The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire (39 page)

Rather than enslave or exile any of the defeated tribes, Manduhai and Dayan Khan used a combination of old and some new structures to create a Mongol nation of two wings—the Left and the Right—each of which was divided into three tribes, or
tumen
, of ten thousand. Because of this primary feature, the Mongols called this system the Six Tumen, which would come to be used as another name for their country.

The new system of clans and tribes expanded the concept of Mongol to embrace everyone living in the territory, no matter what their former ethnicity. Included were diverse and often antagonistic groups such as the Three Guards along the border with the Ming; the old imperial Ossetian and Kipchak guards from the reign of Khubilai Khan; lingering remnants of the Onggud and Tangut; and some of the Uighurs. The Six Tumen consisted of new geographic-kinship groups.
In the east were the Chakhar, Khalkh, and Khorchin, and to the west were the Ordos, Tumed, and Yungshiyebu. Each of these contained a set of
otogs
, which were something like the old clans but were comparable to an occupational caste or a geographic group as well and constituted the primary social units of allegiance for individuals.

Within the Mongols, there would no longer be a distinction between the competing lineages descended from Genghis Khan’s four sons. Henceforth, they were all part of the Borijin. Other branches of the family descended from Genghis Khan’s brothers were also folded into the main body, with one single exception. The descendants of Khasar, the people of Manduhai’s early general and supporter Une-Bolod, were allowed to keep an independent identity within the Borijin clan.

For a people not accustomed to reading, the Mongols had to learn the new organization by means of easily learned songs such as “Zurgaan Tumen Mongol” (“The Six Tumen of the Mongols”), which listed the tribes with some pertinent information about each group’s geographic location and its social function within the united Mongol nation. The Khalkh were described as “located in the Khangai Mountains, as a guard from strangers,” or the Uriyanghai as “hunters of gazelle and wild animals, protectors from thieves, and diggers of wells.” Through these and similar songs, the people came to know who they were or, at least, who they were expected to be in the new nation.

The monarchs devised a plan to station their sons, the Seven Steels, around the edges of the empire to protect it as a permanent wall of steel, and they established a series of permanent encampments along the Chinese border. These eventually grew to approximately thirty bases from which the Mongols could keep watch on the Chinese and from which they could launch raids into China. Each settlement had a permanent cadre of soldiers stationed there, as well as animals and food supplies if a larger army needed to be sent in to assist them.

For the Mongols, the bases required minimal cost to maintain. In addition to keeping their own herds of animals, the soldiers had ample supplies of antelope, which they hunted for meat and for hides. The
bases seem to have created fear and concern in the Ming court far beyond the actual danger that they posed. The Chinese responded with a new round of wall building in order to place a permanent protection between the Chinese urban and agricultural population centers and these Mongol bases.

The new Mongol nation, or Six Tumen, included Buddhists and Muslims with a mixture of the earlier Christian groups who had long since lost all contact with the outside Christian world. Manduhai and Dayan Khan did not choose among these religions, and they let their people follow any that they wanted. The government and ruling family, however, maintained a spiritual focus on a state cult formed around Genghis Khan and his shrine.

Through the work of Manduhai and Dayan Khan, “the government was rectified and humanity was united.” In this time, “peace, unity and prosperity spread throughout all the people.” Yet not all of their reforms succeeded. The effort to curtail usage of the title
khan
failed as each of their sons scrambled to take the title in his own domain.

After the
khuriltai
, Manduhai Khatun and Dayan Khan maintained their capital south of the Gobi and the Mongolian Plateau, along the Chinese border, in what is today Inner Mongolia. Manduhai had abandoned the quieter northern grazing grounds of the royal family favored by her first husband, Manduul Khan. The southern area served as the source and route for the trade goods out of China, and as the ideal base for the Mongol raids. The Mongols often made their camp in the Ordos, which offered them the most varied points of access into China and the Silk Route. Their presence troubled the Chinese commanders along the border and encouraged them to raid the Mongols more frequently.

The defensive wall remained more of a plan than a reality, and the Ming officers still had to defend their territory against Mongol raids. Unable or unwilling to mount substantial campaigns against them or to engage in large battles, the Chinese army occasionally struck out against the Mongols in small raids. On one such occasion in 1501, the
border authorities learned that Manduhai and Dayan Khan had set up camp in a lightly defended area in the Ordos. They launched a raid, and the pair had to flee in the middle of the night, barely escaping their pursuers.

Following their near capture in the Ordos, Manduhai and Dayan Khan recognized that despite the advantages of the location, it would always be hard to defend because they were south of the Yellow River, which they could cross only in the winter, when it froze. They had escaped this time, but the mere possibility of their entrapment or capture in the Great Loop might entice other Chinese generals to mount campaigns against them. As important as the area was strategically for the Mongols and as important as it was to Manduhai as the area where she was born and grew up, the monarchs decided to move their capital back north of the Gobi into Mongolia proper.

Because Manduhai was born in the south, she understood it, but she also understood the dangers for nomadic people living there. Eight hundred years earlier, a wise Turkish khan had cautioned the steppe tribes against staying too close to the cities. In stones carved with his words and erected near Karakorum, he told them that the steppe was the best place on Earth to live. He said that the city people “give us gold, silver, and silk in abundance,” and that their words “have always been sweet and the materials of the Chinese people have always been soft.” But if you settle in their area, warned Bilge Khan, “you will die!”

One of Bilge Khan’s ministers, Tonyukuk, also recorded similar words on another set of stones, stating that Heaven would kill them as punishment for giving up their steppe freedom and submitting to the agricultural kingdoms. He encouraged the steppe people to remain always nomadic, to erect no buildings, and to resist the settled people at all costs. If they became too weak to resist, they should retreat into the mountains, but under no circumstances should they submit to rule from beyond the steppe.

The spirit of these men had certainly defined the prevailing attitude of the steppe tribes and had been one also accepted by Genghis Khan. The Mongols would die if they left Mongolia. The Mongol
nation would die if the people gave up herding and settled in cities. With such strong ideas in their minds, Manduhai and Dayan Khan did not return to the ancient ruins of Karakorum for their capital. They would have no city with walls of stone or buildings of wood; there would be no palace, no market, and no temple.

Manduhai Khatun and Dayan Khan rejected the trappings of empire and instead withdrew to the Kherlen River near the hearth of the Borijin clan, where Genghis Khan had grown up. Along these banks, Temujin had first gathered his noble people and founded his nation in the year 1206, taking for himself the title of Genghis Khan. Most importantly, he was buried close by at a secret spot in the silence of Burkhan Khaldun. The old palace
gers
of his wife and mother still resided here, and Mongols came from everywhere to pray and to remember him and them.

This was the first tribal capital of the Mongols, not the imperial capital of the Mongol Empire. This was the place where Genghis Khan divided his empire among his sons and daughters. This was the place where he had invested Alaqai Beki with the Onggud nation and Al-Altun with the Uighurs, and where he had made his nuptial speeches to them, charging them with their responsibilities to their nation. This was the place where the
Secret History
had been written. Perhaps more than anything else that she did, this choice demonstrated Manduhai’s commitment to the ancient history of the Mongols and showed her lack of interest in maintaining the pretense of an empire or of expanding into the territory of the Chinese or the Muslims. For her people and her children, she sought a secured and protected Mongol nation of herders, not a world empire of cities and foreign lands.

After Manduhai and Dayan Khan had been only a few years in their new northern capital, a delegation of the southern tribes crossed the Gobi to request their rulers’ return. The southern tribes had grown tired of the constant bickering, and they had once again felt the oppressive raids of the warlords from the Silk Route oases and the Chinese. In particular, they mentioned that they had paid lower taxes
under Manduhai and Dayan Khan than they were now required to pay under their new warlord.

Rather than going south themselves, the couple decided to send a son to govern for them. In their last official act together, Manduhai Khatun and Dayan Khan appointed their second son, Ulus Bolod, as the new
jinong
. Manduhai retired, turning over the control of the empire to her husband and children.

In 1508, Ulus Bolod headed south to assume his office in front of the Shrine of Genghis Khan, where his parents had created the new Mongol nation. A small group of retainers accompanied him across the Gobi, but no army seemed necessary.

Yet another warlord had begun pushing into the area. Called Ibari, or Ibrahim, he wished to replicate the power once held by Beg-Arslan and Ismayil. He and his allies incited discontent against Borijin rule. “He has come saying he will rule our country,” they complained. “Has he come saying he will rule our heads?”

Ulus Bolod arrived at the Shrine of Genghis Khan and was installed the same day in his new office of
jinong
by allies there. The priests who operated the shrine seemed eager to have a descendant of Genghis Khan ruling in the territory where they were now located, since this development would only enhance their own position.

On the second day, Ulus Bolod planned a long ancestral tribute of honor to Genghis Khan, thereby stressing his direct lineal descent from him and the restoration of his family’s power. This kinship connection, of course, set Ulus Bolod clearly apart from the other local leaders who did not belong to his Borijin clan. On Ulus Bolod’s way to the shrine on the second morning, he could see a large crowd gathered for the ceremony which he was about to conduct.

Before he reached the entry to the
ger
, an unknown enemy stepped out of the crowd and stopped him. The man claimed that Ulus Bolod owed him a horse in payment for a wrong done by some other family member. Ulus Bolod refused to give up his horse, but the man would not let him pass. In anger, Ulus Bolod pulled out his sword and sliced
off the man’s head. Such a bloodletting in front of the holiest of shrines upset everyone and proved a very bad omen for Ulus Bolod.

Having arranged this confrontation, Ibari and his men rushed forward and incited the crowd against Ulus Bolod. Another man jumped out from the crowd to offer his own horse to Ulus Bolod, on which he could flee, but the conspirators already had their troops ready and they barred any escape. Ulus Bolod and the few men with him dashed into the holy tent itself for refuge, where the priests tried to protect them, but the hostile troops began shooting their arrows. In the ensuing battle at the shrine, it is said that Ulus Bolod managed to kill one of the enemy, and one of Ulus Bolod’s men wounded Ibari, but the small group could not outfight the larger force attacking them. The new
jinong
Ulus Bolod was killed after only one day in office.

Dayan Khan vowed revenge for the assassination of his and Manduhai’s son, calling on the Eternal Blue Sky and the spirit of Genghis Khan to help him. “May you heaven, and next, you Holy Lord know the blood which has been shed and abandoned, and the bones which lie drying.”

Dayan Khan dutifully called his army and prepared to lead them south to reinstate control over the southern tribes, chase out Ibari, and install another son as
jinong
. He would henceforth rule from his base located in the central part of the Mongol territories south of the Gobi, in what is today Inner Mongolia, as head of the Chakhar clan of Mongols. His sons would occupy the lands to his left and right.

Now past sixty, Manduhai lacked the stamina to ride a horse across the Gobi one more time and charge back into battle. She had been at war for more than thirty-five years. Manduhai and Dayan Khan had scarcely been apart in those years. Ever since they came together, they had shared one life between them. Now the time had come for Dayan Khan to go on without her. He was in his early forties and had many years left ahead of him to rule, but she would not be there to see it. It
seemed as though there would never be an end to the violence, that as soon as one rebel or warlord was struck down, another rose to replace him. The long struggle of Manduhai to unify her nation seemed to have been in vain.

Manduhai would never again see Dayan Khan—the crippled boy whom she had dressed in large boots and stood before the Shrine of the First Queen to make him khan, the boy whom she put in a basket and took to war, and the man whom she married and with whom she raised eight children. As Dayan Khan and his sons rode south from Manduhai’s
ger
, it had been almost exactly three hundred years since Alaqai Beki had stood before her mother, Borte, and presented her cheek to be sniffed before riding south to assume her rule over the Onggud. From the same area near the Kherlen River, Manduhai sent her sons and husband back to complete the work that she had pursued throughout her life.