The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire (9 page)

The Tangut recognized that Genghis Khan was not a merchant, but a conqueror seeking to control the trade. As soon as he united the steppe, he dispatched forces south to attack the Tangut cities closest to the Mongol nation. As early as 1205, he had sent small bands of his cavalry south to probe the Tangut defenses. Attacking a walled and heavily fortified Tangut city proved far more difficult than capturing a herder’s camp, but through persistence and trial and error, Genghis Khan managed one small victory after another. Each triumph forced new contributions of camels and merchandise from the Tangut, but it did not produce a constant supply of goods. With each defeat the Tangut earnestly vowed to send more animals and wares in future tribute, but as soon as the Mongols disappeared back north of the Gobi, the defeated cities stopped payment. Genghis Khan’s campaigns, while proving militarily successful and giving his army good practice in laying siege to cities and maneuvering back and forth through the Gobi, were not producing the material results he sought.

Unable to succeed by military force alone, Genghis Khan devised another strategy that depended upon his daughter Alaqai Beki, whom he had promised in marriage to the family of the Onggud leader Ala-Qush. With Alaqai now around sixteen or seventeen years old, he decided to send her to the Onggud.

Alaqai was born to Genghis Khan and Borte around the year 1191, about the time that Borte turned thirty years old. Some scholars believe that her name means “Siberian Marmot,” but others offer a more mysterious origin tied directly to the birth of her father. According to this
etymology, the name means “Palm of the Hand,” in reference to some now unknown event at the time of her delivery. Such an origin for the name closely parallels the account of her father’s birth, when Genghis Khan emerged from the womb clutching a small blood clot in the palm of his hand. This was taken as a sign that he would one day rule the world. Whether true or not, the connection of these birth stories for the father and daughter show that some people place her in an important position comparable to his. No such story exists for any other member of the royal family.

Mongol tradition strongly maintains that Borte refused to hand over the rearing of her children to any of the many retainers she acquired as her husband’s power expanded. She and her mother-in-law, Hoelun, are attributed with raising their children, and she, much more than Genghis Khan, instilled in their daughters the duty to serve the nation. Borte came from the Khongirad, and in contrast to the Mongols’ nearly exclusive reliance on force and violence, her tribe had a far more subtle approach to public life and diplomacy. As Borte’s father explained: the Khongirad did not depend on the strength of their sons; they trusted instead in the beauty and cleverness of their daughters to protect them. He said that their daughters rode on carts pulled by black camels, and that they married powerful men and became queens to negotiate, intercede, and protect them. “From ancient time,” he said, “the Khongirad people have queens as our shields.”

Having grown up in the tribe that expected such a role for its daughters, Borte transmitted those same values and expectations to her female offspring. Her daughters were bred to rule.

Alaqai Beki was the first of her Borijin clan to come off the Mongolian Plateau to impose Mongol rule over the sedentary civilization of China. As she rode down the steep embankment that separated the Mongol steppe world from the agricultural and urban world of the Chinese, she faced more than 100 million people who, through generations of fighting, had come to loathe and fear everything she represented.

The steppe society where Alaqai grew up differed markedly from
the land she went to rule. The Onggud lived south of the Gobi on the borderland between the zones of herding nomads and the settled farmers of China. They had trading towns surrounded by high, thick walls. They lived in buildings for part of the year and in felt
gers
for the other part, and they worshiped in temples. The Onggud formed one of the oldest civilizations of northern Asia.

To remove competition against the rule of his daughters, Genghis Khan not only removed their husbands to his army, he dismissed all their other wives. Only the Mongol wife would preside. If the
guregen
already had wives, he had to divorce them in order to marry a royal Mongol woman, and once married he could not take another wife without a rarely issued dispensation from the Great Khan.

Divorcing the other wives did not impede the status of their children. Unlike societies that employed baroque procedures for distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate children, the Mongols accepted all children as equal. No child could be born without the consent of the Eternal Blue Sky. No earthly law or custom could presume to declare the child illegitimate.

The wives might be dismissed and their power curtailed, but the children, particularly the sons, could not be easily displaced as future sources of power. In other societies, such heirs and potential rivals faced nearly certain death, but Alaqai Beki took control of her husband’s other children in order to protect them, and to keep them close enough to prevent one from being set up as a rival ruler.

Alaqai Beki took literally the Mongol nation’s first step from its pastoral homeland into what would become one of the greatest conquests in Asian history. In his nuptial edict, her father charged her with an amazing mission. In preparation for the coming invasions, he told her: “You should be determined to become one of my feet.” He left no doubt that this was a major military assignment. She was not there merely to administer, but to rule—thereby beginning the expansion of the Mongols from a tribal nation into a global empire. “When I am going on an expedition, you should be my helper, when I am galloping, you should be my steed!”

Despite her youth, the importance of her mission demanded that Alaqai Beki act on her own young judgment. “No friend is better than your own wise heart!” Genghis Khan told her. He elaborated on this need for self-reliance, despite what complaints she might hear from those around her. “Although there are many things you can rely on, no one is more reliable than yourself,” he explained. She held ultimate power, and therefore, ultimate responsibility. “Although many people can be your helper, no one should be closer to you than your own consciousness.” He warned her to be careful because her survival was of the highest importance. “Although there are many things you should cherish, no one is more valuable than your own life.”

He also gave her more fatherly advice to protect herself and to foster good habits. He stressed the importance of constant learning as the key to being a successful ruler. He told her to be “prudent, steadfast, and courageous.” In perhaps his most important words, he said, “You have to remember life is short, but fame is everlasting!”

No Mongolian description survives of the coronation of the Mongol queens. The only hint comes from foreign accounts that Mongols raised their queens up to office while they were seated on a white felt rug, which would make their installation identical with that of a newly proclaimed khan.

The departure from home was simple for Alaqai and for each sister leaving her mother’s
ger
for a new life far away. The mother and daughter stood in front of the
ger
, and the daughter presented first her right cheek and then her left so that her mother might sniff each one in the traditional kiss of the Mongols. This sniff would help the mother to remember the smell of the child until they met again. Sometimes the mother declined to sniff the second cheek, saying, “I will sniff the left one when you return.” So great is the power of words that by saying it and visualizing it happening, the mother hoped to ensure that they would meet again.

When the daughter mounted her horse to ride away, she did not look back at the
ger
of her past but had to stare straight ahead into the future. Borte, like any Mongol mother, watched her daughter ride
away but never shed a tear. A Mongol mother was never supposed to cry in the presence of her child. Of all the fluids from a mother’s body, tears were the most dangerous. The mother’s blood gave life to the infant growing in the womb, and her milk nourished the baby after birth. Her saliva moistened the food that the mother chewed and put into the child’s mouth, and she used her urine to wash and sterilize her offspring’s wounds. The tears of a mother, however, contained dangerous power; no matter how great the pain the mother felt, she could not shed them in the presence of the child for fear of causing future harm.

Instead of crying, the mother performed an ancient ritual of the steppe. She brought out a pail of milk, and as her child rode away, she stood before the door of her
ger
and threw milk into the air with a
tsatsal
, a wooden instrument resembling a large perforated spoon. With an upward and outward toss of her right arm, the mother waved the
tsatsal
and aspersed the milk into the air until her child passed out of her sight. The milk constituted a special prayer, and it carried the hope that the mother could pour out a white road ahead of her child. Because a route made of white stones and sand can reflect the moon and stars, it could be traveled at night as well as day. Particularly for Alaqai passing south across the Gobi, night travel would help her animals not to overheat and would thus require less water. A white road offered freedom, but it also posed far greater danger than the usual black road of day. Because it was traveled in the darkness of night, the white road could easily lead into the land of temptation, error, and sin. By sprinkling the milk, the mother reminded her offspring of their obligation to behave properly.

Once her daughter passed beyond the horizon, the mother put down her pail of milk, and then after walking far away from her
ger
and her family, she lay facedown on the earth and cried her pain and her tears onto the ground. Mother Earth always understood the sorrow of a mother and would hide her tears.

As long as her children remained away from her, the Mongol mother came out every morning with her pail and
tsatsal
to sprinkle milk in the direction of each one of them and any other family member
away from home. For a people without ownership of land, the milk aspersions of the
tsatsal
also served to mark a territory of occupation. Her ritual sought a blessing and permission from the spirits of the land for her family to use all the land, waters, and pastures within sight in every direction. The
tsatsal
ritual located the family in space and in relation to one another, and it simultaneously established geographic location, spiritual connection, and social orientation.

According to the diplomatic procedures of the age, Genghis Khan sent Alaqai Beki to rule by marrying her to Ala-Qush, the leader of the neighboring kingdom, or the leader’s son, or nephew. The exact identity of her first husband remains unclear, but in time she married each of the men in succession, as needed or as she preferred. The confusion over her husbands’ identities frustrated generations of scholars, but the vagueness further illustrates the unimportance these men had in her administration. The identity of the Mongol queen mattered; the identity of her consort did not.

Alaqai’s kingdom occupied a large swath of land in what is now Chinese Inner Mongolia. Like the future empire that her father would create, Alaqai Beki’s multicultural kingdom spanned the Mongol, Turkic, and Chinese worlds. Because of her position at the intersection of these three civilizations, two of which were literate, we know more about her than her sister, Checheyigen of the Oirat. This information derives not from the Mongol chronicles, but from those of her neighbors, who exercised an intense curiosity about the Mongol queen.

As a leader of the Onggud, Alaqai Beki headed a tribe that had never been a powerful conquering or independent force, yet their history stretched back much farther than that of the Mongols. The Onggud formed one of the Turkic-speaking groups that had dominated the history of China’s northern borderlands over the previous two thousand years. They entered the pages of recorded history in the eighth century, when they constituted a part of the powerful Turkic empire based on the Mongolian Plateau during China’s Tang Dynasty,
between the years 618 and 907. They roamed in the long region between the inhabitable Gobi to the north and the agricultural lands of the Yellow River to the south.

Their neighbors called the Onggud by different names, but each name revealed a certain aspect of their identity, location, or relation with stronger powers around them. Although large and scarcely populated, the area has a consistent ecological appearance that is succinctly summarized in the Chinese name for the Onggud. They call them the Shatuo, meaning “the Sandy Gravel tribe,” in reference to this transitional zone between the desert and farmland. The Chinese also referred to the Onggud as the White Tatars, a benign designation that distinguished them from the wilder Mongols, whom they called Black Tatars.

The Mongols consistently called them the Onggud, and according to the etymology recorded by a thirteenth-century Persian chronicler, they acquired their name from a word for wall. They were therefore the People of the Wall, representing their occupational status and geographic location under the Jin Dynasty of the Jurched. Whether the etymology was true or not, this designation “People of the Wall” accurately encapsulates their history: They traditionally manned the forts and protected the Chinese settlements from the other, wilder tribes of the steppes. Another etymology derives from the word for gate or opening, and this designation also shows that for the Mongols, they were not so much a barrier to China as the entrance into it.

Because of their loyalty to a series of northern Chinese dynasties, the Onggud also had an official designation as a military prefecture called the Tiande Jun, a type of border patrol. Although willing to guard the frontier and work for their Chinese or other employer, the Onggud carefully maintained their own Turkic language, and they repeatedly embraced foreign religions, such as Christianity; that set them firmly apart from the Chinese population and from the ruling dynasty of both the Song and the Jin.