The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire (12 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”