by The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire
As Elbeg Khan approached the rabbit, he could see it dying atop the freshly fallen snow. A single arrow had pierced its body, but with an ever-weakening pulse, its heart squirted a spray of blood that collected in small red pools in the snow. The sight of the red blood on the white snow created a hypnotic effect over the Great Khan. He seemingly entered into a trance and stared transfixed at the peaceful face of the rabbit and at the marked contrast of the two colors of red blood on white show—each so beautiful and yet so dramatically different.
It was at this moment that the soul, the shimnus, of the rabbit abandoned its dying body and entered into Elbeg Khan. The shimnus could not bear to leave the sight of its old body, and thus, through the eyes of its new body in Elbeg Khan, it stared back at its former self, the dead rabbit.
Finally, the shimnus-possessed Elbeg Khan spoke to his hunting companion in a pleading voice. “If only there were a woman this beautiful—with a face as white as snow and cheeks as red as blood.”
Rather than helping the Great Khan escape from the trance, his hunting companion, Dayuu, who was also being pulled inextricably into the horror about to unfold, encouraged the delusional desire. “But there is, my khan, such a woman,” responded Dayuu, but then he seemed to taunt the mesmerized khan. “But you may not see her,” he added.
“Who is she?” demanded the anxious and bewildered khan.
“She is the wife of your son,” answered Dayuu. “She is splendid like this,” he said pointing to the exquisite color on the white snow.
A strict taboo forbade a man from entering the ger belonging to the wife of either his son or his younger brothers, all of whom were collectively referred to as sons. While younger men had friendly access to senior women married into the family and might themselves one day marry one of them, a senior man had almost no interaction with the wives of his junior relatives and certainly could never marry one. Even to bring milk or food to her ger, he had to stand outside and pass it to her through an opening in the ger wall without seeing her or entering the dwelling.
Upon hearing that the beauty of his son’s wife was as great as the rabbit blood on the white snow, Elbeg Khan felt an irresistible urge to see her with his own eyes despite the law against doing so. His trancelike daydream suddenly acquired a focus and a goal that took his sight and attention away from the dead rabbit.
Genghis Khan once said that “when a khan behaves like a commoner, he will destroy his Mongol subjects.” Elbeg Khan was about to commit a crime that would nearly destroy the precious little that remained of the dwindling Mongol nation. The diabolical tangle of transgressions began as Elbeg Khan returned from hunting to his main camp determined to see this young woman.
“Show me what I have not yet seen,” he ordered his assistant, showing that he clearly understood the forbidden nature of his request. “You who bring together what is distant; you who satisfy my desires, my Dayuu, go!”
Dayuu slyly watched and waited for the appropriate opportunity to arrange a tryst between the khan and his daughter-in-law. After seeing the khan’s son leave to go hunting, Dayuu cautiously approached the beautiful young wife. “The khan commands you to let him come and visit you to see how beautiful you are,” he informed her.
Fully understanding the meaning of the proposal and its impropriety, she adamantly refused. “Are the heavens and earth no longer separate and it has now become acceptable for a great khan to see his daughter-in-law?” she demanded of the messenger. “Or has my husband now died?” she asked, “and the khan comes to tell me of it?” Suspecting an even deeper supernatural change, she perceptively asked, “Or has the khan turned into a black dog?”
The messenger returned to Elbeg Khan with the harsh words of rejection from his son’s wife. In his wrathful envy of his own son and in his fixation on seeing the woman with a face as beautiful as blood on fresh snow, Elbeg Khan mounted his horse and went out hunting his son. His sexual obsession had grown so strong that nothing could prevent his fulfilling that desire. The khan found his son and killed him.
Elbeg Khan rode back to the camp to rape his dead son’s widow. Rather than satisfying the khan’s desire, however, the attack only increased it. As his obsession with the young woman grew, he made her his wife. When she became the new khatun, Elbeg Khan made Dayuu the taishi, an office generally equivalent to prime minister and the highest position allowed to any man outside the Borijin Clan.
The curse of the rabbit spirit now began to spread, like a vicious plague of the soul. The beautiful young woman, the innocent victim who had lost her husband and was forced into a new marriage, became infected herself with the same wicked obsession of red on white, but in her the spell found a different focus. She needed to see her new husband’s red blood on the white skin of the friend who helped him to kill her first husband and violate her. Just as the khan lusted after sex, she lusted for revenge, and she would use sex to avenge herself on both of them.
The unwilling queen watched and waited around her new imperial ger in the royal camp. Her opportunity for revenge came when, once again, the Great Khan left to hunt with his falcon. Dayuu arrived at the royal tent. Because the Great Khan was not there, he waited outside the door.
The aggrieved queen saw the man and sent a servant out to him. “Why wait out on the cold steppe?” asked the servant, “when you can come into the royal home where it is warm?”
Dayuu accepted the invitation and approached the royal ger of the newly installed young queen. When he entered, she greeted him not with anger but welcomed him into the tent with exaggerated honor and lavish hospitality. She served him a platter of prized foods, including butter dainties and dried dairy dishes. She also offered him a drink of twice-distilled mare’s milk, the potent “black drink” of the steppe tribes. As the minister quickly showed signs of inebriation, she told him, with deceptive humility and feigned appreciation, what a great debt she owed him “for making my poor person important, for making my insignificant person great, for making me a queen.”
In appreciation, she said that she wished to give him her personal silver bowl. According to steppe etiquette, he had to drink the contents of the offered bowl to show his acceptance of the gift. But when he did so, he immediately fell unconscious.
The queen moved quickly toward her prey. She dragged his drugged, limp body onto her bed. She then tore out clumps of her own hair, ripped her clothes, and clawed herself all over her body. She tore at the fabric lining the walls, and then she began to scream for help. Servants and guards came running to her aid, and she showed them the wounds of red blood on her white flesh that, she said, came from fighting off a sexual attack from Dayuu, her husband’s friend and councillor.
The queen sent out her servant again, this time to find her husband, the khan, and summon him home to deal with the crime against her and against his honor and the prestige of the family. When the khan returned, she emotionally explained that she had summoned his councillor to thank him for making it possible for her to marry the khan. Then, when she gave him her bowl in gratitude and he drank its contents, “he wanted to become intimate with me,” she explained. “When I refused, he attacked me.”
Slowly regaining consciousness, the councillor heard the voices around him repeating the accusations against him. He panicked, and his fear gave him a new burst of energy with which he managed to jump up and flee from the tent. He grabbed the reins of the first horse he found, jumped on it, and raced away from the royal camp.
With the assumption that the flight proved his friend’s guilt, the khan called his men together, and they set out in pursuit. Just as he had hunted down the white rabbit, the khan now hunted down the friend who had helped him. When the khan caught up with the councillor, a fierce fight ensued between the two men. As the khan approached, Dayuu fired an arrow and struck Elbeg Khan in the hand, slicing off his little finger.
In retaliation, the khan shot his former friend and let him lie moaning in agony before finally killing him. Now the enraged khan skinned the
body of his friend precisely as he had skinned the rabbit. The khan brought the flesh from the dead man’s backside to his young queen as a gift of revenge against her accused attacker.
For the aggrieved queen, however, the punishment of only one of the two men who had wronged her failed to quell her anger at the murder of her first husband. In the words of the chronicles, “She lay on her bed without satisfaction.” But when her husband approached her with the man’s skin dangling from his wounded hand, she reached out and took the khan’s wounded hand. She brought it up to her lips to kiss it, and she lovingly licked the blood from the stump of his missing finger. At the same time, she gently took the gift of the freshly flayed skin of her husband’s dead friend and also brought it to her lips.
The khan now saw what his obsession for a woman as beautiful as the red blood on white snow had brought him—only now it was red human blood, his own blood, dripping onto the snow white fat of his former friend. She gently licked the skin in the same way that she had licked her husband’s bleeding finger, and then she swallowed the grease of the skin together with the blood of her husband.
“Although I am a woman,” she proclaimed to her husband. “I have avenged the vengeance of my husband. When I die, there will be no regret.”
Only now did the khan fully comprehend the evil of his own deeds, and on account of his evil sins, his family would pay dearly. The queen had avenged the crime against her, but that act proved to be no more than the opening of the rabbit’s curse on the royal family and the Mongol nation. They would now fight among themselves, one Mongol tribe against another, clan against clan, sister against brother, mother against son, husband against wife, and daughter against father.
The sordid tale of Elbeg Khan summarizes, as well as any other explanation, the degenerate state of the Borijin clan. Their Mongol nation seemed to be gasping through a protracted death. The Mongol power appeared to have at last entered its final phase. On the fertile steppe where millions of animals once roamed, now hunger stalked the few surviving animals and threatened the nomads who depended on them. The clans and tribes moved in scattered groups across a once beautiful landscape now ravaged by war and overgrazing and through forests decimated by the returning royal court. Animals starved amid the environmental degradation, and roving gangs of thugs seized the animals that survived. The returning invaders abided by neither Mongol custom nor law. It was not yet the end of time, but surely the end could not be far away. A constant stream of Mongols made their way across the Gobi to surrender to the Ming Dynasty and seek jobs as soldiers or border administrators.
Gangs of former foreign guards and their Mongol allies of the moment seized rival Borijin boys to proclaim them khan or to mock them and degrade them as objects of derision, exploitation, and torture. They tossed the title of Great Khan back and forth from one member of the Borijin clan to another the way that horsemen tossed around the carcass of a goat in a game of tribal polo. Men who once would have laid down their lives for their Borijin leader now made and replaced the Great Khans on any whim.
The daughters of queens who once set out from Mongolia to rule the world now served as nothing more than tools of amusement and instruments of competition among the basest of men. Like looters of the treasury playing with jewels as though they were dice, the powerful men of the moment seized Borijin girls to trade among one another as little more than sexual toys. After all, if the Great Khan was not above raping his son’s wife, then why should any man refrain from whatever lust might strike his heart?
The Mongol nation and the once glorious Golden Family sank so low and suffered so much abuse that it would possibly have been a blessing for the whole family to have died and the name of the nation to have disappeared into the wind like the cold ashes of an abandoned camp. So many nomadic nations had risen, fallen, and disappeared in the thousands of years since humans first learned to herd animals and turn the sea of grass into sustenance. The torn and neglected banner of the nation was tattered and scattered like clumps of wool stuck in the brown grass. Even the horses seemed too exhausted to raise a cloud of dust. In the pages of history, the passing of yet one more such nation, even one once as powerful and important as the Mongols, hardly would have seemed surprising.
Yet amid all the depravity and defeat, one woman held her ground, kept her focus, and looked forward to a day when the nation might be reassembled, the flags raised again, and dignity restored to the royal clan. Like a small thread on which the fate of the Mongol nation fluttered, she alone sustained its spirit. She was Samur, the daughter of Elbeg Khan by birth, but the true daughter of Genghis Khan in spirit, strength, and sheer stubbornness.
She was born in the 1380s, in the first Borijin generation to be reared back in Mongolia after the expulsion from China. Samur carried the Chinese-derived title gunj, which the Mongols had adopted during their stay in China and substituted for the older Mongolian title of beki previously used for princesses. Samur Gunj began life as a victim of all the corruption and chaos engulfing the Mongol nation and her Golden Family. Her debut into world history came in the midst of the sordid affair of her father with his daughter-in-law.
After her father, Elbeg Khan, killed his ally and councillor Dayuu, he realized what a tactical error it had been, even though he believed it was morally justified. In a desperate effort to maintain his office of khan and avoid being killed in revenge for what he had done, Elbeg gave his young daughter Samur to the dead man’s son as a peace offering and compensation for the killing. By receiving Princess Samur as a wife, Dayuu’s son also received his dead father’s title and command of the Oirat in western Mongolia.
Elbeg Khan’s most dangerous enemy, however, was not among outside rivals and former allies; it was within his own family. Samur’s mother was Elbeg’s senior wife, Kobeguntai. She had become deeply resentful when her husband took his new young wife, and now he took her daughter from her to pay off the political debts incurred by his sins. She found a supporter of her own, killed Elbeg Khan, married her co-conspirator, and left the nation adrift without a khan. The turmoil resulting from the Great Khan’s terrible deeds would last for nearly a century.
At no moment in this long ordeal of the coming decades would Samur hold supreme power anywhere; yet throughout it, she held the survival of the nation in her hands. Her actions determined its fate as she faced crisis after crisis. For more than half a century, Samur fought unsuccessfully to reunite the Mongol nation and to free her male relatives in the Borijin clan from their captivity by their own guards, who perpetually fought among themselves for the meager riches left in the country. Her husband held the office of taishi of the Oirat, and when he died in the struggle to liberate the Mongols, her son stepped forward to take the title and resume the battle.
From roughly 1400 until 1450, while the so-called Great Khans were held prisoner of various strongmen, she formed a powerful force based in the Oirat tribes in western Mongolia and constantly, if vainly, attempted to resuscitate the Mongol royal family and liberate them from their captivity. She encouraged her husband to mount repeated campaigns to rescue the nominal Great Khan from his captors, and when her husband was killed in this effort, she encouraged her son in the same pursuit until he too was killed.
The Golden Clan established by Genghis Khan had completely lost control of the reins of state, and they were held captive by an unusual assortment of men. Their captors had Mongolian names, spoke the Mongol language, wore Mongol clothes, sometimes had Mongol wives, and in general, had become an intimate part of Mongol society. Yet they remained quite different from the Mongols. These men derived from an odd mixture of captives whom the Mongols had brought back from Ossetia, Russia, Ukraine, and other parts of Europe to be their imperial guards, but who, over time, had taken control of the royal family.
The type of strongman who ruled Mongolia in the fifteenth century was typified by one who carried the nickname Arugtai, meaning “the One with the Dung Basket,” in reference to the job he performed in the court o
f Elbeg Khan. Despite his lowly status, like all dung collectors he had the ability to roam freely throughout the day in search of dried dung. This freedom also gave him the opportunity to talk with many people, and he thereby became a source of information for members of the household. From this position, he slowly gained power and moved into the political vacuum left by Elbeg Khan’s death. He made his hostile attitude toward the Borijin clan clear. “It is dangerous to let the offspring of a savage beast roam freely,” he said. “You should not indulge the son of your enemy.” On the basis of this policy, Arugtai hunted the Borijins down to kill them or keep them captive for future schemes.
After the death of Samur’s husband and then her son, she encouraged her grandson Esen to become taishi and to continue her struggle against the strongmen who controlled her male relatives and to reunite the Oirat and Mongol tribes. Following the failures of his father and grandfather, Esen quickly and easily began assembling the Mongol tribes—some through conquest, but many through persuasion. The Mongols seemed suddenly invigorated and ready once again to follow their conquering leader to the ends of the earth.
In order to recapture control of the Silk Route, Esen began to raid the Muslim oases under the rule of Ways Khan, yet another descendent of Genghis Khan. Esen defeated the Muslims repeatedly: “It is told that the [Muslim] khan fought twenty-one battles” against the Mongols. “Once he was victorious … [but] in all the rest he was routed.” Esen captured him three times but released him. With almost a sigh for the incompetence of Ways Khan, the Muslim chronicler concluded the statement with “God knows best.”
During a campaign in 1443–45, Esen quickly took control of the oasis of Hami, along the Silk Route west of the Gansu Corridor, and then conquered the Three Guards, the Mongol units whom the Ming employed to guard their borders. He rallied Mongol unity and called upon them to remember their identity. Mocking the titles given the Three Guards and other Mongol leaders by the Ming, Esen reminded them that, unlike himself, who had no titles directly from Genghis Khan, they held important titles granted by him to their forefathers and that they should honor them above Ming titles. After the defeat of the Three Guards, the Jurched (Manchu) voluntarily submitted to Esen. Officials on the Ming court lacked the ability to take strong military action against their former allies who were now deserting them, and they mistakenly calculated that merely suspending trade with the rebels would soon return them to Ming authority.