Jack Weatherford

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

  A woman named Saichai and her husband, Temur Khadag, who is sometimes credited along with his six brothers with being the child’s rescuer, became the new foster parents for the boy, and set about trying to restore his health and rehabilitate his body. His new mother instituted a long treatment in the traditional Mongolian art of therapeutic massage or bone setting known as bariach. Gentle massage and light bone adjustment still forms a regular part of child rearing among the Mongols and is viewed as essential to the child’s body growing in a properly erect and aesthetically pleasing manner. Older people in particular, such as grandparents, sit around the ger in the idle hours, rubbing the child’s muscles and tugging at the bones and joints.

  Saichai rubbed the child’s wounds with the milk of a camel that had recently given birth for the first time. The milk was prepared in a shallow wooden bowl with a veneer of silver over the wood. Both the milk and the silver had medicinal properties important to Mongol medicine. The treatment required persistent massage by rubbing the milk onto the damaged parts of the boy’s body and rubbing the warm silver bowl itself against the afflicted area. By this persistent massage of his damaged, but still growing, body, the bone setter gradually adjusted the boy’s bones and gently pushed them back into proper alignment. In the words of one chronicle, she wore through three silver bowls trying to repair Batu Mongke’s broken body. As is so often the case with suffering, the physical damages proved easier to treat than the emotional ones.

  After the good care of the foster family, Manduhai sent for Batu Mongke when he was about five years old. His foster father set out with him on a horse to escort him across the Gobi to the royal court, but while crossing a stream, the boy fell from the horse and nearly drowned before the father could jump from his horse and rescue him. Since the streams of the Gobi are quite small and only rarely have water in them, it seems strange that the boy would have had so much difficulty getting up and remounting his horse unless he was already badly injured or was severely hurt in the fall. For whichever reason, he arrived at the camp of Manduhai in quite bad physical condition, and his survival remained in doubt for some time.

  Manduhai’s first challenge was to install him as Great Khan in a way that people would view as legitimate. Genghis Khan left precise laws in place prescribing that the Great Khan must be elected at a khuriltai. If the candidate, and there was only one at a time, did not attract representatives of an overwhelming majority of the tribes and clans, then anyone not attending could always deny the legitimacy of the election. Genghis Khan’s descendants had violated the spirit of the law from the start. Khubilai Khan made a mockery of the khuriltai, and Khubilai’s descendants abandoned it entirely. Subsequently, a khan sought legitimacy by being installed in office before the sulde, the horsehair banner of Genghis Khan that usually remained in the area of Burkhan Khaldun. But in the turmoil of Manduul and Bayan Mongke’s battles, it temporarily disappeared or was under the control of someone not sympathetic to Manduhai’s quest.

  Without the legitimizing process of the khuriltai or control of the sulde of Genghis Khan, Manduhai had to find another way to make the installation of a new Great Khan both legal and known to everyone. Manduhai needed the support of the people, and to achieve this, she also knew that she herself needed some semblance of spiritual or religious support for what she wished to undertake. Every time Genghis Khan wanted to rally his people to a cause that he thought might be difficult for them to support, he made a very public pilgrimage up the sacred mountain and prayed there until he felt that he had been granted the support.

  Manduhai chose to install Batu Mongke at the hitherto seemingly unknown Shrine of Eshi Khatun, the “First Queen.” The shrine, like many others, was little more than a tattered felt tent mounted on a cart and pulled by an ox or camel from one Mongol camp to another and from one sacred site to another. The importance of a nomadic shrine to the people on the steppe far exceeded its humble and worn appearance.

  Mongols worshipped male spirits on mountains or rocks piled up like a miniature mountain, called an ovoo; rocks, mountains, and cliffs constituted the bones, and therefore the male element, of the earth. Female spirits were worshipped near bodies of water, which formed the life-giving female parts of the earth, or else in caves, which were the wombs of Mother Earth. In contrast to the stationary ovoo, the ger became a sort of portable cave that allowed worshippers to honor the female spirit wherever she was taken.

  Both the male sulde and the female ger had a home territory, but as befitted the needs of a nomadic society, each could be easily transported anywhere it might be needed. When the sulde needed to be moved, a mounted warrior carried it by hand. The ger was always transported on a special ceremonial cart similar to the one normally owned and driven by women. When the tribe moved into a new homeland, their shrine led the way and sanctified the land as the people followed behind.

  Some elements of the shrine derived from ancient female Earth Mother worship in Inner Asia, but it also contained elements and possibly relics of Mongolian women such as Alan Goa, from whom all Mongol clans traced descent, and Hoelun, the mother of Genghis Khan. The Shrine of the First Queen may have been one or several of the Eight White Gers erected in honor of Genghis Khan’s queens at Avarga. Between the confiscation of women’s gers by Khubilai Khan and the repression of female shrines by a later form of Buddhism, little information survives about them. Had it not been for the importance of Manduhai’s visit to the Shrine of the First Queen, we would not know that it had existed.

  In choosing for the first time to install the Great Khan in the shrine dedicated to a female, Manduhai was not merely seeking to restore the dynasty of Genghis Khan. She also sought to restore the male and female spiritual balance that had been so important to the success of Genghis Khan, but so persistently ignored by his heirs. While the Eternal Blue Sky offered inspiration, only the Mother Earth could offer success and fulfillment of the endeavor. Manduhai already had the inspiration of the Eternal Blue Sky; now she needed the support of the Earth Mother to bring her plan to reality.

  Before a small crowd of her apprehensive supporters, in the fall of 1470, still the Year of the Tiger, Manduhai dismounted from her horse at a respectful distance away from the shrine. Some of her retainers gathered behind her in support, others remained on their horses and watched from a distance, clearly as spectators rather than participants. She approached the final distance toward the shrine on foot as a humble petitioner approaching a sacred cave. When she came close to the front of the cart, she stopped and performed the tsatsal ritual, tossing fermented mare’s milk into the air as an offering to the spirits.

  Although her words would be addressed to the shrine and she would face away from the crowd, there could be no question that, in addition to being the spiritual outcry of a pilgrim, these words constituted a desperate plea of a queen to her people. This would be the most important political speech of her life. She had to make it clear to her people not only which choice she wished to make, but why she wanted them to follow it and accept her.

  Everyone knew the danger, both supernatural and bodily, that hung over these appearances of a national leader before a sacred shrine. Only a few decades earlier, the son of Samur Gunj had appeared at one of the shrines dedicated to Genghis Khan as a supplicant to take the office of Great Khan, but he had been killed. Whether one believed the popular explanation that the arrow had been fired supernaturally by the spirit, or one accepted a more mundane source for the killing, by the end of the ceremony, the supplicant lay dead on the ground in front of the tent.

  Despite the ritual precision of the ceremony and the real dangers lurking within it, Manduhai called out at the door of the tent. She began her emotional plea with a statement of deep personal desperation and confusion. In language reminiscent of religious hymns and sacred scriptures, she described her own life as wandering senselessly in a place “where black cannot be distinguished from white.” Her world was so dark, she lamented, that she could not distinguish the diff
erent colors on a multicolored horse.

  She addressed the spirit of the First Queen as the source from which emanated light and wisdom. Manduhai pleaded for wisdom to pass out from the divine gates of the First Queen’s world into the visible world of humans. Still standing in the open air outside the tent after this emotionally strained and somewhat frightened plea for help, Manduhai began to present her case in a formal, legalistic manner, calling upon the dynastic and cultural traditions of the Mongol state. She was laying out her case before the people, and she obviously had already made a choice of husband that she wished them all to accept.

  First, she stated the problem confronting the Mongol nation because the royal family had no men to serve as Great Khan. “The Borijin clan is under the threat of extinction,” she explained. The Mongols were living in a time of discord and violence. As articulated clearly by one of her descendants, “there was suffering,” and the state of the world was not stable. The Mongols did not resolutely distinguish between “khans and commoners” nor between “good and evil.” As the chronicler summarized the situation, “At that time the Borijin Golden Clan deteriorated.”

  After expounding on the dire condition of the Mongol people, Manduhai presented her own personal predicament. As though pleading for mercy before a judge, she lodged her complaint that she was being forced into marriage by another man and by the public support that he had.

  Speaking about Une-Bolod, the favored candidate to take her in marriage and become Great Khan, she acknowledged his power and popularity. “Because he is big and powerful,” she explained, he “wants to take me for his wife.” She made clear her unwillingness to marry the popular candidate, and to make her rejection of him unambiguous and irrevocable, she closed the door on him forever with a special oath and request of the First Queen. If she should ever yield to him, she placed a curse upon herself: “If I do it, I beg you First Queen, punish me harshly.”

  For the people gathered at the shrine, it must have been disappointing and perplexing as they sought to understand what the queen wanted. If she ruled out so steadfastly the most popular of the Mongol generals, then would she choose one of the Muslim warlords or an already arranged deal through the Ming court? Was their queen about to deliver her nation into the hands of foreigners? Was she about to betray them and the office she had served?

  Knowing the suspicious questions and fear in the minds of those around her, and possibly remembering the killing of the previous royal pilgrim, Manduhai quickly dispelled all these options and reasserted her loyalty. “If I desert you and your descendants,” she proclaimed to the First Queen and to the Mongol people in the simple imagery that every herder would immediately comprehend, “then take your long horse snare and lasso me.”

  She continued, in the strongest and most vivid form of oath that a Mongol could make, asking that if she brought any harm to her people or failed to protect them, “then may you break and rip apart my body.” For the Mongols, execution through mutilation constituted the least noble and most feared way of dying because it allowed all the soul-bearing liquids, especially the blood, to flow out onto the earth. Such a death not only kills the body but destroys the soul and pollutes the earth. Manduhai made it clear to everyone that if she failed in her duty and promises, she was requesting precisely such an ignominious death for herself. She added the wish that in killing her, the First Queen or the Mongol people should separate “my shoulders from my thighs.” In tearing apart the body, the oath breaker would surrender all connection to everyone, since the dismemberment would break the bones symbolizing the father and rip apart the flesh symbolizing the mother.

  The graphic oath made reference to one often employed by men going to war and swearing loyalty to one another in the face of all enemies; it was an explicitly male form of oath taking. Traditionally as part of the oath, the men killed three male animals—a stallion, a ram, and a dog—by cutting them in half. They separated the halves of the three animals and, standing between them, they made their vow: “O God! O Sky! O Earth! Hear that we swear such an oath. Here are the males of these animals. If we do not keep our oath and break our word, let us be as these animals are.” For Mongols, this vow before the Sky and the Earth constituted the highest oath possible. A lesser version of the oath was to hold out an arrow, break it into two pieces, and then hold the two pieces stretched far apart to show that the oath taker expected to be broken and pulled equally far apart for breaking the vow.

  After thus vowing never to desert her people, Manduhai invoked the protection of the First Queen. “I act as a daughter-in-law,” she said to the First Queen, emphasizing her loyalty to the Borijin clan. Manduhai’s plea made it clear that in rejecting Une-Bolod, she rejected all the options presented and had not considered the Muslim or the Ming alliances. Instead of the three options, Manduhai was seeking a new path unknown and unexpected. She would surrender her power to no man.

  With a sense of public drama and experience in how to build popular support, Manduhai called forth her choice to present to the First Queen and to her subjects. The figure who stepped forward from the crowd was not even a real man at all, but an awkward child only six or seven years old, dressed in big boots. Despite the extra height provided by the triple-soled boots that he wore for the occasion, he could scarcely control his own body, much less guide a nation. At an age when he had barely learned to command a horse, how could he command the armies needed to protect his office and his people?

  Manduhai introduced the boy to the spirit of the First Queen and to the assembled crowd as the grand-nephew of her late husband. “By coming to your tent,” she said very clearly to the spirit of the First Queen, “I wish to make your descendant Great Khan even though he is still a young boy.”

  Even if he trembled in fear in his oversized boots, merely by standing before the shrine of the First Queen and the assembly of Mongol nomads, Batu Mongke showed both tremendous bravery and total reliance on Manduhai, who guided him. Twice before in the previous generation, boys of his age had been proclaimed Great Khan, only to be murdered by their rivals before they could reach full maturity. Other fully grown men who bore the title were also ignominiously struck down and killed by the Muslim warlords who tried to control them. Any one of the new boy khan’s rivals for power might descend upon the unorthodox inauguration to seize Manduhai, but now that she had publicly proclaimed him Great Khan, any usurper would have to kill the young boy to make his own claim supportable.

  Batu Mongke stood at the Shrine of the First Queen before the people who were supposed to be his subjects, and was acclaimed by Manduhai as the new Great Khan, but his battered body still bore the signs of ill treatment. Fortunately for him, the heavy Mongol boots of manhood not only increased his stature, but the thick, stiff hide that came all the way up to the knee formed an inflexible brace that served to hold him erect even if his knees weakened and began to buckle during the long public ceremony.

  In his short but miserable life, he had cultivated a keen ability to discern other people’s motives and an intuitive recognition of their strategies in what they sought from him. In this life of betrayal and suffering, he had one attachment to one ally and guide, to whom he showed unswerving trust. Batu Mongke’s willingness to stand bravely and tall before all these dangers showed an extraordinary confidence in the judgment and guidance of the one person who had orchestrated this event.

  He had little choice about relying on Manduhai, but he soon learned that, in her, he had found not only a savior but also a guardian and mentor. She would be the one person who remained loyal to him and protective of his safety and his political interests until the day she died. Though no one else in the mounted throng may have had the confidence in her ability to protect him and to unite the nation, he showed no sign of doubt in her on that, or any other, day in his life.

  She perceived something in him that escaped the notice of others, and he found in her something that no one else could see. They had an understanding and faith in each other that s
eemed to surpass the limited views of those around them. Over the next thirty years, the two of them, like Qaidu Khan and Khutulun two centuries earlier, formed an indivisible if unlikely team, united by a bond that transcended generation and gender and which allowed them to achieve together what neither could have done alone.

  Manduhai and young Batu Mongke shared something important. They were both totally alone in the world. Both had been taken from their places of birth by circumstances beyond their control, and both had to live without the vast kinship network so important in tribal society. In Mongol society, a person depended almost totally on kin to provide all the supports needed in life. No religious, market, or fraternal organizations existed outside of the kinship network. The most dreaded misfortune in life was to be without family. The tragic figure in Mongol mythology was always the orphan. Many songs and poems bemoaned the sad fate and the empty future of such a person. The second most tragic figure was the widow whose husband left no male relative to marry her.

  Queen Manduhai and Batu Mongke formed a strange dyad of precisely these two outcasts. They had no parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, or even cousins. Everyone had either died or disappeared to some unknown place and fate. In a sense, both had been abandoned by life. Yet, through some tortured sequence of events and unusual circumstances, they had found each other and made an odd emotional alliance and political union. The orphan and the widow could scarcely be expected to survive alone, but they were not alone. They had each other.

  In officially making him Great Khan, Manduhai was also formally marrying the boy. While the office of Great Khan was conferred until death, the marriage would be considered a temporary formality until the boy was grown. At that time the two of them would negotiate whether to continue it or for him to take another wife. In the meantime, she was still the Mongol khatun and would rule alone in her own name as well as in his. For now, an inexperienced young queen who was barely more than a girl herself stood united with a crippled little boy of seven. Nothing about them appeared encouraging or inspiring. It scarcely seemed plausible that such an unlikely pair could survive the coming winter, much less conquer the quarrelsome Mongol tribes and take on foreign enemies.