The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire (22 page)

In appreciation, she said that she wished to give him her personal silver bowl. According to steppe etiquette, he had to drink the contents of the offered bowl to show his acceptance of the gift. But when he did so, he immediately fell unconscious.

The queen moved quickly toward her prey. She dragged his drugged, limp body onto her bed. She then tore out clumps of her own hair, ripped her clothes, and clawed herself all over her body. She tore
at the fabric lining the walls, and then she began to scream for help. Servants and guards came running to her aid, and she showed them the wounds of red blood on her white flesh that, she said, came from fighting off a sexual attack from Dayuu, her husband’s friend and councillor.

The queen sent out her servant again, this time to find her husband, the khan, and summon him home to deal with the crime against her and against his honor and the prestige of the family. When the khan returned, she emotionally explained that she had summoned his councillor to thank him for making it possible for her to marry the khan. Then, when she gave him her bowl in gratitude and he drank its contents, “he wanted to become intimate with me,” she explained. “When I refused, he attacked me.”

Slowly regaining consciousness, the councillor heard the voices around him repeating the accusations against him. He panicked, and his fear gave him a new burst of energy with which he managed to jump up and flee from the tent. He grabbed the reins of the first horse he found, jumped on it, and raced away from the royal camp.

With the assumption that the flight proved his friend’s guilt, the khan called his men together, and they set out in pursuit. Just as he had hunted down the white rabbit, the khan now hunted down the friend who had helped him. When the khan caught up with the councillor, a fierce fight ensued between the two men. As the khan approached, Dayuu fired an arrow and struck Elbeg Khan in the hand, slicing off his little finger.

In retaliation, the khan shot his former friend and let him lie moaning in agony before finally killing him. Now the enraged khan skinned the body of his friend precisely as he had skinned the rabbit. The khan brought the flesh from the dead man’s backside to his young queen as a gift of revenge against her accused attacker.

For the aggrieved queen, however, the punishment of only one of the two men who had wronged her failed to quell her anger at the murder of her first husband. In the words of the chronicles, “She lay on her bed without satisfaction.” But when her husband approached
her with the man’s skin dangling from his wounded hand, she reached out and took the khan’s wounded hand. She brought it up to her lips to kiss it, and she lovingly licked the blood from the stump of his missing finger. At the same time, she gently took the gift of the freshly flayed skin of her husband’s dead friend and also brought it to her lips.

The khan now saw what his obsession for a woman as beautiful as the red blood on white snow had brought him—only now it was red human blood, his own blood, dripping onto the snow white fat of his former friend. She gently licked the skin in the same way that she had licked her husband’s bleeding finger, and then she swallowed the grease of the skin together with the blood of her husband.

“Although I am a woman,” she proclaimed to her husband. “I have avenged the vengeance of my husband. When I die, there will be no regret.”

Only now did the khan fully comprehend the evil of his own deeds, and on account of his evil sins, his family would pay dearly. The queen had avenged the crime against her, but that act proved to be no more than the opening of the rabbit’s curse on the royal family and the Mongol nation. They would now fight among themselves, one Mongol tribe against another, clan against clan, sister against brother, mother against son, husband against wife, and daughter against father.

The sordid tale of Elbeg Khan summarizes, as well as any other explanation, the degenerate state of the Borijin clan. Their Mongol nation seemed to be gasping through a protracted death. The Mongol power appeared to have at last entered its final phase. On the fertile steppe where millions of animals once roamed, now hunger stalked the few surviving animals and threatened the nomads who depended on them. The clans and tribes moved in scattered groups across a once beautiful landscape now ravaged by war and overgrazing and through forests decimated by the returning royal court. Animals starved amid the environmental degradation, and roving gangs of thugs seized the animals that survived. The returning invaders abided by neither Mongol custom nor law. It was not yet the end of time, but surely the end
could not be far away. A constant stream of Mongols made their way across the Gobi to surrender to the Ming Dynasty and seek jobs as soldiers or border administrators.

Gangs of former foreign guards and their Mongol allies of the moment seized rival Borijin boys to proclaim them khan or to mock them and degrade them as objects of derision, exploitation, and torture. They tossed the title of Great Khan back and forth from one member of the Borijin clan to another the way that horsemen tossed around the carcass of a goat in a game of tribal polo. Men who once would have laid down their lives for their Borijin leader now made and replaced the Great Khans on any whim.

The daughters of queens who once set out from Mongolia to rule the world now served as nothing more than tools of amusement and instruments of competition among the basest of men. Like looters of the treasury playing with jewels as though they were dice, the powerful men of the moment seized Borijin girls to trade among one another as little more than sexual toys. After all, if the Great Khan was not above raping his son’s wife, then why should any man refrain from whatever lust might strike his heart?

The Mongol nation and the once glorious Golden Family sank so low and suffered so much abuse that it would possibly have been a blessing for the whole family to have died and the name of the nation to have disappeared into the wind like the cold ashes of an abandoned camp. So many nomadic nations had risen, fallen, and disappeared in the thousands of years since humans first learned to herd animals and turn the sea of grass into sustenance. The torn and neglected banner of the nation was tattered and scattered like clumps of wool stuck in the brown grass. Even the horses seemed too exhausted to raise a cloud of dust. In the pages of history, the passing of yet one more such nation, even one once as powerful and important as the Mongols, hardly would have seemed surprising.

Yet amid all the depravity and defeat, one woman held her ground, kept her focus, and looked forward to a day when the nation might be
reassembled, the flags raised again, and dignity restored to the royal clan. Like a small thread on which the fate of the Mongol nation fluttered, she alone sustained its spirit. She was Samur, the daughter of Elbeg Khan by birth, but the true daughter of Genghis Khan in spirit, strength, and sheer stubbornness.

She was born in the 1380s, in the first Borijin generation to be reared back in Mongolia after the expulsion from China. Samur carried the Chinese-derived title
gunj
, which the Mongols had adopted during their stay in China and substituted for the older Mongolian title of
beki
previously used for princesses. Samur Gunj began life as a victim of all the corruption and chaos engulfing the Mongol nation and her Golden Family. Her debut into world history came in the midst of the sordid affair of her father with his daughter-in-law.

After her father, Elbeg Khan, killed his ally and councillor Dayuu, he realized what a tactical error it had been, even though he believed it was morally justified. In a desperate effort to maintain his office of khan and avoid being killed in revenge for what he had done, Elbeg gave his young daughter Samur to the dead man’s son as a peace offering and compensation for the killing. By receiving Princess Samur as a wife, Dayuu’s son also received his dead father’s title and command of the Oirat in western Mongolia.

Elbeg Khan’s most dangerous enemy, however, was not among outside rivals and former allies; it was within his own family. Samur’s mother was Elbeg’s senior wife, Kobeguntai. She had become deeply resentful when her husband took his new young wife, and now he took her daughter from her to pay off the political debts incurred by his sins. She found a supporter of her own, killed Elbeg Khan, married her co-conspirator, and left the nation adrift without a khan. The turmoil resulting from the Great Khan’s terrible deeds would last for nearly a century.

At no moment in this long ordeal of the coming decades would Samur hold supreme power anywhere; yet throughout it, she held the survival of the nation in her hands. Her actions determined its fate as she faced crisis after crisis. For more than half a century, Samur fought
unsuccessfully to reunite the Mongol nation and to free her male relatives in the Borijin clan from their captivity by their own guards, who perpetually fought among themselves for the meager riches left in the country. Her husband held the office of
taishi
of the Oirat, and when he died in the struggle to liberate the Mongols, her son stepped forward to take the title and resume the battle.

From roughly 1400 until 1450, while the so-called Great Khans were held prisoner of various strongmen, she formed a powerful force based in the Oirat tribes in western Mongolia and constantly, if vainly, attempted to resuscitate the Mongol royal family and liberate them from their captivity. She encouraged her husband to mount repeated campaigns to rescue the nominal Great Khan from his captors, and when her husband was killed in this effort, she encouraged her son in the same pursuit until he too was killed.

The Golden Clan established by Genghis Khan had completely lost control of the reins of state, and they were held captive by an unusual assortment of men. Their captors had Mongolian names, spoke the Mongol language, wore Mongol clothes, sometimes had Mongol wives, and in general, had become an intimate part of Mongol society. Yet they remained quite different from the Mongols. These men derived from an odd mixture of captives whom the Mongols had brought back from Ossetia, Russia, Ukraine, and other parts of Europe to be their imperial guards, but who, over time, had taken control of the royal family.

The type of strongman who ruled Mongolia in the fifteenth century was typified by one who carried the nickname Arugtai, meaning “the One with the Dung Basket,” in reference to the job he performed in the court of Elbeg Khan. Despite his lowly status, like all dung collectors he had the ability to roam freely throughout the day in search of dried dung. This freedom also gave him the opportunity to talk with many people, and he thereby became a source of information for members of the household. From this position, he slowly gained power and moved into the political vacuum left by Elbeg Khan’s death. He made his hostile attitude toward the Borijin clan clear. “It is
dangerous to let the offspring of a savage beast roam freely,” he said. “You should not indulge the son of your enemy.” On the basis of this policy, Arugtai hunted the Borijins down to kill them or keep them captive for future schemes.

After the death of Samur’s husband and then her son, she encouraged her grandson Esen to become
taishi
and to continue her struggle against the strongmen who controlled her male relatives and to reunite the Oirat and Mongol tribes. Following the failures of his father and grandfather, Esen quickly and easily began assembling the Mongol tribes—some through conquest, but many through persuasion. The Mongols seemed suddenly invigorated and ready once again to follow their conquering leader to the ends of the earth.

In order to recapture control of the Silk Route, Esen began to raid the Muslim oases under the rule of Ways Khan, yet another descendent of Genghis Khan. Esen defeated the Muslims repeatedly: “It is told that the [Muslim] khan fought twenty-one battles” against the Mongols. “Once he was victorious … [but] in all the rest he was routed.” Esen captured him three times but released him. With almost a sigh for the incompetence of Ways Khan, the Muslim chronicler concluded the statement with “God knows best.”

During a campaign in 1443–45, Esen quickly took control of the oasis of Hami, along the Silk Route west of the Gansu Corridor, and then conquered the Three Guards, the Mongol units whom the Ming employed to guard their borders. He rallied Mongol unity and called upon them to remember their identity. Mocking the titles given the Three Guards and other Mongol leaders by the Ming, Esen reminded them that, unlike himself, who had no titles directly from Genghis Khan, they held important titles granted by him to their forefathers and that they should honor them above Ming titles. After the defeat of the Three Guards, the Jurched (Manchu) voluntarily submitted to Esen. Officials on the Ming court lacked the ability to take strong military action against their former allies who were now deserting them, and they mistakenly calculated that merely suspending trade with the rebels would soon return them to Ming authority.

Esen reunited not only the Mongolian Plateau but also most of the Silk Route—modern Inner Mongolia (south of the Gobi), part of Manchuria, and some territory south of the Yellow River near the Gansu Corridor. In 1449 he achieved his most important victory over the Chinese and captured the Ming emperor. For the first time in nearly a century since the fall of the Yuan Dynasty, the Mongols posed a real threat to China. From their last effort to rule China, the Mongols understood that it was far easier to conquer China than to control it, and this time they made no effort to occupy or run the country. Esen used the emperor by taking him on raids of Chinese cities in order to persuade them to surrender or at least create fear of fighting the Mongols and thereby possibly injuring their emperor. This tactic did not work for long, and eventually Esen released the bedraggled and discredited emperor, knowing that his return to Beijing would keep the Ming officials busy fighting one another and leave the Mongols in peace for a while.

Esen had united the Mongols and defeated the Muslim ruler and the Ming emperor, but in the most important confrontation of his career, he could not overcome the determined will of his grandmother. Samur supported her grandson throughout his conquests and as he drove out the warlords and the old guards. Early in his career as
taishi
, he seemed to share her desire to reunite the Oirat and Mongol people under Borijin rule. He had been successful in liberating the Borijin family and the Mongols from foreign rule, but they continued to quarrel among themselves. In hopes of uniting the people, Esen sought to further integrate the ruling families of the two tribes with a marriage between his sister and the new khan.