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Queens at War and Commerce
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WITH ALL THE SMALLER KINGDOMS SECURELY UNITED behind him and under the control of his daughters, and with an adequate, if not entirely amicable, alliance with the Tangut in control of the Gansu Corridor of the Silk Route, Genghis Khan could move and challenge one of the larger kingdoms. For the remainder of his life he would pursue two major operations: first, the North China campaign from 1211 to 1215, and then the Central Asian offensive against the Muslims from 1219 to 1224. His daughters played critically important, but different, roles in each of these two massive quests.
In 1211 Genghis Khan attacked the Jurched rulers of North China, but his perfect plan failed almost immediately. As soon as his cavalry became hotly engaged with the Jurched forces, the Onggud erupted. The disgruntled faction suddenly revolted against young Alaqai. The rebels tried to kill her, and although they failed to capture her, they assassinated Ala-Qush and many of the other Mongol sympathizers. Alaqai barely escaped the rebels, but in addition to saving her own life, she managed to take both of her stepsons to the temporary refuge of her father’s army.
While Genghis Khan had fostered a close alliance with a single Onggud clan, the others resented kowtowing to a foreign queen, particularly one from such a wild people as the Mongols. When Genghis Khan’s daughter dismissed the other wives, she also destroyed the power base for their clans. The families of the old wives failed to share in the prestige and rewards of the new system and turned against her. They did not realize that because Ala-Qush was Genghis Khan’s faithful ally in marriage, killing him constituted one of the gravest crimes against the Mongols.
Only twenty years old, Alaqai Beki faced these enemies at a time when it still remained unclear how successful the Mongol army would be and how powerful her father would become. Although Genghis Khan had made Ala-Qush the ruler of the Onggud, the old elite still favored their traditional alliance with the Jurched rulers of northern China, who had supplied them with a constant flow of silks and trinkets, as well as invited them to feast at grand political events at the imperial court. Those Onggud shared the more general Chinese view of the Mongols as unwashed savages who dressed in ragged wool and the skins of beasts, lived in felt tents, and gorged on unflavored meat boiled in large cauldrons that contained whole animals from the eyeballs to the tail.
When the Onggud revolted, Genghis Khan was campaigning with his army near the modern city of Datong in northern China’s Shanxi Province. His soldiers had passed through Onggud territory on the way to invade China. By installing his daughter as the ruler of the Onggud, he thought that he had securely protected his rear and sides before launching the invasion. The Onggud rebels also understood this strategy, and they saw clearly the danger they posed to him. The bulk of the Mongol army now confronted the Jurched to their south and east and the Onggud to their north and west. If the Onggud rose up in rebellion, they could trap the Mongol forces between the two enemies. At the least, an Onggud rebellion would distract the Mongol forces and thereby relieve pressure on the Jurched.
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Genghis Khan would tolerate no such act against his daughter, who ruled in the name of the greater Mongol Empire, nor could he afford to have such a dangerous enemy at his back. He dispatched an army with her to fight the rebels, whom they quickly vanquished.
After the suppression of the Onggud rebels, Genghis Khan favored the same kind of massive retaliation against the Onggud that he had become accustomed to using against the rebellious steppe tribes, such as the Tatars. The punishment meant killing every rebel and all the males in their family taller than the wheel of a Mongol cart, then redistributing the women and children among the tribes of the Mongol’s loyal allies.
Alaqai prevented the massacre. Instead of condemning the whole nation, she persuaded her father to punish only the specific assassins who had attacked Ala-Qush. Genghis Khan wanted an investigation of the killing of Ala-Qush. “Who killed our quda? ” he demanded to know, “so that I can extract vengeance. ” He demanded that the specific “person who violated his person” be brought to him. Genghis Khan then ordered the execution of the assailant and his family.
The Onggud ranked as possibly the luckiest people who ever rebelled against Genghis Khan, and their good fortune derived exclusively from having Alaqai as their ruler. As the empire grew larger and the army spread thinner and ever farther from home, Genghis Khan could not afford to tolerate any dissent or show any mercy. The Onggud were the only people whom he allowed to continue to exist as a nation after they revolted against him. Alaqai seemed determined to prove that he had not made a mistake in sparing the Onggud; she kept them loyal to the Mongols and integrated them into the heart of Mongol imperial administration.
Alaqai resumed her rule and took her stepson Jingue as her husband. She set about knitting the Onggud society back together again, but clearly within the realm of her father’s growing Mongol Empire. Over the next four years, while her father fought in one city after another across northern China, she ran the Onggud nation. After she had proved her loyalty to the Onggud by protecting them from the wrath of her father, her subjects never again contested her rule.
Conquering an empire is difficult; ruling it even more so. For the Mongols the task was especially challenging since they had been a nation for a mere twenty years and had had a written language for only two years longer than that. They could turn to no single group of administrators on whom to rely in the same way they counted on merchants to operate the commercial system. Muslim administrators lived by much different rules than the Chinese administrators, and both differed from the Christians. In the marketplace one could creatively combine items from different cultures: a silk gown from China, a damask belt from Persia, a sable collar from Siberia, a peacock feather from India, beads from Venice, and turquoise chips from Afghanistan. Governmental systems, administrative practices, and law, however, could not be picked apart and recombined so readily. Muslim law derived from the Koran, which could only be read in Arabic and depended on a calendar based on the flight of Muhammad; thus for the Mongols to adopt the Muslim system of administration required accepting a whole different language and religion. Similarly, Chinese administration could not be separated from the Chinese written language and calendar. Governments were far more complexly integrated than markets.
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Unable to merely pick up an existing system, the Mongols had to invent a new one, and with the men busy in perpetual war, this task fell primarily to the daughters ruling the string of kingdoms along the Silk Route. As the senior queen among the Mongols and as ruler of the largest segment of the empire, Alaqai led the way in creating a government. One of her first requirements was to learn to read and write. Where or how she did so is not known. A Chinese envoy sent by the Sung royal court in South China compiled an extensive report of his visit to the Mongols, and he wrote that Alaqai had not only mastered the rudiments of literacy, she spent a lot of time reading each day. He even specified her fondness for religious scripture, but he does not state which kinds. According to the Sung envoy, she was particularly learned in medicine. She also organized medical facilities in the lands where she ruled.
From the archaeological investigations of the ruins of Olon Sume in modern Inner Mongolia, we now know that her capital contained Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist religious structures, and it probably had Confucian and Taoist institutions and clergy. The presence of so many different religions and languages within one small city illustrates the cosmopolitan and often eclectic cultural mix that became a hallmark of the Mongol Empire. The Mongols had no universal religion that they sought to impose on their subjects; instead they encouraged all religions to flourish. Mongols such as Alaqai picked and chose what appealed to them from various religious ideas, objects, and practices with as much individual taste as they expressed when they selected from local foods. Such a right of personal preference applied not merely to the queen; every Mongol enjoyed the same opportunity.
Alaqai Beki fashioned a powerful form of Mongol internationalism. As the first member of her family and nation to rule a sedentary civilization, she invented the cultural and organizational model that grew into the Mongol Empire. On a steadily increasing scale, her capital would later be used as the prototype for Ogodei’s capital of Karakorum in Mongolia; then to Khubilai Khan’s building of Shangdu in Inner Mongolia, known more commonly in the West as Xanadu; and finally to Khubilai Khan’s capital Khan Baliq, which the Chinese called Tatu and which would become Beijing.
Genghis Khan conquered northern China, and the Jin Dynasty of the Jurched surrendered to him but then fled farther south, leaving the Mongols in control of the north and with the Jurched as a buffer between them and the Southern Sung. Genghis Khan had anticipated that the Jurched would, as his new vassals, continue to administer northern China, so their flight south left him in control of the north but without a government to manage it. He could not stay in China and had no intention of administering the country himself. He turned to his daughter Alaqai, who, after her father, was already the highest-ranking Mongol south of the Gobi. When he withdrew back to Mongolia in 1215, Genghis Khan left her in charge of the Mongol territories in China. He left his garrison army of occupation under the leadership of General Muqali of the Jalayir clan, whose members constituted the majority of his warriors and who had long been loyal followers of the Borijin family, but Alaqai reigned.
As Genghis Khan became more occupied arranging the next major invasion, this time of the Muslim lands of Central Asia, he devoted less attention to northern China and depended increasingly on Alaqai, who proved progressively more capable. She acted independently, yet always in the best interests of the whole Mongol world no matter how far away she was from her father’s mobile court. Knowing that he would be away for several years, Genghis Khan designated responsibility for managing the already conquered lands in the hands of two people. He put the Mongolian Plateau, the lands north of the Gobi, under the control of his youngest brother, Temuge Otchigen, and he left the newly conquered lands south of the Gobi under the control of his daughter Alaqai Beki, giving her the title “Princess Who Runs the State. ” Her authority had expanded from command of the Onggud nation of only about ten thousand members, concentrated in what is now Inner Mongolia, to being responsible for millions of people spread across northern China.
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Under Alaqai’s rule, troops were regularly dispatched to aid her father in his campaigns in China and Central Asia. These troops from China included medical personnel, who did much to spread the reputation and practice of Chinese medicine to the Muslim world and the West.
Through the installation of his three daughters as queens along the Silk Route, Genghis Khan controlled the territory and the fragile commercial links connecting China with the Muslim countries. With his invasion into Central Asia in 1219, Genghis Khan began a new phase of not merely capturing the trade links, but expanding them deep into the manufacturing heart of the Middle East. Just as his conquests of China started the process of taking over Chinese manufacturing industries, his armies targeted the craft centers of the Muslim world, thereby expanding control to the two major terminuses of the Silk Route.
Throughout Genghis Khan’s career, the roles played by his sons remained fairly limited and stagnant, but the role of his daughters continued to develop as they matured and their experience expanded. The conquest of varied new countries and ecological zones constantly brought new military and administrative demands on the Mongols.
It was difficult for the Chinese to understand the role of Genghis Khan’s daughters, though their power evoked a puzzled respect, but the Persian encounter with another daughter produced bewilderment, at best, and otherwise disgust and horror. The Chinese scorned the behavior of Mongol women as contrary to sophisticated etiquette, but the Muslims condemned them as immoral affronts to religion and, perhaps more presciently, as threats to civilization.
Although Genghis Khan lost many sons-in-law in battle, such a loss at the hands of rebels usually provoked a particularly vicious response. The fortunate fate of the Onggud rebels contrasted markedly with the fate of the rebellious citizens of Nishapur, who killed another son-in-law ten years later at a time when Genghis Khan’s bloody Central Asian campaign was at its height but its ultimate victory not yet certain.
Located in what is today eastern Iran, Nishapur ranked among the primary cities of Khorasan at the time of the Mongol invasion. Khorasan, though dominated by Persian culture, was actually a part of the Turkic empire of Khwarizm, including what are now Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. Located near rich turquoise mines, Nishapur was the source of the iconic blue-green color that symbolized Persian culture. The city produced the beautifully glazed porcelains that epitomized the art and technology of the era. The most beloved of all Persian poets, Omar Khayyam, was born there in 1048 and was buried there; through his verses, he cloaked the city and Persian literature in a nearly magical aura of beauty sculpted in words. The city of turquoise, poetry, and ceramics exemplified the highest level of Persian civilization, and its destruction by an army under the leadership of a pagan princess marked the ultimate insult against all Islam. In the eyes of the Muslim world, this event came to symbolize the whole of the Mongol era.
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The story was first offered in detail in the chronicle of the Persian writer Juvaini, the most accurate and informed of the Muslim historians despite his being active in the political life of the Mongols and therefore a highly partisan chronicler. Juvaini participated in many of the events and situations that he described, and he talked to the witnesses, many of whom he knew intimately.
When the Mongols captured Khwarizm’s main cities of Bukhara, Samarkand, and its capital, Urgench, the sultan of Khwarizm fled to Nishapur; but instead of preparing for war, he wallowed in wine and debauchery. “He recognized no business but merrymaking, ” as Juvaini wrote. “Because of arranging the jewels of women he could not concern himself with the training of men, and whilst pulling down the garments of his wives he neglected to remove the confusion in important affairs. ” The sultan and his servants gave in to drinking and feasting, so that when the Mongols approached, he was totally drunk and his servants had to throw cold water on his head to rouse him. He abandoned the city on May 12, 1220, and fled west toward Iraq.
The people of Nishapur wisely offered no resistance to the Mongols. They obeyed the orders to surrender and agreed to assist the Mongols in the hunt for their former ruler, the sultan. The army of the Mongol general Subodei came, and the Persians fed the men and horses. For Mongols, accepting food was a highly symbolic act that not only demonstrated the submission of the conquered people but, more important, indicated that the Mongols would accept their submission and let them live as vassals. The people of Nishapur also supplied subsequent Mongol army units passing by in their hunt for the sultan.
For a short time the Mongols stopped coming. As the Mongol units became fewer and as the rumor spread that the sultan had defeated the Mongols, the people grew anxious for revolt and revenge. They thought that the Mongol wave had passed, and they were glad to be rid of both them and the sultan who had ruled them. As Juvaini described the situation, “The demon of temptation laid an egg in the brains of mankind. ”
The Muslims seemed not to realize that the main Mongol army had not yet arrived. Thus, in November 1220, when Tokuchar, a son-in-law to Genghis Khan, arrived with a tumen, a unit of ten thousand warriors, he was the vanguard of the main army under the command of Genghis Khan’s youngest son, Tolui. On the third day, an arrow fired from the ramparts struck Tokuchar and quickly killed him. According to Juvaini, the Persians had no idea who the unknown fallen warrior was, and thus when his army withdrew, they thought they had defeated the Mongols. Throughout the remainder of the winter of 1220–21, the people of Nishapur seemed to believe that they had successfully and permanently driven the Mongols away. The defenders of Nishapur had three thousand crossbows, three hundred seige engines, and a supply of naptha that they could set afire and hurl from their ramparts against the Mongols.
The Mongols attacked on the morning of Wednesday April 7, 1221. By noon prayers on Friday, they had filled the moat, breached the wall for the first time, and brazenly raised their flag on a piece of the wall that they now controlled. The fighting raged on, and the Mongols continued to press onward through the night and the next day, until they controlled all the walls and fortifications around the city. According to a potentially accurate account written much later, seventy thousand defeated warriors lost their lives in the battle for Nishapur.
The people of Nishapur found themselves trapped inside their own walls. For the Mongols, this was precisely the way that they hunted wild animals—forming a fence around them and then killing them off at will. First, Tokuchar’s widow, one of Genghis Khan’s daughters, shut off the flow of water into the city and ordered the people to leave. After Nishapur had been evacuated onto the plains, she entered the city with her escort of warriors to round up those who had refused the order to evacuate.
When Mongols hunt, they always let some animals escape in order to reproduce. In a similar way, even when a whole city was condemned, a few people would be allowed to live. Tokuchar’s widow separated out the craftsmen who might be useful in the future. Mongols had a great respect for people with any skill, from metalworking or writing to carpentry and weaving, but they had no use for defeated soldiers or people without skills, and in this category they included the rich.
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In comparison with Alaqai Beki, who defended her nation even after it had rebelled against her and killed her husband, this daughter felt no connection with the rebels who had killed her husband. She ordered the burning of the empty city and then the execution of everyone except the selected workers. In the words of the chronicler known as Khwandamir, “She left no trace of anything that moved. ” Although the reported number of 1, 747, 000 executed exceeded credibility by a factor of about one hundred times the actual number, it nevertheless shows the horror felt for the Mongols. In the words of the Persian chronicler Juvaini, who loved the cities of his homeland, “In the exaction of vengeance not even cats and dogs should be left alive. ” By the time the Mongols finished with Nishapur, he wrote, the “dwelling places were leveled with the dust, ” and “rose gardens became furnaces. ”
Muslim scholars believe that this daughter was likely Tumelun, but the original Persian records do not mention her name. The Mongols conquered so many cities that they did not keep a written record of them, and thus the account does not appear in their documents either. Unless some hitherto unknown text surfaces, her name will possibly never be known.
In the long list of cities conquered by the Mongols, the fall of Nishapur lacked much strategic importance, but it produced profound terror in the Muslim world because of the cultural importance of the city and its horrifying fate at the hands of an infidel woman. Any educated Muslim of the era would have keenly felt the looming doom promised by the Mongols, which seemed to have been presaged in the words of the beloved Persian poet Omar Khayyam: “Whether at Nishapur or Babylon, the Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop; the Leaves of Life keep falling one by one. ”
Muslim and Christian chroniclers used the story of the unnamed Mongol princess as the defining illustration of Mongol barbarism in war, with accounts of skulls piled up into pyramids according to sex and age, and of conquerors so ruthless that they even killed the cats and dogs of the defeated city. Despite the repeated use of these images in recounting Mongol warfare, the histories that seemed to record so precisely the number of dead never bothered to mention the name of the woman who so terrified enemy soldiers and civilians alike. The chroniclers described her merely as the daughter of Genghis Khan, the elder sister of the general Tolui, and the widow of the warrior Tokuchar.
Genghis Khan encouraged the terrifying stories about the Mongols. With such a small army compared with those that he faced and with the massive populations that he sought to conquer and control, he learned to win by propaganda and public relations as much as by his army. From the terrible abuse around him in his childhood, he mastered an uncanny ability to discern what people most wanted and most feared. He managed to use both in building his empire.
Of all civilizations to crumble before the Mongol onslaught, the Muslims certainly suffered the most and benefited the least from the Mongol invasion. After the extensive carnage of their conquest by Genghis Khan between 1219 and 1224, the Muslim states of the Middle East never again reclaimed their economic and cultural prowess at the center of the world commercial system.
For thousands of years, the people who settled in the deserts of Inner Asia traded via the unhurried flow of goods from one oasis to the next. Chinese silks slowly made their way to Rome to be unwoven and sold thread by thread, and, just as gradually, silver coins bearing the portraits of the Roman emperors drifted across the deserts toward China. Small caravans of camels—or donkeys in some areas—connected the oasis villages, and goods traveled primarily from one village to another. The traders of each oasis carefully maintained trade relations with the next, but each community and many intertwining and alternative routes prospered and withered according to local weather and political patterns. This amorphous system of small but jealously guarded routes prevented merchants from traveling in a single caravan along one entire route. Every item had to be traded dozens of times as it slowly wended its way along these multiple routes.
With the fall of Nishapur, the destruction of the Khwarizm Empire, and the conquest of the Persian cities, the Silk Route had become a Mongol highway. For the first time in the thousands of years of trade and commerce, one power controlled the Silk Route all the way from northern China across Central Asia, south to the Indus River, and west to the Caucasus Mountains at the threshold of Europe. Trade flowed uninterrupted from the Arctic Circle to the Indian Ocean, from inside the workshops of China to the cities of Persia. Except for the crucial distance of the Gansu Corridor, ruled by the Tangut kingdom, which lingered on as only a semi-vassal state of the Mongols, Genghis Khan’s daughters controlled all the states between China and Muslim Central Asia. With the aid of his daughters and his mighty army, Genghis Khan had accomplished what Alexander the Great had attempted and failed to do and what the Romans, Arabs, and Chinese had only dreamed of achieving.
The Mongols exercised ownership of the trade system, but since they knew nothing about commerce, they let the merchants run it. Mongols reaped the rewards and enjoyed the luxuries while opening up all the trade routes under a unified system and consistent policies. The Mongols simply supplied the infrastructure of safe routes, frequent resting stations, ample wells, relief animals, a speedy postal service, stable currency, bridges, and equal access for merchants, without regard to their nationality or religion.
The daughters of Genghis Khan did not create the interlocking network of trade routes, but they made it work much faster. Mongol protection and the organization of an intercontinental system of rest and relay stations permitted new supercaravans that were not only much larger than the old ones but could travel considerably farther by obtaining supplies and replacing animals as needed. Genghis Khan opened new routes, bypassing smaller settlements, and he destroyed whole cities that served as roadblocks. The Mongol routes, like modern superhighways, allowed large caravans to connect not just one oasis with the next but the entire string of oases, as merchants could now travel thousands of miles on a single journey.
The string of Silk Route kingdoms of Genghis Khan’s daughters depended on controlling the points of contact and the direction of movement rather than occupying large areas of land. Gradually the Mongols developed a system of investment similar to those in modern corporations. Thus Alaqai Beki in China had shares of animals in Iraq and furs from her sister Checheyigen in Siberia; Al-Altun had claim on part of the silk production of China, and they all received wine from the Uighur oases of Al-Altun.
During the lifetime of Genghis Khan and his daughters, the Mongol enterprise was not so much an empire as a vast global corporation in which each son and daughter had the assignment to manage one part that provided a particular set of goods. The daughters operated a world financial organization that benefited almost everyone it touched. Through this interlocking set of kingdoms ruled by the daughters of Genghis Khan, the Mongols created a new world system based on a faster flow of goods and information than had been previously practical.
The Silk Route had grown slowly over several thousand years; yet suddenly, under the administration of Genghis Khan’s daughters, it attained a level of complexity and global importance far beyond that of any earlier era. Alaqai Beki and her sisters transformed the chain of competing city-states and nations spread across Asia into an interlocking set of political and commercial units with a new specialization of labor that made them mutually interdependent rather than rivals. Under the control of the Mongol queens, the Silk Route reached its zenith.
In this extensive commercial system, each daughter’s kingdom had its own particular role. Al-Altun’s Uighurs operated the communications center of the Mongol Empire. Their location between China to the east, Mongolia to the north, and the Muslims to the southwest put them in the geographic center of the extensive Mongolian postal relay system that united the empire and made possible the rapid dispatch of messages throughout its length and breadth. The Uighurs did not serve as riders in the system; instead, they worked as translators, scribes, and clerks. From this specialization they became important in information gathering and general intelligence for the Mongol authorities.
Genghis Khan did not permit military information to be written down; it had to be delivered orally. Thus the messengers had to learn to compose and recite military orders through “rhetorically ornate rhyming words and cryptic expressions. ” Occasionally the people receiving an order might not understand it, but the messenger could interpret it. This special form of military poetry served the most strategic type of communication, but for more mundane affairs, the government used the Mongolian language written in Uighur script. Under the Uighur influence, the Mongols began a steep intellectual ascent. The Uighurs already had extensive libraries of hand-copied manuscripts translated from Sanskrit, but under the Mongols many Tibetan manuscripts were also translated into Uighur.
Uighur script became the Mongol script and thereby the official script of the empire. For the next seven centuries, until 1911, it remained the official script in its Mongol and Manchu forms. Even during the Ming Dynasty, which favored Chinese writing, the Chinese court had to use Mongol script for communication with many parts of its empire and foreign nations as far away as Turkey.
When Genghis Khan left on his campaign against the Muslims, he had taken Alaqai Beki’s stepson Boyaohe with him as part of his personal detachment. The boy was ten or twelve years old when he set out with the army, and subsequently grew up on the campaign in Central Asia, where he performed very well and grew into an excellent soldier. By the time the Mongols conquered Muslim Central Asia and the army returned to Mongolia, Alaqai’s husband, Jingue, had died. In 1225, Genghis Khan then gave the precocious Boyaohe to Alaqai to be either her third or her fourth husband. At the time of his marriage to his stepmother (who was, of course, also his sister-in-law), Boyaohe was seventeen years old, and Alaqai was in her mid-to-late thirties.
Alaqai’s only child, Negudei, the son born from her marriage to Jingue, had inherited his late father’s title Prince of Beiping, and she groomed him to succeed her in power. She arranged an excellent marriage for him with a daughter of her brother Tolui. During the 1230s, after nearly a quarter of a century ruling northern China, Alaqai suffered one of the cruelest blows of her life; her recently married teenage son went to fight the Song army in southern China and was struck down in battle. This ended her dynasty, and she was too old to bear more children. With the same spirit she had shown throughout her life, she devoted herself to the care of Boyaohe’s other children, offering them a secure future by arranging the best marriages for them that she could within the ranks of her own Mongol family.
In the absence of her own son who could follow her, Alaqai improvised a new system that would set the pattern for Onggud rule for the next several centuries; she arranged a series of marriages of Onggud male subjects to women from her Borijin clan of the Mongols. Since Alaqai ruled for a long time, she arranged many similar marriages, which grew into a permanent part of the Mongol kinship system. When Marco Polo came to China more than half a century after Alaqai’s death, this system still functioned. He explained that the leaders of the Onggud, whom he called Tenduc, “always obtain to wife either daughters of the Great Khan or other princesses of his family. ”
Throughout her twenty-year career, Alaqai Beki remained loyal both to her father, who sent her to rule, and to the Onggud people over whom she reigned. She laid much of the foundation for the later expansion of the Mongolian Empire into China, and she became a major conduit for selectively designating parts of Chinese civilization to be emulated by the Mongols and choosing aspects of it to be incorporated into their culture. Yet, in the end, without sons to follow her, the name of Alaqai Beki would fade quickly.
By 1226, Mongol queens controlled the Silk Route, with the exception of one small area, the still troublesome Tangut kingdom occupying the Gansu Corridor. Genghis Khan had grown tired of the perfidy of the Tangut, who promised obedience one year only to disregard it the next, sending tribute at one time and then refusing to later. Determined to finally remove the Tangut ruler, destroy his dynasty, and fully incorporate his subjects into the Mongol Empire, Genghis Khan launched a new invasion.
His principal wife, Borte, had too many responsibilities and too large a family to go with him, but on each campaign he chose one of his other three wives to accompany him. For this campaign he chose Yesui Khatun, the Tatar queen and younger sister of the second-ranking queen, Yesugen. The fourth wife, Khulan, had become the emotional favorite of his old age, but he chose Yesui because of her superior intellect and better education. It turned out to be a prescient choice.
Soon after beginning the campaign, Genghis Khan fell ill, and, unable to lead the campaign but unwilling to leave the front, he relied on Yesui to administer the government without either his enemies or his soldiers knowing of his debilitating condition.
In his final public words before his death, Genghis Khan addressed his nation as “My people of the Five Colors and Four Foreign Lands. ” The five colors referred to the Mongol territories he left to the five men of his family—his four sons and one surviving brother. The four foreign lands were the kingdoms of his four daughters.
At the end of his final talk, one of his retainers was quoted as making a dark prophecy. “The jade crystal that is your realm will shatter, ” he said. “Your many people brought together and collected together, will be scattered in all directions. Your lofty rule will be abased. ”
Upon hearing these words, Genghis Khan asked his people to help his children whom he was leaving behind, to offer them “water in the desert” and “a road through the mountains. ” He ended with the plea of his people and his descendants to “guard the good rule of the future. ”
“I leave you the greatest empire in the world, ” he said to his children. “You are the peaceable possessors of it. ” He begged his children to preserve his empire by remaining united: “Be then as but one tongue and one soul. ”
Genghis Khan greatly disliked cities, and usually just before a city surrendered, even after the hardest-fought campaigns, he departed from the scene to begin the next campaign while his officers finished the last one. Thus it was, in August 1227, just prior to the fall of the Tangut capital and the surrender of their khan, that the spirit of Genghis Khan abandoned his body. Genghis Khan’s followers took his body back to the sacred mountain in Mongolia for burial in a hidden place, but they erected his sulde, the “spirit banners” made from the manes of his horses, to blow eternally in the wind.
His four wives had their territories occupying most of Central Mongolia. His son Ogodei acquired western Mongolia; Chaghatai received Central Asia. Tolui, the youngest son, received the ancestral homeland of eastern Mongolia. Jochi, the eldest son and the one whose brothers doubted that he was their father’s son, had already died, but his heirs received Russia, the most distant part of the empire, in the hope of keeping them far removed from the rest of the family who did not recognize their father’s legitimacy.
The daughters also had their lands: Checheyigen ruled the Oirat territory of Siberia. Alaqai ruled northern China. Al-Altun ruled the Uighur. Presumably Tolai was still alive with the Karluk, but too little is known about her fate. Yesui Khatun ruled the Tangut in addition to her original ordo along the Tuul River of Mongolia.
Genghis Khan left his Mongol nation rich and well protected.
Genghis Khan used sequences of spiritually meaningful numbers to organize his empire. Each number had a particular use: a social and cultural role in addition to its numerical value. Practical matters were organized in even numbers: two shafts of the cart or ten men to a military unit. Odd numbers held much greater supernatural power. Seven was to be avoided whenever possible, but nine and thirteen were the two most important numbers for him.
Genghis Khan’s father was named Yesugei, which meant “With Nines, ” a name thought to bestow good fortune because its bearer would always be at the center of the eight directions and thus never be lost.
Mongols are often called by the name of the parent; thus Genghis Khan was “Son of Yesugei, ” or “Son of Nines. ” Mongols considered a name or title to carry a fate and a mission with it. Genghis Khan took his name and his patronymic seriously and literally. He structured life so that he was always the ninth, surrounded by eight. He had his primary group, known as Yesun Orlus, the “Nine Companions, ” or the “Nine Paladins. ” This set comprised the most talented and powerful men in the empire, including the four principal army commanders, known as the Four Dogs, plus the commands of his personal guard, known as the Four Horses. As always, Genghis Khan occupied the pivotal ninth position in the formation.
His personal guard originally consisted of eight hundred by day and eight hundred by night. After 1206 he adopted the older Turkic decimal system of organizing the lower military ranks into units of ten, building to the largest units of ten thousand. At this time he also increased his guard to ten thousand, but he arranged the army into eight units; the guard around him became the ninth.
In his arrangement of family government, he divided power and responsibility among eight of his children—four sons and four daughters. He had other sons and daughters, but he placed the future of the empire in the hands of these eight. Four sons held the steppes of the nomads, four daughters held the sedentary kingdoms, and Genghis Khan, the ninth in the system, ruled over them all. The system was simple, practical, and elegant. With the placement of four of his daughters as queens and four of his sons as khans, Genghis Khan had fulfilled the destiny bestowed upon him by his father’s name.
Genghis Khan, however, sought to surpass his father, and for this the number thirteen had a special, but largely secret, importance for him. In the formation of his nation in 1206, he organized the khuriltai, and thereby the empire, into thirteen camps, and he sometimes referred to his nation as the Thirteen Ordos, or Thirteen Hordes. His four dowager queens controlled the territory surrounding the mountain in the first circle, and then in the outer circle lay the territories of his four daughters and four sons. Thus in death, precisely as at the moment of creating his empire, Genghis Khan was in the center, the thirteenth position.
In the summer of 1229, two years after Genghis Khan’s death, all his offspring and the other officials of the Mongol Empire gathered to ratify Ogodei, the third son, as the Great Khan. The area of the 1206 khuriltai now lay a little too close to Genghis Khan’s burial site on Mount Burkhan Khaldun, but the family still wanted to be near to the area. Ogodei chose an open steppe on the Kherlen River, a little to the south of the original khuriltai, near a spring where, according to oral tradition, his mother had nursed him, and possibly where he was born.
All the officials, generals, and Borijin clan members came. The daughters and the sons of Genghis Khan affirmed Ogodei, since their father had told them to do so. He had been chosen not because he was the smartest or the bravest, but because he was the most congenial to the largest number of people in the family, a situation created, at least in part, by his apparently being the heaviest drinker of all the heavy-drinking sons.
During the summer, as the family and officials gathered at Khodoe Aral, the supreme judge, the Tatar orphan raised by Mother Hoelun, began to write down the history of the Mongols. He gathered the stories and legends of the past, compiled the accounts of witnesses to the life of Genghis Khan, and wrote down his own memories. If he gave the record a title, it was lost, but it became known eventually as The Secret History of the Mongols.
At the end of the summer, Ogodei took his position at the geographic center of Mongolia, from where he would preside as the Great Khan over the eight kingdoms that constituted the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan. Despite the mediocrity of Ogodei’s leadership, the generals of Genghis Khan still commanded the army. With them in charge of the military campaigns, the empire continued to grow, adding Russia, Korea, and the Caucasus, and pushing ever deeper into China.
In terms of conquests and military expansion, the empire had not yet reached its zenith. Yet, paradoxically, it was already beginning to fall apart, and that collapse came from the center. The system left by Genghis Khan was too delicately balanced to survive. It began to totter even before all the delegates reached their homelands.
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