The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire (3 page)

The Great Khan’s mother knew how to deal with men and certainly did not fear them; she had already raised ten boys, including the four she had with her husband, two that he had with another wife, plus the four she adopted after becoming a widow. Even now she had two children staying with her, and at least one of her sons or grandsons was probably about the same age as the Tatar who was now within an arm’s reach of her.

In her old age, Hoelun was raising not only Altani but also Tolui, Genghis Khan’s youngest son and her youngest grandson. Tolui had just reached the age when he could run around outside the
ger
by himself. From the time children could crawl, they needed to be constrained. Infants were held gently and passed constantly from person to person or, when necessary, were tightly tied with a rope to keep them away from the flames of the fire.

At age four or five, Tolui was now old enough to go near the hearth without injuring himself. As the youngest boy, he enjoyed special privileges and was called
otchigen
or
otgon
, “the prince of the fire.” Because he was the last to leave his mother’s womb, he held the closest connection to the past: In him resided the honor and future of the family. One day he would be charged with caring for his aged parents, and he could inherit their animals and household. In giving him the name Tolui, which referred to the three stones used to make a fire in the center of the
ger
, his parents clearly stated the boy’s symbolic importance.

Before the soup finished heating, young Tolui threw open the felt
flap hanging over the door and dashed into the
ger
. With the impulsive energy of a four-year-old, he raced inside with no particular purpose and turned to run out again. At this moment, rage stirred inside the Tatar and then erupted. Without warning, and before Tolui could get through the flap a second time, the stranger lunged from his seat, grabbed up Tolui in his arms, and ran out the doorway with him. To rob a family of its youngest son was to deprive it of its heir. In addition to the emotional pain of losing the little Prince of the Fire, such a loss, akin to the departure of his ancestors’ support and the blessing of the sky, carried enough supernatural importance to jeopardize the career of Genghis Khan.

Before the grandmother could scream for help, Altani jumped up and tore out the door behind the kidnapper. She chased after him, and when she drew near, the Tatar pulled out his knife. Tolui struggled to free himself, but to no avail. The assailant sought to turn Tolui slightly in his arms in order to stab the knife into the boy’s jugular vein or heart.

Just as the Tatar had Tolui in position and was ready to thrust in the knife, Altani leapt on him. In the words of the
Secret History
, “With one hand she seized his plaits” (referring to the large braid over each ear), “and with the other she seized the hand that was drawing the knife.” She fought to keep the Tatar’s arm down and the weapon away from the boy, and “she pulled it so hard that he dropped the knife.”

Even after disarming the attacker, Altani clung to him as tightly as he clutched the child, and the Tatar fought to escape her hold. She could not overpower him alone, but because of her weight and tight grip, he could not throw her off to escape with the boy.

Behind the
ger
, the guards had just slaughtered the ox and commenced butchering it when they heard the screams. Dropping the meat, they ran around the
ger
toward the sound of the struggle between Altani and the Tatar. The two men reached her, clutching their butchering tools in “their fists red with the animal’s blood.” The guard with the ax raised it and struck the Tatar. Altani grabbed Tolui and pulled him aside while the two guards finished off his assailant “with ax and knife.”

Soon after the incident, the guards began to vie over which one of them deserved the credit for having saved the child: the one who knocked the kidnapper unconscious with the ax or the one who cut him open with the knife. With a strong tone of self-congratulation, they wondered aloud: “If we had not been there and if, by running fast and arriving in time, we had not killed him, what would Altani, a woman, have done?” The attacker “would have harmed the life of the child.”

Altani heard their boastful talk and objected to their claiming credit for saving Tolui. She demanded recognition for what she had done. “I ran up and caught up with him, seizing his plaits and pulling the hand that was drawing the knife,” she declared to the men. “If the knife had not dropped, wouldn’t he have done harm to the child’s life before Jetei and Jelme arrived?”

Although Jelme and Jetei both received awards and promotions, Genghis Khan made it clear who was the true hero of the episode, and “the chief merit went, by general consent, to Altani.” Genghis Khan held her up as a model for everyone. In the Mongol perspective, challenges choose us, but we choose how to respond. Destiny brings the opportunities and the misfortunes, and the merit of our lives derives from those unplanned moments.

The Mongols, and certainly Genghis Khan in particular, placed great importance on sudden individual acts of unexpected heroism. Those are the moments that reveal not just the character of the person, but the soul itself. Many people are paralyzed by fear or, equally as debilitating, by indecision. The hero acts, and often fails, but acts nonetheless. Such a person belongs to the spiritual elite of the divinely blessed and heavenly inspired
baatar
, a person filled with a firm, strong, unyielding spirit. Usually translated simply as “hero,” the word is much more important in Mongolian, containing an emphasis on the personal will behind the act; the heroes formed an honored group known as the
baatuud
.

Genghis Khan always sought out the service of the
baatar
, the hero who acts immediately and decisively without concern for personal
benefit or even survival. Unlike the Greek heroes, who were males of superhuman physical strength, the
baatar
might be male or female, young or old, and frequently, as in this case, only a child. Most important, a
baatar
might spring from any family, but, in Genghis Khan’s experience, the
baatuud
rarely came from rich families or aristocratic and powerful clans. He placed such importance on the spirit of the
baatuud
that he built his military and political system around them. The ideal government for him was rule by these heroic elites, by a true aristocracy of the spirit.

In this regard, Genghis Khan differed remarkably from those around him who believed in a natural aristocracy of birth. These old clans had dominated the steppe tribes for generations and claimed power as a birthright earned by the actions of their ancestors. More than any other barrier, this attitude and the actions derived from it had held Genghis Khan back in life. The aristocracy of birth had been his eternal enemy, and he sought to defeat it through his assembly of heroes: the aristocracy of brave spirits, the
baatuud
.

All his life, Genghis Khan had been treated as an outsider, as an inferior underling. The Mongols were interlopers onto the steppe. They were hunters from a far northern land of lakes and forests, where they had originally lived in temporary cone-shaped tents made of bark. Over the generations they had gradually moved out of the forests in the area of Mount Burkhan Khaldun at the source of the Onon and Kherlen rivers in the north-central region of modern Mongolia.

When the hunting was bad, they scavenged off the herding tribes, stealing animals, women, and whatever else they could before dashing back to the security of their mountainous hideouts. The older Turkic steppe tribes had herded for many centuries, and they looked down on the primitive Mongols, treating them as vassals and expecting them to bring forest gifts of fur and game. They found the Mongols sometimes useful as warriors to help them in a raid, or to herd their animals, and they sometimes stole women from them. Overall, however, the sophisticated
herding tribes of the Tatars, Naiman, and Kereyid despised the Mongols.

With round faces, high cheekbones, and legs markedly bowed from their life on horseback, the Mongols’ appearance set them apart from their Asian neighbors. They had extremely pale skin, kept lubricated by cleaning with animal fat, and had almost no body hair, leading a South Asian chronicler to write that the Mongols “looked like so many white demons.” From frequent exposure to the bitter cold, their cheeks became so red through the nearly translucent skin that they were described as having “faces like fire.”

They had wide mouths and large teeth of a uniform size, which, because of the lack of starches in the diet, did not rot or become discolored. Aside from skin color, the most distinctive Mongol trait was the eye shape. Several Chinese commentators remarked on the unusual eyelids of the Mongols, because these nomads did not have a crease or fold. Only late in life, or when they became tired, did a large wrinkle or fold begin to appear in the skin covering the eye. Persian observers referred to the Mongols as having “cat eyes.” Another Muslim chronicler wrote that “their eyes were so narrow and piercing that they might have bored a hole in a brazen vessel.”

Queen Gurbesu of the Christian Naiman tribe to the west summed up the attitude of civilized steppe people toward the Mongols: “The Mongols have always stunk and worn filthy clothes. They live far away; let them stay there.” Only begrudgingly did she acknowledge some potential use for the Mongol women. “Perhaps we can bring their daughters here, and if they wash their hands we might let them milk our cows and sheep.”

In this marginal and insignificant tribe, Genghis Khan grew up in an insignificant family of outcasts. He was born the son of a captured woman and was given the name Temujin because his father had recently killed a Tatar warrior by that name. His father belonged to the Borijin clan, and although they had once had an independent khan, they now served as virtual vassals for hire for whoever needed them. Before the boy was nine years old, the Tatars had killed his father, but
his own Mongol relatives committed the worst offenses against Temujin’s family. Feeling no responsibility for this captive wife and her brood of children, his uncles seized his dead father’s animals and cast the widow and children out on the steppe to die of hunger and exposure in the brutal winter. When they survived against all odds, young Temujin was captured by the Tayichiud clan, who enslaved him and yoked him to a wooden collar like an ox. After escaping from bondage, he fled to the most isolated place he could find to care for his mother and siblings.

Living as a pariah with three brothers and two half brothers, but only one much younger sister, Temujin grew up surrounded by boys in a household oddly bereft of adult men or girls. From the beginning of his life, Temujin’s male relatives repeatedly failed him and threatened his life at the most critical moments. At age twelve, Temujin so intensely disliked the bullying of his older half brother that he killed him.

Around 1179 he married Borte, a girl from a steppe clan distantly related to his mother, when he was about sixteen and she was seventeen. Although the couple expected to spend their lives together, enemies from the Merkid tribe stormed down on them, kidnapped Borte, and gave her to another man. Desperate to rescue his new wife, Temujin tracked and saved Borte, killing a large number of Merkid in the process, revealing a tenacious spirit and a nearly ruthless willingness to use whatever violence necessary to achieve his goals.

The kidnapping of Borte initiated young Temujin into steppe politics, with its perpetual low-grade hostility interrupted by spasms of amazing violence and destruction. In order to rescue Borte from the Merkid, Temujin made alliances with Ong Khan of the Kereyid tribe, the most powerful steppe chief at the moment, and with his childhood friend Jamuka. With new allies came new enemies, and the boy who had been raised as an outcast on the steppe found himself thrust into the maelstrom of dynastic struggles, clan feuds, and all the desperate treachery of steppe politics.

For the Kereyid, Temujin was, like his father and all men of his
Borijin clan, just one more Mongol vassal to be sent out to war when needed and consigned to perform the tasks that were too dangerous or boring. Temujin thought that through his extreme loyalty and his success in battle, he would gain the favor of his overlords.

Traditionally among the steppe nomads, related lineages united to form a clan, and, in turn, several clans united to form a tribe such as the Tatars or the Kereyid, or even a confederacy of tribes such as the Naiman. Although contracting or expanding over time, these unions lasted for generations and sometimes centuries. The Mongols repeatedly sought to unite into a tribe under one khan, but the union always failed. The Mongols were not so much a tribe as a roving set of fractious clans sharing the same language and culture but often fighting one another. Even within the same clan, families often feuded, broke away, and joined rival clans or enemy tribes.

Temujin’s mother was not a Mongol, and his connection to her gave him a perceived opportunity to rise up in the steppe world by negotiating a formal marriage alliance with his mother’s family in the Khongirad clan. Around 1184, when he was about twenty-two years old, Temujin arranged a marriage for Temulun, his only sister, with Botu of the Ikires. Such a marriage alliance would strengthen the tie between the two clans in the traditional way and showed Temujin’s desire to maintain permanent marital alliances, known as
quda
. Because Temujin was still quite a novice in all respects, it seems likely that his mother, Hoelun, helped arrange this marriage.

Before the marriage, Botu “came as a son-in-law,” meaning that he came to live with the bride’s family as a form of service to them. According to steppe tradition, a potential groom or engaged boy resided with the family of his intended wife. Similarly, Temujin had been given at age eight to the family of his future wife, Borte, with the expectation that he would learn their ways of doing things, live under their supervision, and care for their animals. The boy had to prove himself as a capable herder, and after learning the basics as a child
among his own family, he became an adult man under the watchful eye of his bride’s parents. If the boy proved lazy or unsatisfactory, the family sent him away. If he could not endure the hard work and discipline imposed by his potential father-and mother-in-law, he might run away. If they developed a working relationship, the marriage between the engaged youths would evolve and blossom in its own natural time.