The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire (16 page)

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.

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 would 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.