by The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire
The Persian chroniclers recorded the full cruelty and sheer evil behind the crime inflicted on these innocent, “star-like maidens, each of whom affected men’s hearts in a different way.” Everyone knew that this barbarous act violated in spirit and in detail the long list of laws Genghis Khan had made regarding women. Girls could be married at a young age but could not engage in sex until sixteen, and then they initiated the encounter with their husbands. They could not be seized, raped, kidnapped, bartered, or sold. Ogodei violated every single one of those laws.
The chronicles explain that the episode was punishment against the Oirat for not sending girls for Ogodei’s harem. Ogodei’s debauched appetites at this stage of his life, however, favored alcohol over girls, and while this excuse may have been proffered, the rape of the Oirat virgins was part of a much larger assault against the power of Genghis Khan’s daughters and their lineages. Depraved as the violence against the girls was, it did not spring from the mindless lust of a wicked old man. The atrocity grew from a calculating greed and the desire to expand Ogodei’s wealth and power. He used this ordeal to seize the lands of his sister Checheyigen, who most likely had recently died. This act brought the Oirat under Ogodei’s control.
Many of the girls raped that day had been born after the death of Genghis Khan in 1227. They lived in a much different Mongol Empire from the one he founded and left to his people, and the mass rapes, although only a decade later, showed how quickly the world was changing.
The rape of the Oirat girls was the opening move in a long political, diplomatic, and terror campaign against the women of Genghis Khan’s Borijin clan. Through the attack, Ogodei was taking away the powers left to his sister and imposing his own authority over her lands, her people, and her family. His crime was the beginning of the ruination of everything that his father had accomplished for his family and nation. Without the father’s restraining hand, the stronger of his children began to pick off the weaker ones.
Genghis Khan’s unusual system of political organization had placed Ogodei in the geographic center, surrounded by the territories of his brothers and sisters. The empire as a whole continued growing at the outer edges, but the central location of Ogodei’s personal holdings prevented him from expanding without moving into the territory of his siblings. He began encroaching on their lands almost as soon as he came to power. Since he outranked them as Great Khan, it was hard to resist him. The Oirat kingdom of Checheyigen disappeared first, but the lands of the other sisters would soon follow. The unprecedented violence Ogodei had committed against the family of one sister would now expand into a struggle against all of them.
Ogodei managed to find or invent a variety of excuses to expand his power at the expense of other members of the Borijin royal family. He moved into the territory of his father’s widows Yesui and Yesugen in the Khangai Mountains and along the Tuul River. As the youngest son, his brother Tolui, had inherited their mother’s land on the Kherlen, but Ogodei had tried to take it as well after Tolui died.
One day in 1232, the forty-three-year-old Tolui had stumbled out of his ger and in a drunken tirade collapsed and died. Some observers surmised that Ogodei had orchestrated the death with the help of shamans who drugged the alcoholic Tolui. No matter the cause, Ogodei immediately sought to benefit from his brother’s death by arranging a marriage for his son Guyuk with Tolui’s widow Sorkhokhtani. Knowing precisely what Ogodei was trying to do, she politely, but firmly, refused on the grounds of devoting her life to her four sons, but the refusal meant that she could never marry anyone else.
Having failed to gain the eastern lands through this marriage strategy, Ogodei sent Guyuk on a European campaign under the leadership of his cousin, Jochi’s son Batu, who was expanding his family’s holdings from Russia into Poland and Hungary up to the borders of the German states, and south into the Balkans. The plan, later denied by Ogodei after it failed, seemed to have been for Guyuk to take control of some of the new territories for himself, thereby giving Ogodei’s family a hold in Europe from which they could slowly absorb the lands of their relatives who controlled Russia. Batu firmly rejected Guyuk’s attempts to claim part of the conquests, and after a night of raucous drinking, crude mocking, and angry arguing, Batu chased Guyuk away in fear for his life.
In addition to her central Mongolian territory along the Tuul River, Yesui had been granted the Tangut kingdom astride the crucial Gansu Corridor of China’s Silk Route. Ogodei sent his second son, Koten, to take those lands. Koten proved more successful than his brother Guyuk, occupying part of the Onggud lands that had once been controlled by his aunt Alaqai Beki and the Tangut lands ruled by Yesui Khatun. Koten used these lands as a base for the conquest of Tibet, and he became the first Mongol patron of Tibetan Buddhism.
Had Ogodei’s plan worked, his sons would have occupied Manchuria to the east and Tibet to the south, as well as Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine to the west, thereby encircling the Mongol Empire with his personal lands all around the edges.
As each of Genghis Khan’s wives died in the coming years, her territory was seized by one of Genghis Khan’s sons. Just as a man’s earthly spirit lived on in the hair of his horses, a woman’s spirit lived on in the wool that she pressed to make the felt walls of her ger. The sons seemed afraid to confiscate the actual ger that had been the queen’s ordo. The ger had been given to her by Genghis Khan, and it was there that he had lived and slept with his wives. As each queen died, she was sent to Burkhan Khaldun for burial there, and her ordo was sent to the former territory of Borte at Khodoe Aral, where the Avarga stream flows into the Kherlen River. Here the four structures were erected as permanent memorials to Genghis Khan and his empire. Known as the Four Great Ordos, they became a mere symbolic relic of the empire Genghis Khan had created.
Genghis Khan’s death left a power vacuum that his weak and quarrelsome sons exploited but failed to fill. Although Genghis Khan’s daughters and their families suffered greatly during the reign of Ogodei, a new set of women came into power; these were the wives of the khans, the daughters-in-law of Genghis Khan. Ogodei’s wife Toregene was the first to take command, while her husband sank deeper into his wine. Although not the first wife, she gradually assumed the title yeke khatun, “empress.” The oldest surviving use of that title is from an order that she issued under her name and her seal on April 10, 1240, while her husband was still alive. The text indicates that she controlled part of the civilian administration of the empire. She pursued her own activities of supporting religion, education, and construction projects on an imperial scale.
In a similar way, even before his death, the alcoholic Tolui had effectively abdicated power to his wife Sorkhokhtani because he “used to weep a great deal.” Recognizing his own inability, “he commanded that the affairs of the ulus [nation] and the control of the army should be entrusted to the counsel of his chief wife, Sorkhokhtani Beki.” After the death of Chaghatai, khan of Central Asia and the only one of Genghis Khan’s sons not to succumb to alcoholism, his widow Ebuskun assumed power.
Until their sudden arrival on the political scene, very little is known of these women; they had married into the family without, in most cases, anyone noticing them enough to mention who they were or where they came from. Mongol chronicles do not specify Toregene’s origin, but according to Chinese chroniclers, she had been born a Naiman. Before her marriage to Ogodei, she had been married to the son of the Merkid chief. The Merkid had been the first enemies of Genghis Khan, responsible for kidnapping his wife Borte, and through the decades he had found and defeated them several times, only to see them strike up the feud again. When Genghis Khan conquered the Merkid for the final time in 1205, the Year of the Ox, he decided to destroy the tribe—killing off the leading men and dividing up the rest. In the distribution of the remaining tribe, Genghis Khan gave the soon-to-be-widowed Toregene to Ogodei as a junior wife.
These queens such as Toregene and Sorkhokhtani had been princesses before marrying Genghis Khan’s sons. Their fa
thers, husbands, and brothers had been killed, but as women of the aristocratic clans, they had grown up at the center of political and diplomatic life and been exposed to the intrigues that simmer and periodically explode in every power center. In addition, the most powerful daughters-in-law of Genghis Khan came from the western tribes of Mongolia and were Christians. It is uncertain if any were literate, but being raised as Christians, they at least knew the importance of written documents, and they had a larger worldview that made them proponents of religion and education in general. Sorkhokhtani supported Muslim schools in central Asia, and Toregene patronized the Taoist monasteries in China.
In her position as empress, Toregene was by far the most powerful of all the women, but she provoked angry opposition within the Mongol court on two primary accounts. She sought to increase tax revenues from wherever she could, but in a seemingly contradictory policy, she also sought to diminish the powers of the central administration, or at least to reduce the authority and power of the ministers and officials who managed the imperial court and oversaw the bureaucracy. In 1240, a dispute arose over how to produce more tax revenue from northern China, and Ogodei moved in Mahmud Yalavach, one of his experienced Muslim administrators from Central Asia, to take over as supreme judge. Toregene, however, did not like him, and at the same time she had one of her favorites, Abd-ur-Rahman, appointed as chief tax collector. The resulting rivalry sustained enormous dissension for twenty years.
In 1241, Ogodei died, probably paralyzed from an alcoholic binge. Toregene assumed complete power over the Mongol Empire as yeke khatun. In pursuit of her own policies, she dismissed all her late husband’s ministers and replaced them with her own. Despite being the mother of five sons, she chose not to move them into high positions of critical importance in her new government. Instead, the highest position went to another foreign woman, who had been a servant in Toregene’s household. She was Fatima, a Shiite Muslim Tajik or Persian captive from the Middle Eastern campaign. The Persian chronicler Juvaini, who seemingly disapproved of women involved in politics, wrote that Fatima enjoyed constant access to Toregene’s tent, and she “became the sharer of intimate confidences and the depository of hidden secrets.” Fatima played a political role while the older “ministers were debarred from executing business, and she was free to issue commands and prohibitions.” So enormous was Fatima’s reputed power that the Persian chroniclers referred to her as a khatun, a “queen,” of the Mongols.
Toregene maintained her nomadic court in the vicinity of the capital city, Karakorum, built by her late husband in the fertile steppes near the Khangai Mountains and adjacent to the Orkhon River in central Mongolia. By Mongol standards, the area encompassed a beautiful, well-watered series of steppes, covered with green pastures in the summer and providing nearby mountains to shelter the herders and their animals in the harsh winter; for visitors, the area presented untold hardships. One of the educated Persian officials working with the Mongols wrote of Karakorum: “And the wind has pitched over our heads tents of snow without ropes or poles. Its arrows penetrate our clothes like an arrow shot by a person of great bulk.”
The newly erected capital of Karakorum consisted of a small cluster of buildings constructed in both Chinese and Muslim styles, but they were hardly more than a series of warehouses for the tribute sent from around the empire. The city also provided housing and work space for the numerous captured workmen producing goods for Ogodei’s followers, and it contained a large contingent of foreign clerks translating documents and helping to handle the poorly organized administration of the massive empire.
With the usual Mongol dread of solid walls of wood or stone, Ogodei always lived in his ger camp, which moved four times a year in a large patterned migration within a radius of about a hundred miles around his capital. To maintain the continuity of her husband’s and Genghis Khan’s adherence to traditional Mongol patterns, Toregene continued to run the country from her mobile court.
She reigned as yeke khatun from 1241 until 1246 because it took that long to orchestrate her son Guyuk’s succession as Great Khan. She had to overcome the stated preference of Ogodei for another heir, as well as the opposition of most of the officials appointed by her husband. She could not persuade these men, so she reorganized the administration of the court and the newly conquered territories, appointing new administrators from China to Turkey. In the cases of recalcitrant officials who did not heed her words, she resorted to extreme measures of public punishment. The Uighur scribe Korguz, who had been quite loyal to her husband and had been given administration over eastern Iran, angered the empress; she had him arrested and executed by stuffing stones in his mouth until he choked to death.
One of her most problematic issues derived from northern China, where she repeatedly had trouble exerting her authority over the Mongols in charge there, particularly over her second son, Koten. He harbored ambitions to take power from his mother and to become Great Khan; so when she began persecuting his father’s former officials, many of them escaped to Koten’s court for refuge.
Toregene continued and intensified her husband’s struggle for land within the Mongol Empire. The lands closest to hers were those of Ogodei’s sisters. Just as Ogodei had moved against the lands of his sister Checheyigen on an unconvincing pretext, Toregene now moved against his sister Al-Altun.
Al-Altun had ruled the Uighur territory under the aegis of Genghis Khan. It is not known what type of dealings Ogodei had with his sister while their father lived, but around the time of Ogodei’s death, someone from his faction executed her. According to the Persian chronicle of Rashid al-Din, this was done in violation of laws of Genghis Khan and the Mongols. “They put to death the youngest daughter of Genghis-Khan, whom he loved more than all his other children … although she had committed no crime.”
The official excuse for executing Al-Altun seems to have been the accusation that she poisoned her brother Ogodei. She “had killed his father [Ogodei] with poison at the time when their army was in Hungary, and it was for this that the army had retreated from those countries. She and many others were judged and killed.” Accusing her of such a crime against her brother at least partially justified killing her since she would have been the first to break the law against killing a member of the family. The claim, however, did not convince the family, as evidenced by a subsequent speech made by Tolui’s son Khubilai Khan at the trial of some of the retainers of Ogodei demanding to know why they killed her without a trial, as mandated by Genghis Khan.
Ogodei’s daughter Alajin Beki assumed power over the Uighurs. She first married the eldest son of the old Idiqut, who had been married to her aunt, and when he died, she married his younger brother.
Like their father, each of them inherited the title of Idiqut upon marrying the daughter of the Great Khan.
In 1246, five years after her husband’s death, Toregene had gained sufficient control of the empire to summon a khuriltai to select Ogodei’s successor and to have her son named Great Khan. It had been almost two decades since the last khuriltai in 1229 to elect Ogodei, but this khuriltai contrasted markedly with the last one. The Secret History specifies that the princes of the family as well as the princesses and the imperial sons-in-law attended the khuriltai of 1229, but the role of the imperial daughters-in-law at that time was so negligible that their presence was not even mentioned. By 1246, these women had risen so quickly in power that they completely controlled the khuriltai and managed every detail of its agenda.
By the khuriltai of 1246, all four of Genghis Khan’s sons were dead. None of his daughters remained in power, and it is not certain that even one was still alive. The empire of eight kingdoms had been reduced to four, corresponding to the territory of the now dead sons, but three of these were ruled by women. Ebuskun, the widow of Genghis Khan’s second son, Chaghatai, ruled Central Asia or Turkestan. Sorkhokhtani served as regent for eastern Mongolia and her sons’ expanding territory in northern China. Toregene ruled the territory of her late husband
in the center of Mongol territory, and as empress she presided over the whole empire. Only the Golden Horde of Russia, under the control of Batu Khan, remained under male rule.
Women ruled from Korea to the Caucasus Mountains, from the Arctic to the Indus, but not one was a daughter of Genghis Khan, a member of the Borijin clan, or even technically a Mongol. Never before, or since, had, or has, such a large empire been ruled by women. Yet these women were not allies; they were rivals, as each sought more power and lands for herself and her sons.
In anticipation of the great gathering on the steppes of Mongolia in 1246, foreign dignitaries arrived from the distant corners of the empire to the capital at Karakorum or to Toregene’s nomadic imperial camp, where she held court in a large and elegant tent. Friar Giovanni DiPlano Carpini, the first European envoy to Mongolia, seemed surprised both that she had a court of her own and that the tent could contain such an enormous entourage. Guyuk, Toregene’s son, “sent us to his mother where a court was solemnly held, and when we had arrived there, so great was the size of the tent which was made of white fabric, that we reckon that it could hold more than two thousand men.” In addition, each of the khan’s wives maintained her own court as well. Guyuk’s “wives had other tents, however, of white felt which were quite large and beautiful.”
Emirs, governors, and grandees jostled along the same roads as princes and kings. The Seljuk sultan came from Turkey, as did representatives of the caliph of Baghdad, and two claimants to the throne of Georgia: David, the legitimate son of the late king, and David, the illegitimate son of the same king. The highest-ranking European delegate was Grand Prince Yaroslav II of Vladimir and Suzdal, who died suspiciously just after dining with Toregene Khatun in the fall of 1246.