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

A
LSO BY
J
ACK
W
EATHERFORD

 

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

 

The History of Money

 

Savages and Civilization:
Who Will Survive?

 

Native Roots:
How the Indians Enriched America

 

Indian Givers:
How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World

 

Tribes on the Hill:
The United States Congress—Rituals and Realities

 

May the Golden Light of the Eternal Blue Sky
forever bless the mothers and the daughters
of the Great Mongol Nation

 

 

I
NTRODUCTION
The Missing Chapter

 

O
N AN UNKNOWN DAY LATE IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY
, an unidentified hand clumsily cut away part of the text from the most politically sensitive section of
The Secret History of the Mongols
. The censored portion recorded words spoken by Genghis Khan in the summer of 1206 at the moment he created the Mongol Empire and gave shape to the government that would dominate the world for the next 150 years. Through oversight or malice, the censor left a single short sentence of the mutilated text that hinted at what had been removed: “Let us reward our female offspring.”

In the preceding section of the text, Genghis Khan bestowed offices, titles, territories, and vassals upon his sons, brothers, and other men according to their ability and contribution to his rise to power. But at the moment where the text reported that he turned to the assembly to announce the achievements and rewards of his daughters, the unknown hand struck his words from the record. The censor, or possibly a scribe copying the newly altered text, wrote the same short final sentence twice. Perhaps the copyist was careless in repeating it, or perhaps the censor deliberately sought to emphasize what was missing or even to taunt future generations with the mystery of what had been slashed away.

More than a mere history, the document known as
The Secret History of the Mongols
recorded the words of Genghis Khan throughout his life as he founded the Mongol nation, gave his people their basic laws, organized the administration, and delegated powers. It served as the biography of a tribe and its leader as well as the national charter or constitution of the nation that grew into a world empire. Only the most important members of the royal family had access to the manuscript, and therefore it acquired its name.

The
Secret History
provides an up-close and personal view of the private life of a ruling family that is unlike any other dynastic narrative. The text records the details of conversations in bed between husband and wife; of routine family problems as well as arguments over who had sex with whom; and expressions of the deepest fears and desires of a family who could not have known that they would become important actors in world history. Many episodes and characterizations, particularly those regarding Genghis Khan’s early life, are unflattering. It was not written by sycophantic followers currying favor, but by an anonymous voice dedicated to preserving the true history of one of the world’s most remarkable men and the empire he founded. That did not mean that the history was available to just anyone, however.

The Mongols operated possibly the most secretive government in history. They preserved few records, and those were written in the Mongolian language, which their conquered subjects were not allowed to learn. While Mongol khans gave away jewels and treasures with little evidence of covetousness, they locked their documents inside the treasury and kept them closely guarded. As Persian chronicler Rashid al-Din wrote in the thirteenth century: “From age to age, they have kept their true history in Mongolian expression and script, unorganized and disarranged, chapter by chapter, scattered in treasuries, hidden from the gaze of strangers and specialists, and no one was allowed access to learn of it.” Both the secrecy of the records and the apparent chaos in which they were kept served the purposes of the rulers. With such an unorganized history, the person who controlled the treasury of documents could pick and choose among the papers and hide or release parts as served some political agenda of the moment. If a leader needed to discredit a rival or find an excuse to punish someone, there was always some piece of incriminating evidence that could be pulled from the treasury. Following the example of Genghis Khan, the early Mongol rulers clearly recognized that knowledge constituted their most potent weapon, and controlling the flow of information served as their organizing principle.

Genghis Khan sired four self-indulgent sons who proved good at drinking, mediocre in fighting, and poor at everything else; yet their names live on despite the damage they did to their father’s empire. Although Genghis Khan recognized the superior leadership abilities of his daughters and left them strategically important parts of his empire, today we cannot even be certain how many daughters he had. In their lifetime they could not be ignored, but when they left the scene, history closed the door behind them and let the dust of centuries cover their tracks. Those Mongol queens were too unusual, too difficult to understand or explain. It seemed more convenient just to erase them.

Around the world, the influential dynasties of history exhibit a certain uniformity in their quest for power, and they distinguish themselves from one another primarily through personal foibles, dietary preferences, sexual proclivities, spiritual callings, and other strange twists of character. But none followed a destiny quite like that of the female heirs of Genghis Khan. As in every dynasty, some rank as heroes, others as villains, and most as some combination of the two.

Rashid al-Din wrote that “there are many stories about these daughters.” Yet those stories disappeared. We may never find definitive accounts for all seven or eight of Genghis Khan’s daughters, but we can reassemble the stories of most of them. Through the generations, his female heirs sometimes ruled, and sometimes they contested the rule of their brothers and male cousins. Never before or since have women exercised so much power over so many people and ruled so much territory for as long as these women did.

References to Genghis Khan’s daughters have come down to us in a jumble of names and titles with a stupefying array of spellings, according to how each sounded to the Chinese, Persians, Armenians, Russians, Turks, or Italians who wrote their stories. Each source differs on the number of daughters. The
Secret History
identifies eight sons-in-law for Genghis Khan and his wife Borte in the pivotal year 1206, and it further identifies each of them as a commander of a thousand troops. The list of sons-in-law is longer than the list of daughters, due in part to multiple marriages and also to the efforts of more distant relatives by marriage to raise their status and apparent closeness to Genghis Khan in the official record.

Through the generations, Mongol chroniclers and scholars dropped the names of Genghis Khan’s daughters one by one from their accounts. By the time of the Buddhist chroniclers of the seventeenth century, the number of remembered daughters had dwindled to only one, and then even she disappeared in the contorted chronicles that followed.

Four became ruling queens of their own countries and commanded large regiments of soldiers. At least one became literate, but several supported scholars, schools, and the publication of religious and educational texts. Some had children, while others died without surviving descendants. The youngest, of whom Rashid al-Din wrote: “Genghis Khan loved this one more than any of his other daughters,” was treacherously assassinated by her brother soon after their father’s death.

At court these noble women wore elaborate headdresses of felt and feathers that rose more than two feet above their ears so they would tower over everyone around them and “give [themselves] a great luster when they are on horseback.” When they could, they raised their children in peace, but when it was necessary, they put on the helmet of war, took up the bows and arrows of battle, and went forth to defend their nation and their families. The royal Mongol women raced horses, commanded in war, presided as judges over criminal cases, ruled vast territories, and sometimes wrestled men in public sporting competitions. They arrogantly rejected the customs of civilized women of neighboring cultures, such as wearing the veil, binding their feet, or hiding in seclusion. Some accepted the husbands given to them, but others chose their own husbands or refused any at all. They lived by the rules of society when prudent, and they made new rules when necessary.

Without Genghis Khan’s daughters, there would have been no Mongol Empire. Genghis Khan recognized early in his career that an empire as large as the one he was creating could not be managed by a single ruler alone. To survive it needed different centers of power that fulfilled complementary roles. Not able to rely upon his sons to guard the empire he was conquering, he increasingly turned to his daughters, who ruled a string of kingdoms along the Silk Route from northern China through Central Asia.

Yet almost as soon as Genghis Khan died, the daughters came under attack, first from the wives of their brothers. What started as a war of powerful women against one another soon degenerated into simply a war against women in power. In the next generation, their nephews, the grandsons of Genghis Khan, intensified the attack on the systematic balance of powers left by Genghis Khan and on the lineages of his daughters.

Through most of the Mongol imperial era, from 1206 until 1368, the royal women of Genghis Khan’s Borijin clan mounted a persistent opposition to the centralized governments of their male relatives. Not only did the women fight outside efforts to claim their territories, but even after some faced gruesome and horrendous deaths, their daughters and granddaughters continued the struggle for the heritage bestowed upon them by Genghis Khan.

With the official role of royal women compromised and then nearly eliminated, the empire buckled, collapsed, and died. By 1368 the Mongols had lost their lands, fled back to their steppe homeland in disgrace, and resumed fighting among themselves with even more viciousness than ever. The bickering, feuding, and raiding lasted for another century, until a new queen unexpectedly appeared around 1470. Queen Manduhai the Wise lifted up the Mongol banners that had been left trampled in the dust. She awakened the forgotten consciousness of the Mongols. She put the Mongol nation back in order, created a new government, and then, like the Mongol queens before her, disappeared back into the fog of neglect.

Words and documents can dimly reflect the truth, like shadows by a night fire or the outline of a mountain through the mist, but alone they are too small and primitive to contain all of it. While words may be altered or censored, the truth endures, even when not properly recorded. Truth can be forgotten, misplaced, or lost, but never annihilated. The human hand might erase the words, mutilate the manuscript, or chisel off a name, but that only alters memory. Such vandalism tampers with the evidence without altering the facts. Cutting part of a document still leaves an outline of what was removed, a silhouette of the missing piece.

Once an event happens, evidence will remain in some form. The land always remembers. The truth will lurk somewhere waiting for the wind to blow away the sand that hides it. A few scattered ashes tell us of a campfire from long ago; even a delicate footprint can survive in hardened mud for millions of years to permanently record a fleeting act. The world remembers long after people have forgotten.

We rarely find what we do not seek. Once we look for information on these great queens, we realize that much of the history was not hidden at all; it was merely ignored. Snippets of evidence concerning these royal women can still be found in the diplomatic reports of the Chinese court, letters to the Vatican, the elegant Muslim histories, royal Armenian chronicles, the memoirs of merchants such as Marco Polo, and carved into the stones of Taoist and Confucian temples. Once we know what we are looking for, we find the Mongol queens in the rhymes of Chaucer and the arias of Puccini, in Persian manuscript paintings and silken
thangkas
hanging in Tibetan monasteries. Those queens are still there, waiting through eight centuries for us merely to see them again.

This book is a small effort to find that lost story, to reassemble the clipped pages of the
Secret History
, to blow the dust off this neglected chapter, and to see once again what in our past has been denied to us for seven hundred years. What did those censors not want us to read? What is it about our history that we are not allowed to know? If the truth was important enough for one generation of powerful officials to go to great lengths to hide it, then it should be important for us to search for it now.