed as capable as the previous one. After uniting the steppe, Genghis Khan turned his attention to foreign nations, and now women assumed a far more important role in building the empire abroad. At least three daughters had been married to closely related clans, and those marriages had helped to solidify bonds within the newly formed Mongol nation; however, now four other daughters faced a far more challenging task beyond the Mongol world, in the lands of neighboring countries.
By the end of the summer of 1206, Genghis Khan had transformed the steppe tribes into a nation, or perhaps more precisely into a large army with a small mobile country attached. Normally, at the end of a large steppe conference, the various tribes would return to their way of life with little real change in the daily routines, but after the khuriltai of 1206, Genghis Khan prepared them to move out and conquer the world. Now that all the steppe tribes acknowledged him as their khan, he was ready to begin his next and greatest phase of life by turning the Mongol nation into an engine of conquest. In the coming twenty years, Genghis Khan and his Mongol army conquered and ruled the largest empire in history. In these two decades they would acquire far more people and territory than the Romans, Persians, Greeks, or Chinese had been able to do in centuries of sustained effort.
How could he take such a tiny nation of 1 million people with 100,000 warriors and conquer countries of many millions with armies of many hundreds of thousands? How could he conquer territories that were more than one hundred times the size of his small nation and more than a thousand times the size of his army?
Genghis Khan had hardy horses and excellent riders well trained in archery, but the steppe had had such horses and archers for thousands of years. His unique success derived not from any secret technology; it came out of his unique charisma and his ability to organize human effort.
To achieve the conquests for which he was aiming, Genghis Khan had to use every resource available to him to the fullest extent. To confront armies several times the size of his own, he
had to maximize the effectiveness of every warrior and the talents of every Mongol—including the women. Thus, when he laid down the laws and created the organization of the state in 1206, he had special responsibilities for his mother, his wives, and, above all others, for his daughters. A generation later, a Persian chronicler wrote: “After Genghis Khan had tested his sons and discovered for what each of them was suited, he had some hesitation over the throne and office of Great Khan.”
The isolation of the Mongolian Plateau had protected the people for millennia. They had occasionally forayed out beyond the Gobi to attack sedentary people, but in the past, conquering meant leaving their homeland forever and settling in new places. Genghis Khan was about to permanently overcome the geographic obstacles separating the Mongols from the world. Under his system, Mongol warriors could travel back and forth, maintaining their home base on the steppe and commuting to the battlefront. The Gobi changed from an obstacle into a way station on the route to world domination.
Prior to 1206, no one outside of Mongolia seemed to pay much attention to the comings and goings of the nomads there. Whoever the barbarians selected to be their khan had no more importance to the city people than whether these savages ate rats or sheep for dinner. The great centers of civilization had much more important issues to chronicle and more important politics to play than fretting about some savage tribe of herders far beyond the protective buffer formed by the vast Gobi.
Beyond the Mongolian Plateau at the beginning of the thirteenth century, civilization languished. The world was full of frenetic activity, but little significant achievement. The twelfth century that had just ended had been a stagnant era. Theology and religion had spent their meager power to move history forward and instead left the world churning in a series of endless religious wars and silly theological disputes. The old empires of the past had crumbled, but the modern nation state had not yet arrived. The era of heroes such as Alexander and Caesar had given way to petty criminals claiming to be princes of men or designated representatives of gods. The world seemed to be searching and waiting, but no one expected that the next shaper of world history would come on horseback, dressed in fur, and smelling of milk and mutton from the frozen plains of the north.