The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire (6 page)

Having punished one rival, Genghis Khan set about rewarding those who had been most loyal to him. His most pressing task as the new ruler of all the tribes was to divide up all the conquered lands and assign rulers to them. He did not give these lands to his sons or his generals; he gave all of them to his wives.

Each wife would rule her own territory and manage her own independent
ordo
, “court” (sometimes written as
ordu)
. Borte Khatun received most of the Kherlen River, much of which had once belonged to the Tatars, with her
ordo
at Khodoe Aral near the Avarga stream that had formerly been held by the Jurkin clan. Khulan Khatun received the Khentii Mountains around Mount Burkhan Khaldun, which was the Mongol homeland. Yesui Khatun received the Tuul River, including the summer
ordo
of the Kereyid ruler, Ong Khan. Her elder sister, Yesugen Khatun, received the Khangai Mountains, which had been the territory of the Naiman.

Genghis Khan handed over the already conquered territories to his wives because now he was about to begin a new round of conquests, and for this he needed a new set of allies. A major part of the work that summer consisted in granting new marriages, ratifying marriages that
had already been agreed to, and formally sanctifying some that had already occurred. He had won the wars by fighting, but now Genghis Khan sought to ensure peace through a thick network of marriage alliances. Traditionally, steppe khans took a wife from each of their vassal clans, but Genghis Khan never had more than four wives at a time. Borte always remained the chief one, and her children assumed precedence over all others.

Rather than taking a large number of wives, Genghis Khan sought to make marriage alliances for his children instead. Having twice failed to negotiate new alliances through marriages to his eldest son and daughter, he returned to a safer option. He negotiated another union with an already trusted ally, Botu of the Ikires, who had married Genghis Khan’s sister, Temulun. Genghis Khan arranged for his eldest daughter, Khojin, to marry Botu.

This time Genghis Khan had no trouble negotiating marriages for his sons and daughters. He married three of his daughters to Mongols in the traditional system of
qudas
, marriage alliances. The three grooms were related to his mother, Hoelun, and his wife Borte. In addition to Khojin, a daughter married a relative of his wife Borte, and his fifth daughter, Tumelun, married another of his mother’s relatives, though this marriage caused some confusion for chroniclers because of the similarity of her name to Genghis Khan’s sister, Temulun.

Most of the participants in the
khuriltai
of 1206 came from the steppes, but a few delegations from the world beyond also participated; among these were Genghis Khan’s newfound allies, the Onggud. The fortuitous meeting with the merchant Hassan at Baljuna had evidently made as deep an impression on the Onggud as it had on Genghis Khan, because some of them also became his followers. The decisive test for this impromptu alliance between the Mongols and the Onggud had come in 1205, two years after the Baljuna rescue. After rallying his followers to defeat the Tatars and the Kereyid, Genghis Khan faced only a single powerful confederation left on the steppes, the Naiman. The Naiman leader dispatched envoys to Ala-Qush, an Onggud leader, to woo him away from Genghis Khan and join them in a
war against the upstart Mongols. Such an alliance might have been able to crush the newly emerging nation from opposite sides, or at least keep it from expanding further. Ala-Qush not only rejected the Naiman offer of an alliance but sent envoys to warn Genghis Khan of a planned Naiman trap.

According to tradition, when the Onggud envoys approached the camp of Genghis Khan, they brought with them a gift from civilization; this time it was wine made from grapes, a commodity previously unknown to the Mongols, but one destined to have a major impact on them and the success of their world empire. In recognition of their unique relationship, Genghis Khan agreed to a future marriage between his daughter Alaqai Beki and the son of Ala-Qush of the Onggud.

After the earlier failed marriage negotiations for his offspring, Genghis Khan always married his daughters to only the most trustworthy of allies. He never permitted one to marry a rival, nor did he allow them to marry any of his generals or other subordinates. Despite the emphasis on rising in rank according to merit and deeds, he maintained strict lineage segregation. His daughters married men from the aristocratic lineages of the steppes, and later he extended this practice to the ruling lineages of specially chosen neighboring kingdoms.

Genghis Khan’s sons also married women from the same
quda
alliance lineages as his daughters. In addition, the sons, and Genghis Khan himself, sometimes took a different type of wife from the royal wives and daughters of defeated tribes. In each case, Genghis Khan and his sons married a widow or daughter of the dead khan, thereby unmistakably demonstrating that the men of Genghis Khan’s family had replaced those former rulers. Thus Genghis Khan took two Tatar queens and a Merkid princess as wives, while arranging for his eldest and youngest sons to marry the Kereyid princesses who had been Ong Khan’s nieces.

As part of the wedding ceremony, a Mongol bride stood in front of her new
ger
and put on the
boqta
, the tall headgear of a queen. She also put on all her jewelry. Before entering the
ger
, she walked between two large fires that sanctified her so that she might enter her marriage in
the purest possible state. The marriage happened without much ceremony, but for eight days afterward, people brought presents to the couple. On the eighth day, the family would host a grand feast. As described by Pétis de la Croix, “These feasts seldom end without some quarrel, because they are too profuse of their liquors.”

The husband had to have a place prepared for his new wife. In one episode in which a khan brought in a new queen for whom he had not yet prepared a home, he sought to bring her to the
ger
of his senior wife. Out of hospitality for the younger woman, the elder queen did not at first object and she went to sleep, apparently without suspecting that the couple might try to consummate the marriage at that time.

However, during the night the khan became amorous with his bride. The older queen, sleeping nearby, awoke. “How shall I watch you two enjoying each other in bed?” she angrily asked them.

Although it was night, the senior queen ordered them out. “Leave my
ger
!
”
Since there was no other
ger
in the vicinity, the khan and his younger wife had to spend the night outside in the open. The next day, the khan was able to make arrangements to move the young queen in with some of his relatives until he could prepare her a place of her own. In the
ger
, the wife ruled even if her husband happened to be a khan.

Her first felt home came from her husband’s family, but through the years she would gradually add to it by unrolling the insulating blankets, called the “mother felt,” and pounding in new wool to make a series of fresh coverings, called the “daughter felts.” In this way her hands, her perspiration, and her soul became a part of the felt, and the
ger
became more and more hers. Eventually, her sheets of daughter felt would help to make new
gers
for her daughters-in-law; in this way, from generation to generation, the walls of each generation would be made from all the women who had married into the family through all the generations.

During the festivities and business of the summer of 1206, Genghis Khan gave a lengthy speech praising young Altani, who had saved the
life of Tolui, and arranged for her marriage to Boroghul, one of the orphans whom his mother had adopted. Of his three brothers, four sons, and four stepbrothers, Genghis Khan singled out only Boroghul as a
baatar
, or hero. When he was a young warrior of about seventeen years old, Boroghul had rescued Genghis Khan’s third son, Ogodei, from the battlefield, after the prince had been shot and fallen off his horse, passing out from a lack of blood. Despite the close presence of enemies, Boroghul nursed Ogodei through the night, continuously sucking the blood from his neck and thereby preventing infection or blood poisoning. When dawn came, Boroghul loaded Ogodei onto his horse and, holding him tightly, managed to evade enemy patrols, bringing him safely home to his father.

The speech about Altani’s bravery and the shorter mention of Boroghul’s similar courage not only highlighted their status as heroes, but it also gently reminded Genghis Khan’s own sons of their lack of achievement. His sons, even in adulthood, were still the objects of rescue, not the rescuers. They depended on others for heroism that they still had not shown. Sadly for Genghis Khan, they never would.

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.”