The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire (36 page)

The building of the Great Wall posed a problem for Manduhai’s strategy of waiting out the struggle in hopes that the Chinese would crush her rivals. The decision to build it meant that the Ming court had given up hope of chasing down the Mongol warlords. Instead, the court had marked a new defensive line and in effect surrendered everything beyond it to them. The Chinese had defeated Beg-Arslan and driven him away from the border, but Manduhai would have to deal with him without their assistance.

By 1475, when Wang Yue came to serve in the court, the emperor had entered the eleventh year of his reign, and he had not been able to produce a viable heir with Lady Wan or any other woman in his household. He was not yet thirty, but Lady Wan was fifty-five, and it was unlikely she would bear another child.

The court eunuchs working in the palace of the deposed empress, who had flogged Lady Wan in a pique of jealousy ten years earlier, appeared at court with a five-year-old boy. According to the story, as the emperor looked into a mirror one day while a eunuch combed his hair, he sighed in regret that he had no son. The eunuch revealed to the emperor the startling news that he already had a son and that he lived hidden in the palace of his first wife, the disgraced Empress Wu.

Since the emperor apparently had not had conjugal relations with the former empress, the eunuchs claimed that the boy had been born to one of her attendants, a woman captured from the Yao nation in the south in 1467. Despite the unusual circumstances, the emperor needed a successor, and he took the boy to Lady Wan. They accepted the boy and officially installed him as imperial heir. The boy’s birth mother then died under unexplained circumstances. Suspicion for the death fell on Lady Wan, but the deed may have just as easily been done
by supporters of the old empress, who hoped to control the boy and thus have a return route to influence and power in the court.

Lady Wan and her cadre of eunuchs worked hard to stimulate the sexual interests of the emperor so that he might father more children. The chief eunuch in charge of the central stores scoured the country for stimulants, and in the process he acquired vast amounts of pearls, which were thought to have special reproductive powers. In his capacity as the chief publisher of the empire, he gathered pornography and sexual manuals and had them reproduced in elegant volumes meant to enlighten and motivate the emperor. Lady Wan brought in magicians, Taoist and Buddhist monks, and a diversity of charlatans to perform magical rites to help him. Happily for the court, the emperor fathered seventeen children with five women in a little more than a decade.

He continued to live primarily with Lady Wan, who increasingly spent her time supervising financial issues and managing the office of eunuchs, since they controlled the commerce of the empire. Through them, she oversaw most of the major transactions related to tribute and trade, while ensuring that the imperial monopoly over commodities such as salt was maintained. Just as she served as de facto “wife of the emperor,” she also became the virtual chief financial officer of the empire.

Too many immediate issues and scandals distracted the Ming officials for them to focus on the long-term concern of Mongols at the border. The problem seemed taken care of. They had repulsed Beg-Arslan’s invasion, and now they were building the wall to keep him out. The expenses posed a problem, but they proved a much less interesting topic than the political and sexual dramas of the court.

Manduhai had not been waiting idly behind the Gobi. She had begun creating alliances with some of the southern Mongols in preparation for her eventual move to unite the two parts of the country. To control the south up to the Great Wall, she needed somehow to dispose
of both Beg-Arslan and Ismayil, preferably by killing them, or at least chasing them from the area. Rather than fighting both at once, it would be easier to deal with them one at a time. It is not clear if she managed to lure Ismayil into a temporary alliance or if she merely took advantage of a dispute with Beg-Arslan. No matter what the cause, she prepared to move against Beg-Arslan at a time when Ismayil was conspicuously absent.

One of the largest factions of Mongols living along the Chinese border was the conglomerate of old clans and lineages known as the Three Guards. These were Mongols who stayed behind when the Mongol royal court fled north in 1368, and as implied in their name, they had declared loyalty to the Ming Dynasty and worked as border guards. After eighty years of loyal service, they had rebelled and joined Esen about thirty years earlier, just around the time of Manduhai’s birth in 1448. Since Esen’s death they had operated as free agents, following first one and then another leader while raiding and extorting the Chinese when they could and temporarily serving them when profitable.

The son of one of the main leaders of the Three Guards married one of the two Borijin women whom Manduhai called daughter and who had been closely related to her first husband, Manduul, possibly as daughters or nieces. The other daughter had married Beg-Arslan, but she disappeared after helping the Golden Prince escape. Regardless of whether Manduhai arranged this marriage tie with the Three Guards or not, she took advantage of the relationship. As Beg-Arslan retreated to the west, he found himself geographically farther away from the Three Guards, who were based in the east. Manduhai made her alliance and prepared to deal with Beg-Arslan.

The Mongol chronicles commonly employed personal stories to summarize large-scale events. Thus, the desertion of the Three Guards from Beg-Arslan was presented in terms of a private grudge rather than in political terms. Beg-Arslan fell because of his cruelty and the vengeance it evoked.

According to the story, the Three Guards’ break with Beg-Arslan
occurred after a visit from their leader, the same one whose son was married to Manduhai’s so-called daughter. The commander called at Beg-Arslan’s
ger
one day just as Beg-Arslan was sipping from a bowl of butter soup that he had just cooled. A large pot of the soup boiled on the fire, and smelling the rich aroma of the soup, the visiting commander said that his mouth was “thirsty for its tastiness,” and he asked for some.

Beg-Arslan set aside the bowl of cool soup and, without the visitor noticing, maliciously poured boiling soup into another bowl, which he handed to the visitor. Having just seen Beg-Arslan gulping from the bowl without difficulty and not realizing the switch in bowls, the thirsty visitor eagerly took a large mouthful of the nearly boiling, greasy liquid.

Mongols pride themselves on their ability to abide both heat and cold; dropping or refusing food as too hot shows unmanly weakness. Spitting food out is an unforgivable insult. According to Carpini’s report on his visit to the Mongol court in the thirteenth century, “If a piece of food is given to anyone and he cannot eat it and he spits it out of his mouth, a hole is made beneath the tent and he is drawn out through the hole and killed without mercy.”

The visiting commander thought to himself: “If I swallow the soup, my heart will burn. If I spit it out I will be shamed.” So he pretended that nothing untoward had happened. He held the burning soup in his mouth to let it cool, and in so doing, “the skin of his palate came away and fell off.”

The commander vowed silently: “Until I die I shall never forget this hate. One day I shall think of it.”

The story of Beg-Arslan’s cruel disrespect for the commander circulated amid the rumors and stories of the steppe. The Three Guards joined Manduhai Khatun and Dayan Khan, and their first action was to move into the vacuum left by Beg-Arslan’s rout by invading the Ordos. With their allies in control of the Ordos, Manduhai and Dayan Khan at last had the base that they needed south of the Mongolian
Plateau, from which they could launch an open attack against Beg-Arslan. Manduhai prepared for Dayan Khan to lead the expedition.

In 1479, when Dayan Khan was about fifteen or sixteen, Manduhai sent him out on his first command. Dayan Khan took “the Chakhar and the Tumed [clans], and assembled them to set out against Beg-Arslan.”

He first sent a spy out west to locate Beg-Arslan. The man chosen was from the same clan as the Three Guards commander who had been burned. The spy approached the
ger
of Beg-Arslan under the pretext of being sick and needing medicine. He said to Beg-Arslan: “Alas! When this poor body of mine is peaceful, there is an enemy; when it is in good health, there is sickness.” Beg-Arslan poured some alcohol in a small silver dish and gave it to him to drink.

The visitor drank it, and then in remembrance of the earlier episode when his kinsman’s palate was burned, the spy put the silver dish inside his
deel
. “This is a souvenir of my drinking,” he was quoted as saying, and he probably wanted to bring the stolen trophy as evidence that he had located the right person.

After the man left, Beg-Arslan became suspicious and consulted an oracle, but received an ambiguous response that left him as uncertain as before. Nevertheless, the lack of a clearly good sign from the oracle was cause enough to call for his army to gather. Because the land was dry and supported minimal vegetation, the army had been spread out over a large area, and they did not arrive in time to mount a defense for Beg-Arslan.

When he saw the dust of Dayan Khan’s approaching army, Beg-Arslan raced to his horses and fled with a handful of his guards. Dayan Khan’s soldiers saw him and pursued him. But before the Mongols could overtake Beg-Arslan, he removed his helmet and put it on one of his men in an effort to deceive the attackers, while he fled in the opposite direction from his men.

The Mongol force quickly caught the man in Beg-Arslan’s helmet, but to save himself he pointed out the direction in which Beg-Arslan
had fled. “They caught up with Beg-Arslan and seized him,” according to the
Altan Tobci
, “and killed him at the depression of the Kiljir.” With finality, the chronicler recorded: “It is said that salt grew at the place where he was killed.”

The nomads of the steppe had an ancient tale of the wolf and a boy. The story told of a female wolf finding a human baby boy whose feet had been cut off and who had been abandoned on the steppe to die. The mother wolf nursed the boy back to health, protected him, and reared him. When the boy grew older, there was no one else to love him, so he mated with the wolf. From their offspring descended all the Turkic tribes that spread out from Mongolia. From them arose all the notable Turkic nations of history.

Dayan Khan had been born when his father, Bayan Mongke, was fourteen, but Dayan Khan passed his fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth years without an active marital relationship. Manduhai had either married or, more likely, promised to marry him when she made him khan. The Mongols did not usually make a distinction between engagement and marriage. A betrothed couple was referred to as husband and wife, but the marriage was not official until the groom-to-be completed his bride service. While exempt from the formal bride service, in a sense Dayan Khan was performing it by proving himself capable to fulfill his duties as Great Khan.

Around the year 1480, Dayan Khan and Manduhai took the final step into marriage and began to live together as husband and wife. At this time he was approximately seventeen years old, and she was thirty-three. They had already been together for ten years in a formal relationship as intended spouses. Of course, no mention survives to say when or how their intimate relationship began. Unlike some societies that crush together the marriage and sexual union, even forcing both events into the same day or within a few hours of each other, the Mongols had no such artificial scheduling. Boys and girls became engaged or married
as part of a social union, but their physical intimacy remained entirely private and up to their own desire and discretion.

In the many marriages where the wife was older, she led the way with her own sense of timing and appropriateness. Certainly, in the case of Manduhai and Dayan Khan, she most likely set the agenda. Because the wives are biologically more mature than their husbands, they are often ready to bear children as soon as the husband passes through puberty.

Dayan Khan did not become a father until he was nineteen years old; probably most of the young warriors of his age were already fathers by this time. By comparison, the relationship between Dayan Khan and Manduhai, no matter when it began, seemed less hurried and somewhat more mature. In 1482, two years after their marital union, the couple produced twin boys. Over the next twelve years, Manduhai gave birth to eight children, including three sets of twins.

The Mongol mother did not normally take to bed for delivery or recovery, and she was expected to get up to care for the newborn child immediately. A nomadic people, who need to move constantly in search of water and grass for the animals or in flight from human or animal predators, could not afford to allow any members of the community, even a new mother, to remain immobile in bed for long. If Manduhai’s delivery followed common procedure, then immediately after birth the mother scrubbed the infant’s body with wool to clean it.

As she cleaned the baby, the mother usually examined the body carefully, searching for blemishes of the skin or irregularities beneath it. She also looked for the telltale sign that marked all children of the Mongol and Turkic tribes, the blue spot. The spot, which could easily be mistaken for a large bruise by someone unfamiliar with it, appeared clearly at the base of the spine, just at the top of the crack between the buttocks, and after a few years it faded away. For the Mongols, the spot had a nearly sacred significance that marked them clearly and distinguished them from other people. It may have been caused by the blood vessels showing through the very white skin on a place in the body
with little fat to obscure the vessels; or perhaps, as they were taught, the Blue Spot marked them as the children of the Eternal Blue Sky. From long interaction with other peoples, the Mongols and Turkic tribes had taken this mark on the child as a distinctive separation that made them special as the Blue Spot People.

Once she cleaned the newborn baby, the mother typically swaddled it tightly in a sheep’s fleece. Most babies spent the first year of life packed snugly into the fleece that, in turn, fit into a portable cradle made of bark, twigs, or leather that fit snugly under the mother’s arm when she needed to go outside the
ger
. As the child grew a little older, he or she could ride on the saddle in front of the mother and father, carefully protected by the embrace of their two arms and legs. For longer trips, such as moving camp, the parents needed both arms for other tasks, and the young children would be put in a small basket strapped to the side of a camel or horse, as Manduhai had once transported Dayan Khan.