by The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire
Even after Toregene installed Guyuk as Great Khan, he initially showed little interest in his position. As Juvaini wrote, “He took no part in affairs of state, and Toregene Khatun still executed the decrees of the Empire.” Within a short time, however, he decided to consolidate his power, and a disagreement arose between them concerning Fatima, his mother’s close confidante.
Guyuk wished to remove Fatima, and he sent soldiers to arrest her at his mother’s court. Toregene refused to surrender her.
Toregene had twice been married to foreign men whom she had not chosen. Each time, she complied with the demands the world put upon her to be a wife, mother, and queen. With Ogodei, her second forced marriage, she had produced and reared five sons, and despite their incompetence and frequent defiance and disregard for her, she had promoted their interests. Against all odds and the express wishes of his father, she had made Guyuk emperor, but she had received no thanks from her sons or anyone else.
Now in her old age, she found some solace in and emotional attachment to Fatima. Willing to forgo political life, the two women wanted to live in peace and quiet. Their close relationship may have stemmed from nothing more than having the shared experience of being foreign women forcefully brought into the Mongol court. Despite repeated efforts by Guyuk to arrest Fatima, Toregene continued to defy her son and would not yield. The court focused on this emotional struggle of wills between Toregene the empress and her son Guyuk the Great Khan. As with so many such episodes in Mongolian history, the details are missing, but the outcome is clear. She lost.
The Muslim historian Abu-Umar-I-Usman implied that her son assassinated Toregene in order to seize total power. They sent the “Khatun to join Ogodei,” he wrote, “and raised his son to the throne of sovereignty, but God knows the truth.” The chronicler certainly seemed to think that she deserved her fate because “she displayed woman’s ways, such as proceed from deficiency of intellect, and excess sensuality.”
Fatima’s fate was far worse. Guyuk hated her and wanted a public confession that she had bewitched his mother. He brought her to his court, naked and bound. Although Genghis Khan had forbidden the use of torture as part of a trial or as a punishment, Guyuk found a simple way around that law on the grounds that Fatima was not a Mongol, much less a member of the royal clan. He made her torture into a public spectacle as interrogators beat and burned her in ways designed to inflict the greatest pain without shedding her blood, which might pollute the court. For days and nights the ordeal continued, with brief periods of rest so that she might regain enough strength to suffer yet another round.
Other women may have been arrested at this point and brought to trial as well. “And then they sent also for their ladies,” wrote the French envoy Rubruck in order that “they might all be whipped with burning brands to make them confess. And when they had confessed, they were put to death.” Who they were or to what they confessed remains unknown.
In the end Fatima also confessed to every sin and crime that her torturers demanded, but then rather than letting her just die from her wounds or executing her quickly, Guyuk subjected her to one final ordeal. He ordered the torturers to sew up every orifice of her body to ensure the most agonizing death possible. Wrapping her carefully in felt to prevent blood escaping from the stitches, the executioners then threw Fatima into the river.
Fortunately for Mongolia and the world, Guyuk died a little more than a year later. The circumstances were not clear, but he had accumulated too many enemies to speculate on which one may have brought his life to a close. In the continuing political struggles at the center of the empire, the fringes began to unravel. With his limitless love of colorful metaphors, Juvaini wrote: “The affairs of the world had been diverted from the path of rectitude and the reins of commerce and fair dealing turned aside from the highway of righteousness.” He described the land as being in darkness, “and the cup of the world was filled to the brim with the drink of iniquity.” The Mongol people and their subjects, “dragged now this way, now that, were at their wits’ end, for they had neither the endurance to stay nor did they know of a place to which they might flee.”
Ogodei’s incompetent reign had ended with the cruel rape of the Oirat girls; Guyuk’s sadistic reign began with the death of his mother and the public torture of Fatima. Rather than satisfying some mysterious need for revenge, these two episodes had unleashed the wicked forces of total moral corruption. The lines of authority and power shifted rapidly and are difficult to discern with precision yet certain patterns seem clear. While many men faced execution or highly suspicious deaths, once powerful women increasingly bore the brunt of the violence. Rashid al-Din recorded, with seeming approval, that when one of Chaghatai’s queens disagreed with a minister in her husband’s court, the minister publicly chastised and humiliated her. “You are a woman,” he told her, and therefore “have no say in this matter.”
No one defended the queen, and the minister continued his campaign to limit the power of the women in the court. After rebuking the queen, the minister executed one of Chaghatai’s daughters-in-law for adultery without any legal proceeding or requesting permission from anyone. Genghis Khan had left a law that no member of the family, the Altan Urug, could be executed without the agreement of a representative from each branch of the family. The minister made clear that this law did not apply to daughters-in-law. The execution of the daughter-in-law at the court of Chaghatai indicated an expanding resentment against the daughters-in-law in general. The climax of their era was about to erupt in a violent clash between two of them, Oghul Ghaimish and Sorkhokhtani.
Following Guyuk’s brief and chaotic eighteen months as Great Khan, his widow Oghul Ghaimish stepped forward to take control of the empire just as her mother-in-law Toregene had done seven years earlier. She was either from the Merkid tribe or possibly was the daughter of Queen Checheyigen, who had ruled the Oirat, and thus would have been a granddaughter of Genghis Khan. Her name derived from the Turkish phrase meaning “a boy next time,” given by parents who have several daughters and hope for a son. Names have a strange way of creating their own destiny, and this name proved prophetically accurate. She was the last empress to nominally lay claim over the whole empire.
Aside from her constant struggle within the royal family, we know little of Oghul Ghaimish other than from a mission report from a Dominican friar, Andrew of Longumeau, sent by Louis IX of France. He arrived with a small delegation bringing a tent chapel equipped with everything that they might need to convert the Mongols to Catholicism. Fortunately this delegation did not need to travel the whole distance to Mongolia, as the regent Oghul Ghaimish kept her camp and stronghold in modern Kazakhstan, south of Lake Balkash.
The quotes Longumeau gathered and attributed to the queen show a more thoughtful ruler than the one portrayed in the Muslim histories. According to this report, she said to the French: “Peace is good; for when a country is at peace those who go on four feet eat the grass in peace, and those who go on two feet till the ground, from which good things come, in peace.”
Yet most of her comments were far blunter. She followed these philosophical musings with a very simple, pragmatic point that showed her political goals. “You cannot have peace,” she told the French envoy, “if you are not at peace with us!” She then told him to “send us of your gold and of your silver so much as may win you our friendship.” Otherwise, “We shall destroy you!” She then wrote a letter to Louis IX, ordering him to come to Mongolia to surrender to her. The Eternal Blue Sky willed that she rule over the French, and if he accepted this, she would reappoint him to his office as king. This was not what the friars had in mind when they brought her the nice chapel tent, but it is unlikely that either she or the French delegates realized how soon she herself was about to be consumed in the conflagration of Mongol imperial politics.
All the diplomats and ambassadors at her court seemed to despise her. Another French envoy, Rubruck, wrote of Oghul Ghaimish: “As to affairs of war and peace, what woul
d this woman, who was viler than a dog, know about them?” He also eagerly passed on the gossip he heard about her. He wrote that Mongke Khan, the eldest son of Tolui and Sorkhokhtani, “told me with his own lips” that Oghul Ghaimish “was the worst kind of witch and that she had destroyed her whole family by her witchcraft.”
Oghul Ghaimish was empress, but her nemesis, Tolui’s widow Sorkhokhtani, only had the title of beki, “lady.” Over the next three years, the two women fought a vigorous contest for control of the empire. The inexperienced khatun was no match for Sorkhokhtani, whom Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists praised effusively for her cunning. She was probably the most capable woman of the Mongol era, and she had been preparing her entire life for the moment when she had the chance to seize power for her sons. Her role in shaping the form and fate of the Mongol Empire far outweighs that of any other person of her era, and in historical impact, she stands second only to Genghis Khan himself.
By the time she faced off against Oghul Ghaimish, Sorkhokhtani had spent nearly two decades as a widow devoted solely to the task of molding her four sons into outstanding men of respected aptitude. Her sons were probably the best educated and, aside from Batu in Russia, the most talented men in the Mongol Empire. She instilled in her sons an abiding respect for her Christian faith, and they often accompanied her to celebrate the holy days. The sons also maintained portable chapels in tents that went along on the Mongol campaigns, but none of them publicly accepted baptism into her faith.
Sorkhokhtani insisted on their strict adherence to Mongol law, but at the same time, she combined this with extensive education about the civilizations around them, particularly the Jurched, Uighurs, and Chinese. She made sure that in addition to knowing traditional steppe culture, her sons learned to speak, read, and write excellent Mongolian. She had them taught to speak colloquial Chinese, although apparently not to read or write the classical version so prized by scholars and bureaucrats. Throughout the reign of Ogodei’s family, she had tightly controlled her sons’ behavior to keep them beyond any sort of suspicion for misconduct or disloyalty to whichever Great Khan happened to be in power. All accounts agree that she did this by making them scrupulously obey the law and the ruling khan without providing him a reason to suspect or an excuse to punish any one of them. Sorkhokhtani spent her life preparing for the khuriltai of 1251.
By contrast, Oghul Ghaimish was clumsy and awkward in her public role. Despite Oghul Ghaimish’s decisive advantage of control over the imperial capital of Karakorum and all the lands around it, she lacked the skills to keep her immediate family, much less the whole Ogodei lineage, united under her. According to Juvaini, her work “amounted to little except negotiations with merchants, the provisional allocation of sums of money to every land and country, and the dispatch of relays of churlish messengers and tax-gatherers.” In the disjointed politics of the time, “her sons held two separate courts in opposition to their mother;” and thus there were three rulers in one place. And elsewhere also, “the princes made dealings in accordance with their own wishes, and the grandees and notables of every land attached themselves to a party according to their own inclination.” Confusion reigned, “and the affairs of Oghul Ghaimish and her sons got out of control because of their differences with one another and their contentions with their senior kinsmen; and their counsels and schemes diverged from the pathway of righteousness.”
Despite her need to cultivate public support, Oghul Ghaimish Khatun apparently felt a deeper desire for more revenue. In July 1250, just prior to the election for the new khan, she issued an edict to increase the taxes on herders from 1 percent to 10 percent, thereby making the tax for Mongol herders the same as for conquered farmers. Such an act alienated the people whom she most needed to support her, and it revealed her poor sense of political timing.
With the full support of her four capable sons and a lifetime of preparation and waiting, Sorkhokhtani organized the campaign to elect her son to the office of Great Khan. Sorkhokhtani conspired with her nephew Batu Khan of the Golden Horde to bypass the authority of Oghul Ghaimish, call a new khuriltai, and orchestrate the election of her eldest son, Mongke, as Great Khan. This would be the last election in which the women of the family had a public voice. Batu Khan’s invitation went to all the queens. “He sent messengers to the wives of Genghis Khan, the wives and sons of Ogodei Khan, the wife of Tolui Khan, Sorkhokhtani Beki, and the other princes and emirs of the right and left.” On July 1, 1251, the assembled Mongol throng proclaimed the election of Sorkhokhtani’s son, the forty-three-year-old Mongke, as Great Khan of the Great Mongol nation.
After securing the election for her son, Sorkhokhtani personally presided over the trial of her defeated rival, the ousted queen Oghul Ghaimish. Guyuk had interpreted the law to allow torture of people who were not members of the Borijin clan, and this now applied to her. Even if Oghul Ghaimish had been the daughter of Checheyigen, and thus the granddaughter of Genghis Khan, by the rules of patrilineal descent she was not a member of the Borijin clan but of the clan of her father. Her husband and her children were all Borijin members and unquestionably Mongols, but she was neither.
In a show trial similar to the one endured by Fatima, Oghul Ghaimish had to face her accusers naked, her hands sewn together with strips of rawhide. The ordeal was more public torture and interrogation than a judicial proceeding, and other women of the Ogodei branch of the family also had to face similar torture and judgment. The outcome was always the same. The condemned woman was executed in some gruesome manner and thrown into the river.
Mongke conducted the trial of the men. He sat on a chair in front of a shrine to Genghis Khan and had each man brought in for questioning. Since it was still, at least for now, against the law of Genghis Khan to torture a member of the Borijin family, Mongke ordered that their retainers be brought in and beaten to make them confess the crimes of their former masters. As part of the spectacle, one of the ministers decided or was forced to commit suicide with his own sword during the proceedings. Tanggis, an Oirat son-in-law of the late Guyuk, was beaten until the flesh fell from his thighs; yet he was a lucky one, because he survived. In yet another sign of how far they had drifted from the laws of Genghis Khan, the new generation of Mongol rulers seems to have lost its abhorrence of public bloodletting.
After the main trials in the central Mongol court concluded, regional officials were ordered to hold similar trials of members of Ogodei’s lineage and their former administrators. The purge reached a climax in a literal hunt for dissenters who had escaped from the court to the countryside and found refuge from the first round of reprisals. In the traditional hunts, men formed a large circle, and by tightening it drove the prey toward the center for slaughter. In this enormous hunt, Mongke’s court ordered ten units of ten thousand men each to sweep through the land in a large military formation, searching for sympathizers of the deposed branch of the family. The hunt yielded some three hundred families who had fled from the authorities. They suffered the same fate as those before them. They were beaten with heated brands until they confessed. Then they were executed.
We know nothing of most of the victims or of their alleged crimes.
They survive in the historical record only because their deaths left a warning to future generations. One queen called Toqashi Khatun was tried and convicted, in the presence of her husband, by a former political rival serving as judge. The judge “ordered her limbs to be kicked to a pulp.” According to Rashid al-Din, the judge thereby “relieved his bosom filled with an ancient grudge.”
Sorkhokhtani had emerged victorious, but her sons then channeled their fury against the survivors, including women who had once been their allies and helped them attain power. The worst era for royal Mongol women followed the election of Mongke Khan. Once such a purge destroys its original target, the sponsors of the persecutions often find it difficult to stop the violence. Having destroyed their enemies, they turn their fury toward one another and thus make enemies of their former con
federates. The killers began to kill one another. Soon women within the victorious side came under attack.
Rubruck reported that when a wife of Mongke Khan had two people executed, he became angry with her. Then “he forthwith sent to his wife and asked her where she had found out that a wife could pass a death sentence, leaving her husband in ignorance of what she had done.” As punishment he had her sealed up in solitary confinement for a week “with orders that no food be given her.”
As for the queen’s two retainers, a brother and sister who had carried out the executions, Mongke first killed the brother. Then he ordered the man’s head be removed and hung around his sister’s neck. Soldiers then chased her around the camp beating her with burning brands. When they finally tired of the torture, they killed her. Mongke also wanted to have his wife executed but did not. “And he would have had his own wife put to death had it not been for the children he had of her.”
Every successful purge needs a complicit judge or judiciary, and the family of Sorkhokhtani found him in Menggeser Noyan of the Jalayir clan, whom they appointed to be supreme judge of the Mongol Empire. Since he came from neither the ruling Borijin clan nor any of their marriage ally clans, he should have been fair and impartial in reviewing cases and imposing judgments, but according to the Persian chronicles, “He was pitiless in executing offenders.” Initially, Menggeser Noyan arrested the members of Guyuk’s family, oversaw the interrogation, passed judgment on them, and then executed them. In this way, he insulated Mongke Khan and his family from some of the personal blame, since it was still too grave a crime for one member of the Borijin clan to execute another.