Granddaughters of Resistance

 

 

AT THE HEIGHT OF THE MONGOL EMPIRE, AROUND 1271, young Marco Polo set out from Venice to the Mongol capital at Beijing with his father and uncle, who had just completed the same round-trip. The era of conquests begun by Genghis Khan had concluded, and although its shape differed radically from what he had intended, the Silk Route still bustled with caravans, merchants, and exotic wares. Marco Polo easily made his way overland from the Mediterranean to the Mongol court of Khubilai Khan, making almost the entire trip within the Mongol Empire and under the protection of Mongol soldiers.

Yet, by the time he left Beijing to return home around 1291, the middle part of the empire had collapsed; and because he could not cross the continent, he had to sail from China around South Asia to the Persian port of Hormuz. Within the time of his trip, the empire had broken into three large pieces, and the center had shattered.

Instead of a string of khanates around the central one in Mongolia, three miniature empires emerged. In 1271 Khubilai Khan ruled most of Mongol East Asia and had declared a new Chinese dynasty that he called the Yuan. His brother Hulegu had created a soon-to-be Muslim dynasty known as the Il-Khanate over the Middle East. The only one of the three that survived in something approaching the manner created by Genghis Khan was the Russian territory given to the family of Jochi and known eventually as the Golden Horde.

The Il-Khanate of Persia, the Golden Horde of Russia, and the Yuan Dynasty of China formed three points of a large triangle, and although they tried, none of them could control the middle of the continent. This central zone of mountains and adjacent deserts extending roughly from Afghanistan to Siberia became the gathering point for all the disaffected lineages, the deposed Borijin members, dreamers bent on becoming the new Genghis Khan, and those who simply wanted a refuge from the rapidly changing world. Some of the granddaughters of Genghis Khan took up the struggle against the aggression of Sorkhokhtani’s lineage, and they found new allies in the other defeated lineages of Ogodei and Chaghatai. Together they formed a vortex of resistance in the center of the Asian steppe in what is now Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and the western parts of Mongolia and China. These factions directed most of their anger against the newly formed China under Khubilai Khan, since he claimed to be the new Great Khan of the whole empire, but they pitted one part of the empire against the other when possible and rapidly changed sides when advantageous.

Between 1250 and 1270, Orghina, one of Checheyigen’s Oirat daughters who had escaped the mass rape, became the center of resistance. After serving as regent in Central Asia from 1251 to 1260, but unable to form a powerful independent force, she switched sides back and forth among the contenders for the office of khan over the following decade. Orghina Khatun, described as “a beautiful, wise, and discerning princess,” maneuvered through a succession of power struggles, changing allegiances and religions as needed, sometimes coming out on top and sometimes temporarily losing everything and starting again.

Inner Asia provided a constant refuge for the enemies of the large Mongol states around it. After Khubilai defeated his youngest brother, Arik Boke, who as otchigen had ruled the family homeland of Mongolia, he seized the courts from the widowed queens and dispersed their gers and other possessions to his male allies. In this way, Arik Boke’s wives and their courts were treated more as booty from a defeated foe than as defeated members of the royal family. Such actions produced a constant flow of rebels and refugees into the free zone of the interior of the continent.

The hostile tribes of the interior would have constituted little more than a nuisance for the three Mongol factions ruling except for one important factor. All trade goods had to pass through their territory. Under the Mongols, the trade of the Silk Route had grown from transporting mere luxuries into an important international commerce at the core of the world economy. The importation of silks, bronze mirrors, and medicines from China made the Muslims more willing to tolerate the Mongol Il-Khanate as their overlords. The Golden Horde used Chinese silks and Persian carpets to maintain the loyalty of the Russian nobles, who in turn kept the peasants from revolting. The Mongol emperors of China needed Damascus glass and steel, Indian jewels, and Siberian furs as well as Muslim and European technology to sustain their power. Gold brocade became the Mongol fashion throughout the empire, and huge quantities passed back and forth, as did more prosaic items such as asbestos and dried insects used to manufacture exotic dyes.

Just as important as the trade commodities, the Silk Route carried the information that the empire needed to function: diplomatic correspondence, intelligence, tax receipts, census summaries, and conscription reports, all of which required paper to keep the bureaucracy functioning. Accompanying the merchants and camel drivers along the route was a constant flow of priests, mullahs, doctors, astronomers, engineers, brewers, printers, metalsmiths, scribes, weavers, soothsayers, translators, munitions specialists, architects, miners, and tile makers. Never before in history had so many goods and so much learning and cultural influence traveled so quickly from city to city and civilization to civilization.

The Mongols outside of Mongolia had become more of a ruling aristocracy spread out over Eurasia than a tribe of warriors. They maintained a vaguely Mongol theme to their lifestyle, but the underlying substance had shifted. The simple Mongol gers of felt and fur turned into mobile palaces of linen and silk with rich embroidery, plush carpets with intricate designs, and flowing curtains and door covers offering a more dramatic framing for the pageantry and staged events in the daily life of the royal elite. As Juvaini described one used for a Central Asian tiger hunt: “It was a large tent of fine linen embroidered with delicate embroideries, with gold and silver plate.”

As the Mongol men married local women who preferred life in palaces, the ger quickly changed from the focal structure of domestic life owned and controlled by women into accoutrements of manly activities such as hunting and drinking. Although they still controlled the most powerful fighting army in the world, the Borijin men sometimes seemed more interested in designing and decorating novel tents than in obtaining necessary military equipment. According to the Persian record for making one such special ger, “The master craftsmen had been called together and consulted, and in the end it had been decided that the tent should be made of a single sheet of cloth with two surfaces,” with both sides boasting identical designs and capped by a golden cupola. “They feasted and reveled here, and the access of mirth and joy to their breasts was unrestricted.” The tent was judged so beautiful that it made the sun envious and made the moon sulk.

 

Marco Polo’s path home across Central Asia was barred by two of Genghis Khan’s most unusual descendants, a father-and-daughter fighting team. Marco Polo called the daughter Aijaruc, derived from Aiyurug—meaning “Moon Light” in Turkish. She is better known from other sources as the warrior Khutulun, which came from Mongolian Hotol Tsagaan, meaning “All White.” Born around 1260, she was the great-granddaughter of Ogodei, and her father, Qaidu Khan, was the regional ruler in Central Asia.

Qaidu Khan and Khutulun lived in the interior of the continent and allied with a large number of Mongols and tribes opposed to the central rule of Khubilai Khan. After Khubilai Khan proclaimed the existence of a Chinese-style dynasty, the Yuan, in 1271, the disaffected family members in the interior increasingly portrayed themselves as the true Mongols. Their land around the Tianshan Mountains and adjacent steppes became known as Moghulistan, meaning “land of the Mongols,” although it was not in the original homeland on the Mongolian Plateau.

Qaidu Khan was described as a man of average height who held himself quite erectly. According to the Persian chronicle, he had only nine scattered hairs on his face. He was as strict in his habits as in his posture. Almost unheard of in the Mongol royal family, Qaidu Khan drank no alcohol, not even the beloved airag, fermented mare’s milk, and he ate no salt. He seemed equally as strict in his relations. When another of his daughters found her husband having an affair with her maid, Qaidu Khan executed him.

Charitably described as beautiful and much sought after by men, Khutulun had a large and powerful figure. She excelled in all the Mongol arts: riding horses, shooting arrows, and even wrestling. She became known as a champion wrestler whom no man could throw. Since Mongols frequently bet on wrestling matches and other competitions, she often won horses as a result of her wrestling victories. In time, she came to have a herd of more than ten thousand horses won in such a manner.

Her father gave her a gergee as a sign of her power and independence. Called a paiza by Marco Polo, the gergee was a large and heavy medallion of office, consisting of an engraved disk or rectangular plate worn on a chain around the neck. Made of silver or gold, it stated the power of the holder and that it was granted by the khan under the will of the Eternal Blue Sky. Since the earlier queens had used seals, or tamghas, to signify their status, Khutulun is the only woman mentioned as owning her own gergee, an authority usually reserved for men.

Although Khutulun had fourteen brothers, she outperformed them all. While his other children assisted him as best they could, Qaidu Khan relied highly on his daughter Khutulun for advice as well as for support. She was her father’s favorite child and helped him to administer the government and affairs of his kingdom. Rashid al-Din, definitely not a sympathetic chronicler, wrote that “she went around like a boy,” though he also said that she “often went on military campaigns, where she performed valiant deeds.” Despite the apparent unusualness of the relationship between Qaidu Khan and Khutulun, in some ways their cooperative work probably reflected that of Genghis Khan and his daughters.

Khutulun followed an unorthodox method of confronting the enemy. She rode to the battlefield at her father’s side, but when she perceived the right moment, in the words of Marco Polo, she would “make a dash at the host of the enemy, and seize some man thereout, as deftly as a hawk pounces on a bird, and carry him to her father; and this she did many a time.”

Qaidu Khan commanded an army of around forty thousand warriors. They fought all along the frontier with Khubilai Khan’s China and controlled much of the interior of the country along the oases of the Silk Route and the western mountains. In addition to numerous local spats with other members of the family, Qaidu Khan’s army reached toward the northeast as far as the traditional Mongol capital of Karakorum and had at least one campaign in the Khentii Mountains farther east.

Because of Genghis Khan’s law that every branch of the family had to approve the granting of the title, the opposition of Qaidu Khan and Khutulun together with other disgruntled members of the Borijin clan served as a constant reminder that Khubilai Khan lacked universal Mongol approval. On both sides, the campaigns often showed more propagandistic bravado than genuine military achievement. One of Khubilai’s allied cousins, a renowned archer named Toq-Temur, rode off to war on a gray horse. “People choose bays and horses of other colors so that blood may not show on them, and the enemy may not be encouraged,” he is quoted as saying. “As for me, I choose a gray horse, because just as red is the adornment of women, so the blood of a wound on a rider and his horse, which drips on to the man’s clothes and the horse’s limbs and can be seen from afar, is the adornment and decoration of men.”

Despite all the big words, the boundaries changed little. No army secured a decisive victory. The low-grade but persistent hostility continued with periodic violent flare-ups. Caravans sought out routes around the violence, but as the years passed, fewer managed to get through.

Marco Polo also became caught up in the propaganda. Having never seen the Mongols under Genghis Khan and being a young merchant rather than a seasoned soldier, he accepted and repeated many of the grandiose stories of military triumphalism heard around the Mongol court in Beijing. When Qaidu Khan fought Khubilai Khan’s army at the largely abandoned capital of Karakorum in Mongolia, Marco Polo mistakenly described it as one of the hardest fought in Mongol history. “Many a man fell there,” wrote Marco Polo. “Many a child was made an orphan there; many a lady widowed; many another woman plunged in grief and tears for the rest of her days.” Qaidu Khan eventually withdrew, and the battle settled nothing.

Khubilai Khan faced great difficulty in combating Qaidu Khan and the tribes of the interior because his largely infantry Chinese army could not travel far and was not trained in the appropriate kind of warfare needed against mounted tribesmen in the desert and mountains. Even worse, his Mongol and other tribal warriors could not be trusted to fight people who were their own relatives or with whom they had much more in common than they had with the distant and increasingly alien Mongol court in Beijing.

Unable to depend on the Chinese and unwilling to rely on the Mongols for his protection, Khubilai Khan made one of those temporarily convenient decisions that over time produces totally unexpected results with tremendous implications. Khubilai requested and received soldiers from the west via his relatives in the Golden Horde. Fifty years earlier, the Mongols had moved an army of Saxon miners to work in northern Asia, and now Khubilai brought in soldiers who would have no kinship or cultural ties to either the Mongols or the Chinese, presuming that they would therefore be totally dependent and loyal only to him.

Although from various western origins, the recruits came from two main groups: the European Ossetians of the Caucasus Mountains and the Turkic Kipchak tribes of the adjacent plains of southeastern Russia. The Ossetians came as guards to the Forbidden City in Beijing, and the Kipchak to fight Qaidu Khan, becoming an army of frontier occupation in western Mongolia and parts of Siberia. From these sites they repeatedly raided the forces of Qaidu Khan but never eliminated the threat from the independent tribes.

Although never commonplace, through the centuries, stories about women warriors appeared regularly enough in Asian and European steppe history not to be considered as novelty. Their deeds were usually explained as arising from unusually dire circumstances or in some cases from exceptional aptitude. The ability of women to fight successfully in steppe society when they failed to do so in most civilizations derived, however, from the unique confluence of the horse with the bow and arrow. In armies that relied on infantry and heavy weapons such as swords, lances, pikes, or clubs, men enjoyed major physical advantages over women.

Mounted on a horse and armed with a bow and arrows, a trained and experienced woman warrior could hold her own against men. Women fared better in combat based on firepower than in hand-to-hand combat. Although archery requires strength, muscular training and discipline prove to be more important than brute force. An archer, no matter how strong, can never substitute mere might for skill in shooting. By contrast, good swordsmanship requires training and practice, but a sufficiently strong person wielding a sword can inflict lethal damage without prior experience.

Because archery depended so much on training, the ability of women to use arrows effectively in war depended upon their developing their skills as young girls. In the pastoral tribes, all children learned to use the bow and arrow, primarily for hunting and for protecting their herds from predators. Both boys and girls needed this expertise. In a family with an adequate number of both sexes, the boys would take the larger animals, such as camels and cows, farther away to graze, while girls stayed closer to home with the sheep and goats. Since wolves would more likely attack a sheep or goat than a camel or cow, the girls had to be able to defend their animals.

Muslim and Christian sources repeatedly described women warriors among the Mongols. The first such mention came in letters from a Dominican friar and an archbishop between 1234 and 1238, reporting on the Mongol threat to Christendom. Like flashing news bulletins from the war front, the letters described, in a mixture of minute detail and fantasy, reports brought into the Russian cities by refugees fleeing the Mongol onslaught. They reported that a Mongol princess led the army and that she not only fought but acted like a man.

The supposed Mongol princess attacked a neighboring prince and looted his province. In a quest for revenge, he captured, raped, and killed her and, in a final act of retribution, mutilated her corpse and chopped off her head. A similar account of the killing of a khan’s sister appears in the manuscript of Thomas of Spalato, which describes the Mongol invasion of Dalmatia and the siege of Split in 1242. He adds that many women fought in the Mongol army and were braver and wilder than the men, but the account seems based solely on hearsay, with no reliable specifics.

Although both Muslim and Christian chroniclers described fighting Mongol princesses, their reports do not overlap in place or time, and therefore make it difficult to judge their accuracy. By contrast, both wrote about Khutulun, and she survived in oral folk traditions as well.

 

As accustomed as the Mongols were to seeing women on horses and shooting arrows from bows, no one had seen a woman who could wrestle as well as Khutulun could. According to Marco Polo, the independent princess refused to marry unless a man could first defeat her in wrestling. Many men came forward to try, but none succeeded. In order to wrestle her, each opponent had to wager ten horses on a bout, and thus she substantially increased the size of her herds. Her parents became anxious for her to marry, and so, around 1280, when a particularly desirable bachelor prince presented himself, her parents tried to persuade her to let him win. He was “young and handsome, fearless and strong in every way, insomuch that not a man anywhere in his father’s realm could vie with him.” He brought with him a thousand horses to bet on his victory.

A crowd gathered for the match that was held in front of Khutulun’s parents’ court. It seems that with the hope of pleasing the parents whom she loved so much, Khutulun wanted to let the prince win. That resolve melted, however, in the rush of excitement when the match began. “When both had taken post in the middle of the hall they grappled each other by the arms and wrestled this way and that, but for a long time neither could get the better of the other. At last, however, the damsel threw him right valiantly on the palace pavement. And when he found himself thus thrown, and her standing over him, great indeed was his shame and discomfiture.” She not only defeated but humiliated him, and he disappeared, leaving behind the additional thousand horses for her herd.

Gossip and rumors swirled around Khutulun. Leading such a colorful and unusual life without a husband, she became the object of constant interest in her actions and speculation about her motives. Numerous reports maintain that she considered marrying Il-khan Ghazan, one of her cousins, who ruled Persia and Mesopotamia, and that they had an exchange of correspondence and envoys. But she showed no inclination to leave the steppe and live the life of a proper Muslim lady. Because of her reluctance to marry, her detractors alleged that she had entered into an incestuous relationship with her father and thus would take no other man while he lived. In the wake of the salacious accusations against her and her father, she married Abtakul of the Choros clan. He was described as “a lively, tall, good-looking man,” and the chronicles state clearly: “She chose him herself for her husband.”

The marriage only increased the gossip about Khutulun and her lifestyle. According to one contorted story, she married Abtakul after he supposedly came to court on a mission to murder her father, Qaidu Khan. When he was captured, his mother offered herself for punishment instead of him, but Abtakul refused his mother’s aid. Supposedly, Qaidu Khan so respected the mother for trying to save the son and respected the son for trying to save the mother, that he took him into his service and commissioned him as an army officer. Later, when Abtakul was wounded in a battle with Khubilai Khan’s army, he returned to the royal camp to recuperate. At that point, Khutulun met him for the first time and fell in love with him.

Despite her marriage, Khutulun continued to campaign with her father. In 1301, Qaidu Khan moved deeper into Mongolia from the southwest, headed for the capital at Karakorum. According to the chronicler Ghiyasuddin Khwandamir of Afghanistan and India, Khubilai’s Chinese forces outnumbered Qaidu Khan’s army by a hundred to one. They met in battle at Qaraqata near the Zavkhan River. The battle raged for three days and nights, and, on the fourth, Qaidu Khan was wounded and nearly captured.

Qaidu Khan decided to try a ruse that had once worked for Genghis Khan in a battle against the Naiman not far from this area. On the fourth night, “he ordered all his warriors to light fires in several places.” When the Mongol generals leading the Chinese army “saw the flames of so many fires, they thought that assistance had reached Qaidu Khan from some source.” Instead of staying to fight, however, Qaidu Khan left the fires burning while his men “decamped and withdrew.” The enemy suspected a deception, but they were not sure what kind. “Imagining that Qaidu Khan was trying to trick them into drawing closer” and would then ambush them, Khubilai Khan’s forces fled despite having been on the threshold of victory over Qaidu Khan’s army. As they fled, they set fire to the grass on the steppe behind them to prevent Qaidu Khan’s army from pursuing them and to deny their animals pasture if they did.

Following his complete but unexpected victory, Qaidu Khan’s wounds worsened. “After this victory Qaidu Khan fell ill with dyspepsia,” according to Khwandamir. “Some of the ignorant” attendants “who called themselves physicians gave him twenty-five pills, and the pills turned the illness into dysentery.” After a month of treatment, Qaidu Khan died in February 1301. He was buried between the Ili River and the Chu River in a place called Shongkorlog, and Khutulun looked after his tomb for the rest of her life.

According to some accounts, her father respected her so much that before his death he attempted to name her to be the next khan, despite the lack of support within the family for this succession. However, she apparently preferred to continue as head of the military more than to become khan. She made clear that she was “desirous of leading the military and running affairs.” Toward this end, “she wanted her brother Orus to take her father’s place” as khan and leave her in charge of the army.

The Persian chronicler, who condescendingly disapproved of her involvement in politics, reported with approval that the other contenders for the office objected strenuously and insultingly. “You should mind your scissors and needles!” one of them yelled in angry derision. “What have you to do with kingship and chieftainship?” demanded the other.

Her words were not recorded, but her actions showed what she thought of their objections. She continued in her struggle, “stirring up sedition and strife,” in the words of her critics. Yet she maintained the support of her brother Orus. The record is sketchy about her precise actions after her father’s death, but in 1306 she followed him into death. Some reports claim that she died fighting in battle, others that she was assassinated. These speculations only heighten the mystery of this unusual woman.

Khutulun, the All White Princess, returned into the fog of history. If today only Marco Polo’s account of her had survived, we might well imagine that she was merely a mythical figure, a product of travelers’ tales and the fervid imagination. In addition to the works of Marco Polo and the Persian chroniclers, however, part of the story of Khutulun appears in the account of the fourteenth-century Arab traveler Ibn Battuta. Similarly some elements of Khutulun’s life appeared in a Ming Dynasty novel published in the fifteenth century. Yet both the European traveler and the Persian chroniclers recorded stories about her with different details, in different languages, and from different perspectives without contradiction.

With the death of Khutulun in 1306, the Borijin men had won. The queens had been defeated, their lands had been appropriated and distributed among their brothers’ sons, and the last defiant rebel princess had passed from the scene. The men of the family had managed to deny the women control over the Silk Route, but they failed to assert their own control. Trade and communication began to unravel as rival warlords quarreled over oases and trading centers like dogs snarling over goat entrails. The Silk Route had been the core of the Mongol Empire, and without it there was no empire.

 

As the role of women in public life in the Mongol Empire continued to recede over the next century, the elite Mongol men fell into a life of debauched pleasure in their Chinese parks, Persian gardens, and Russian palaces. No heroes came to recharge the energy of the sapped nation. No new allies came to join them. No armies set out to expand the decaying Mongol rule over China. Throughout the fourteenth century, the Mongol leadership, especially the Borijin clan, deteriorated. Each generation proved less competent and knowledgeable, as well as more isolated and corrupt, than the last.

A noxious fog of ignorance and greed engulfed the family, and the khans stumbled blindly in search of physical pleasure and mindless amusements until they were killed by some corrupt official and replaced by another. In the Mongol chronicles as well as in the oral history and folk memory of the people, this debauchery, more than any other factor, brought about the fall of the empire and the fratricidal turmoil that followed.

Khutulun was the last of the wild Mongol women. In Russia, Persia, and China, they began to disappear into the ranks of civilized women, who lived according to the standards of the local culture. They never became quite as domesticated as other women in those countries, but they played roles more similar to those normally allocated to women in powerful dynasties. They operated behind the scenes, making alliances, promoting heirs, fighting with co-wives and mothers-in-law, and pursuing the life of court ladies, who seemed so important to the political life of the moment but had minimal lasting significance on the rise and fall of empires.

One of the few places where Mongol women continued to exercise an important role was in Korea, known to the Mongols as the Rainbow Land of the Son-in-Law Nation. The invasion of Korea began during the reign of Ogodei, but the country was not completely under Mongol control until the reign of Khubilai Khan. The Mongols arranged numerous marriage exchanges with the Korean royal family, and sometimes Korean princes came to the Mongol court to learn the language and customs of the Mongols. Five Korean kings received Borijin daughters as wives for approximately seventy years. Like the other son-in-law states, Korea maintained its traditional laws, administrative structure, and tax system. Unlike the guregen of Genghis Khan’s time, the Korean sons-in-law were not sent off to distant wars; thus, the Mongol queens of Korea lacked the power to rule that their aunts such as Alaqai Beki had held. It had been the last of the foreign countries taken as a son-in-law ally, but it retained this position until the end of the Yuan Dynasty in 1368.

According to the Korean Veritable Records for the year 1442, one Mongol khan looking back on the relations between the two allies wrote: “When our great ancestor Genghis Khan governed all the eight directions … there was none under heaven who would not obey. Korea among others was friendlier with us than any other nation, being as close as true brothers might be.”

With their mastery of the Mongolian language, their numerous Mongolian relatives, their long time spent at the Mongol court, and even their Mongolian names, the Korean kings appeared largely Mongolian to their overlords. Yet, speaking Korean, with numerous Korean relatives and Korean names, they still seemed Korean to their subjects. This ability to play both sides benefited Korea greatly, but in the end the schizophrenic life of the kings came at great personal cost to them and their families.

With her own Mongol detachment of guards close at hand and the mighty Mongol army never too far from Korea, the Mongol queen had an independent source of power that curtailed the options of her husband. Yet, as a foreign queen in a sometimes hostile environment, her powers had very definite limits and rarely reached far beyond the range of her own eyesight.

Mongol-Korean relations in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries centered on these queens, and the era is filled with colorful stories of arguments over seating and rituals, angry domestic fights, murders and mysterious deaths, unfaithful kings who preferred Korean women over their Mongol spouses, mothers-in-law placing curses on their daughters-in-law, and wanton Mongol queens who brazenly promoted with impunity a succession of handsome guards, ministers, and attendants as lovers. Secret letters and coded messages dashed back and forth between the Korean Mongol capitals. Envoys of the royals came and went, checking on rival accusations or to plead for mercy, and occasionally Mongol military units moved menacingly in an effort to quell another flare-up. Despite the drama, romance, and intrigue, Mongols and Koreans continued to live their awkward but mutually beneficial alliance; that relationship, however, had ended by the time the Mongol queen Noguk died during childbirth in 1365, during the reign of her anti-Yuan husband, King Gongmin. Soon both the Goreyo Dynasty of Korea and the Yuan Dynasty of China had run their historical course and were replaced by more vibrant ones.

 

Harmony between the male sky and the female earth continued to fall out of balance as the descendants of Genghis Khan violated virtually every important rule, law, and custom that he had given them. As the Yuan Dynasty deteriorated through the fourteenth century, the court recognized that its officials had abandoned much of their former way of life, including the equilibrium of male and female principles rooted in Mongolian culture and central to the spirituality taught by Genghis Khan.

The Mongol court sought to restore the needed balance through public rituals from a variety of religions. But with the removal of women from the government structure established by Genghis Khan, it was hard for the Mongols to synchronize the necessary male and female components. The last emperor became convinced of a novel way to redress the imbalance. He could imbibe female vitality into his body, making himself the right blend of masculine and feminine essences. If the emperor was perfectly balanced, then his government would be in harmony and the world would be set right.

The way to absorb the needed womanly qualities was through sexual relations performed in a variety of ritually specific ways. With help from loyal retainers, the emperor arranged to recruit a variety of young girls, mostly from the families of commoners, who were specially trained for his service in this urgent spiritual quest to rescue the empire. In 1354, as a way to improve the ritual quality of these diverse girls, sixteen were selected for a special troupe named the Divine Demon Dancing Girls.

The emperor selected ten of his male relatives to assist in these pressing matters of state. Just as Genghis Khan had used ten as the main unit of military organization, with ten squads of ten men each forming a company of one hundred, each of the emperor’s specially chosen men was instructed to perform ten times a night in the ritually prescribed sequence of acts. To assist in their work, the emperor had special rooms constructed to perform the rituals, each with appropriate instructive artwork to teach the occupants more precisely their duties and to encourage them in the performance.

The monks, either on their own or with the permission of the emperor, convinced some women of the royal household that they, too, needed an infusion of male essence by being initiated as nuns into the secret practices. A Ming Dynasty investigation later asserted: “The wives and concubines and other women in the palace committed adultery with outside ministers, or allowed monks to stay in the palace to be initiated into nunhood.” Their actions turned the Forbidden City into a “place full of obscenity.”

All the efforts were in vain; the Yuan Dynasty of the Mongols collapsed in 1368, the Year of the Monkey.

The Mongol royal family, however, did not assume any responsibility for the collapse of Khubilai Khan’s dynasty. Instead the Borijin survivors blamed the fall completely on a deceitful trick by the Chinese. According to the mythical account recorded in the Erdeni-yin Tobci, the expulsion of the Mongols from China began when a caravan of Kazakh carts appeared at the walls of the Forbidden City. The caravan leader handed a note to the guard stating that he was bringing tribute for the khan, but the sentry would not allow the carts to enter until the caravan leader made him “happy with jewels.”

Once through the massive gates and inside the Forbidden City, the merchants quickly set to unloading their immense tribute under the watchful eye of the Mongol guards. The first three sets of carts carried jewels and other valuable gifts. The next vehicles contained armor and weapons that they laid out as though intended for presentation as tribute. From the final carts, the visitors hauled out three large and mysterious objects coated in wax. The merchants explained to the watching guards that these objects were giant candles, and to prove their claim, they lit the wick on each of them. As the wax burned down, it melted the wax off the large metal objects. Once they were free of the wax, it became obvious that the wicks were actually fuses, and each of the large fake candles concealed a cannon. About the time the merchants finished unloading the carts, the fire reached the powder and fired the cannons with resounding noise.

The cannon burst served as a signal to a regiment of rebels concealed in the carts; they sprang out of hiding and rushed to put on the neatly arranged armor and take up the weapons. The boom of the cannon and the mêlée of the rebels woke the emperor, who just managed to escape with the royal jade seal hidden in the flowing sleeves of his imperial robe.

He did not have time to gather his Divine Demon Dancers, and thus the harmony of male and female in the Mongol Empire was abandoned.

 

 

7

 

The Rabbit Demon’s Revenge

 

 

EVEN AS THE EMPIRE OF GENGHIS KHAN COLLAPSED, MOST of the Mongols did not want to return home to Mongolia. Members of the Borijin clan in Russia and Persia intermarried with local elites, changed their religion and language as readily as their clothes, and forgot that they were Mongols in order to blend into the new social order.

Of the three major branches of the Borijin family ruling abroad, only the Chinese branch attempted to flee home when their rule collapsed, but most of their Mongol subjects stayed in China. According to the Mongol accounts, a dispersed population of 400,000 Mongols lived across China in 1368. Yet, only 60,000 managed to escape or were willing to flee with the court. The Borijin rulers, now neither Chinese nor Mongol, had so alienated their Mongol subjects and soldiers that at their final moment of expulsion from China by the newly rising and natively authentic Ming Dynasty, the majority of the Mongol commoners chose to stay in China. They preferred to serve China rather than return to Mongolia with the Borijin clan and its corrupt horde of foreign advisors, sexually permissive monks, alien guards, pampered astrologers, and nondenominational spiritual quacks.

Not knowing where to go in Mongolia, the royal refugees headed back to the Kherlen River, to the source of their myths at the foot of Mount Burkhan Khaldun. The caravan stretched back across many miles, and it took many weeks before all the people and animals arrived. One cluster after another limped back. The camels carried large leather trunks and folded tents of colored silk and damask.

Although on horseback, the women wore their heavy Mongol-style jewelry, their flowing gowns of embroidered gold lined with cashmere, and their coats of tiger and leopard skin trimmed with sable. The children rode on carts pulled by lumbering oxen and yaks. The men wore their silk sashes tied extra tight against the hunger and the constant bouncing on horseback. The people and all they carried arrived coated with a thick layer of Gobi dust. The armor was bent, the lances twisted, the flags tattered, the horses thin.

 

The many Mongols who stayed behind in China or near the border during the Ming Dynasty continued to be a part of the Chinese historical record. Those who returned to the Mongolian Plateau, however, largely passed out of the recorded history of their neighbors. But the Mongols were now literate and relied upon their own written documents and chronicles to supplement their oral stories. Today we would know almost nothing of Mongolia during this era if it were not for two Mongolian texts written in the seventeenth century. The Altan Tobci, meaning the “Golden Summary ,” was recorded around 1651 in a jumble of names, stories, and genealogies; about a decade later, it was followed by the Erdeni-yin Tobči, meaning the “Bejeweled Summary” or sometimes translated as the “Precious Summary.” The accounts were recorded separately, long after the events contained within them occurred, and the details, particularly dates, vary between the two versions. Yet they agree in the overall narrative of events and in the identity and actions of the major players.

The exodus from China was significant, but many of the refugee soldiers streaming into Mongolia were not even Mongol. They belonged to the European Ossetian and Turkic Kipchak soldiers originally brought as imperial guards for Khubilai Khan, who had feared his own Mongol warriors as well as the Chinese.

The Mongol herders, following their traditional way of life on the steppe, did not welcome these strange Mongols gladly. During their seven generations away from home, the royal family had not become Chinese; however, they no longer lived as Mongols. They had all the confidence and bravado of the original Mongols of Genghis Khan, but they had none of the skills, strengths, or stamina. They seemed to have abandoned the virtue of Mongol life and ignored the virtue of Chinese civilization, preferring instead to combine the worst of both. The only occupation they had learned was ruling, and after the death of Genghis Khan, they had not done that well. Once back in Mongolia, they found themselves marooned in a vast sea of grass with little knowledge of their own nomadic culture.

The returning refugees hardly recognized their fellow Mongols who had remained north of the Gobi and continued to follow the traditionally rugged and independent life of nomadic herders. Throughout the sojourn of the royal family and their retinue in China from 1211 until 1368, these Mongols never completely submitted to the rule of their Mongol relatives from the Chinese capital. These Mongol traditionalists remained loyal to the spirit of Genghis Khan by following leaders such as Arik Boke, Qaidu Khan, and Khutulun, but they rejected, or at least remained suspicious of, the Yuan Dynasty established by Khubilai Khan and operated to the exclusive benefit of his descendants for nearly a century.

The Mongols who had dismounted in China and lived there for more than a century had lost their ability to survive in the harsh conditions of Mongolia. For them, hunting was an elaborately ritualized sport, not a survival skill; it was best done with transport elephants, dancing girls for the long evenings, trained warriors to pursue the animals, beaters to drive the animals to where the royals waited with their bowmen at their side, and a cadre of chefs to concoct exotic delicacies from the game.

They did not know how to stalk a wild animal, much less skin the animals or tan the hides. They did not know how to shear the sheep or make clothes from the wool, because they had grown accustomed to wearing silk woven by anonymous workers in the far corners of their erstwhile empire. Each Mongol aristocrat in China had his own private herd, but they were for show and glory, like the ten thousand white horses of the Great Khan. Their century and a half in China had not acculturated them to any new skills; it had merely deprived them of their old ones from lack of use.

The returned Mongols and their foreign guard began eating up everything they could find without regard to season or weather. They slaughtered the animals indiscriminately, and they grazed them without concern for the survival of the pasture for another year. They chopped down the forests and fouled the landscape. They still had their passionate love of horses and tried to maintain their large herds even if sheep, goats, cows, and yaks proved more efficient at converting grass into meat.

Within only a few years, the returning Mongols ate up their homeland, destroyed the pasture, and burned the wood. To survive, they had to move ever farther north into the Siberian forests, west on the mountains and plains around the Altai, or back toward the south, to China from whence they came. The north was colder, harsher, and held fewer resources. The west was still inhabited by the steppe tribes that had not settled in China, and they maintained all the vigor and hostility of the old Mongols.

Though the Ming had chased them from the capital city, the Mongols did not consider themselves to have been overthrown. They had merely lost some territory. The newly emerging Ming Dynasty now controlled the agricultural parts of China, essentially the areas occupied by the dominant Han ethnic group. In victory they changed the name of the Mongol capital to Peiping, meaning “the North Is Pacified,” but many areas still lay beyond their reach. The Ming forces did not take Sichuan until 1371 and Yunnan until 1382. Other areas such as Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, eastern Turkestan, and Tibet remained permanently beyond the effective control of the Ming, leaving them with a far smaller China than the Mongols had held. Backed by the loyalty of many of these other areas, the Mongols still considered themselves to be the legitimate, though temporarily exiled, rulers of all China. They controlled vast but empty territories, with few subjects, no cities, and only minor trade routes connecting China with the forest tribes of Siberia.

Even when the Ming soldiers hunted down the Mongol khans and killed the last ruling descendant of Khubilai Khan in 1388, the Mongols found other members of the Borijin clan to claim the office. Because of the continuing respect for the memory of Arik Boke Khan as the defender of Mongol values against the Chinese administration of his brother Khubilai, some of Arik Boke’s descendants now came to the fore to claim the office. In thirteenth century, Arik Boke had wanted to keep the imperial capital in Mongolia, and now his distant heirs resurrected that possibility. They no longer had the option of locating their capital in another country, since they had lost all the territory that Genghis Khan’s army had conquered, from the Pacific to the Mediterranean and from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean. Now 150 years after the founding of the nation in 1206, they found themselves right back on the high, dry, cold Mongolian Plateau where Genghis Khan had started, and they were about to lose that. More precisely, they were about to lose their power over their ancestral territory and to become prisoners in their own homeland.

 

The Mongol Empire ended abruptly on a snowy day in 1399 when the sex-crazed spirit of a rabbit jumped on Elbeg Khan and captured his soul. Some observers may point to a more gradual decline of the empire from other causes, such as the outbreak of plague earlier in the century or the triumph of the Ming rebels in 1368, but the Buddhist chroniclers clearly saw the role of the rabbit as an intimate but secret protector of Genghis Khan’s clan.

The rise of the Borijin family stemmed from another snowy day two centuries earlier, around the year 1159, the Year of the Earth Rabbit. Genghis Khan’s father was out hunting a rabbit, and the rabbit lured the hunter on a path past a patch of freshly deposited urine. The yellow splash pattern of the urine in the fresh snow indicated that it had been made by a woman. The hunter decided to let the rabbit survive and turned instead to hunt the woman; he found her, kidnapped her, and with her produced Genghis Khan and the Mongol royal family.

Normally the rabbit stood as a symbol of cowardice within the animal kingdom since it is so easily frightened, but having had its life spared, the rabbit became a secret guardian of the family through its rise to power. Genghis Khan founded the Mongol Empire in the Fire Rabbit Year of 1206, and in the animal cycle of years, the rabbit returned every twelve years. Each time it brought some special encounter with the Mongol khans.

Hunting always carried a close association with marriage and sexuality, and generally only men hunted. A boy’s first kill symbolized his marriage to a daughter of the forest, and to mark this loss of virginity, older men smeared fat from the animal onto the boy’s flesh. Genghis Khan personally performed the ceremony on his grandsons Khubilai and Mongke after their first kill in 1224 near the Ili River on the frontier between the Naiman and the Uighur territory. The boys were eleven and nine years old, respectively, and had killed a rabbit and an antelope. In keeping with the theme of hunting as marriage, men had to refrain from sexual relations with their wives prior to embarking on a hunt.

Somewhere along the way, the Borijin clan forgot about its relationship with the rabbit and the debt owed to the animal as the source of the family’s power. When the Yellow (Earth) Rabbit Year returned in 1399, the Mongol ruler, Elbeg Khan, again met the rabbit at the edge of the forest, but this time the encounter produced a much more gruesome result. Elbeg Khan had had no luck that day and was anxious not to return to camp without some game. Although the white rabbit was in the white snow, Elbeg Khan saw it. He carefully pulled an arrow from his quiver, fixed it in his bow, aimed, and shot the rabbit.

As Elbeg Khan approached the rabbit, he could see it dying atop the freshly fallen snow. A single arrow had pierced its body, but with an ever-weakening pulse, its heart squirted a spray of blood that collected in small red pools in the snow. The sight of the red blood on the white snow created a hypnotic effect over the Great Khan. He seemingly entered into a trance and stared transfixed at the peaceful face of the rabbit and at the marked contrast of the two colors of red blood on white show—each so beautiful and yet so dramatically different.

It was at this moment that the soul, the shimnus, of the rabbit abandoned its dying body and entered into Elbeg Khan. The shimnus could not bear to leave the sight of its old body, and thus, through the eyes of its new body in Elbeg Khan, it stared back at its former self, the dead rabbit.

Finally, the shimnus -possessed Elbeg Khan spoke to his hunting companion in a pleading voice. “If only there were a woman this beautiful—with a face as white as snow and cheeks as red as blood.”

Rather than helping the Great Khan escape from the trance, his hunting companion, Dayuu, who was also being pulled inextricably into the horror about to unfold, encouraged the delusional desire. “But there is, my khan, such a woman,” responded Dayuu, but then he seemed to taunt the mesmerized khan. “But you may not see her,” he added.

“Who is she?” demanded the anxious and bewildered khan.

“She is the wife of your son,” answered Dayuu. “She is splendid like this,” he said pointing to the exquisite color on the white snow.

A strict taboo forbade a man from entering the ger belonging to the wife of either his son or his younger brothers, all of whom were collectively referred to as sons. While younger men had friendly access to senior women married into the family and might themselves one day marry one of them, a senior man had almost no interaction with the wives of his junior relatives and certainly could never marry one. Even to bring milk or food to her ger, he had to stand outside and pass it to her through an opening in the ger wall without seeing her or entering the dwelling.

Upon hearing that the beauty of his son’s wife was as great as the rabbit blood on the white snow, Elbeg Khan felt an irresistible urge to see her with his own eyes despite the law against doing so. His trancelike daydream suddenly acquired a focus and a goal that took his sight and attention away from the dead rabbit.

Genghis Khan once said that “when a khan behaves like a commoner, he will destroy his Mongol subjects.” Elbeg Khan was about to commit a crime that would nearly destroy the precious little that remained of the dwindling Mongol nation. The diabolical tangle of transgressions began as Elbeg Khan returned from hunting to his main camp determined to see this young woman.

“Show me what I have not yet seen,” he ordered his assistant, showing that he clearly understood the forbidden nature of his request. “You who bring together what is distant; you who satisfy my desires, my Dayuu, go!”

Dayuu slyly watched and waited for the appropriate opportunity to arrange a tryst between the khan and his daughter-in-law. After seeing the khan’s son leave to go hunting, Dayuu cautiously approached the beautiful young wife. “The khan commands you to let him come and visit you to see how beautiful you are,” he informed her.

Fully understanding the meaning of the proposal and its impropriety, she adamantly refused. “Are the heavens and earth no longer separate and it has now become acceptable for a great khan to see his daughter-in-law?” she demanded of the messenger. “Or has my husband now died?” she asked, “and the khan comes to tell me of it?” Suspecting an even deeper supernatural change, she perceptively asked, “Or has the khan turned into a black dog?”

The messenger returned to Elbeg Khan with the harsh words of rejection from his son’s wife. In his wrathful envy of his own son and in his fixation on seeing the woman with a face as beautiful as blood on fresh snow, Elbeg Khan mounted his horse and went out hunting his son. His sexual obsession had grown so strong that nothing could prevent his fulfilling that desire. The khan found his son and killed him.

Elbeg Khan rode back to the camp to rape his dead son’s widow. Rather than satisfying the khan’s desire, however, the attack only increased it. As his obsession with the young woman grew, he made her his wife. When she became the new khatun, Elbeg Khan made Dayuu the taishi, an office generally equivalent to prime minister and the highest position allowed to any man outside the Borijin Clan.

The curse of the rabbit spirit now began to spread, like a vicious plague of the soul. The beautiful young woman, the innocent victim who had lost her husband and was forced into a new marriage, became infected herself with the same wicked obsession of red on white, but in her the spell found a different focus. She needed to see her new husband’s red blood on the white skin of the friend who helped him to kill her first husband and violate her. Just as the khan lusted after sex, she lusted for revenge, and she would use sex to avenge herself on both of them.

The unwilling queen watched and waited around her new imperial ger in the royal camp. Her opportunity for revenge came when, once again, the Great Khan left to hunt with his falcon. Dayuu arrived at the royal tent. Because the Great Khan was not there, he waited outside the door.

The aggrieved queen saw the man and sent a servant out to him. “Why wait out on the cold steppe?” asked the servant, “when you can come into the royal home where it is warm?”

Dayuu accepted the invitation and approached the royal ger of the newly installed young queen. When he entered, she greeted him not with anger but welcomed him into the tent with exaggerated honor and lavish hospitality. She served him a platter of prized foods, including butter dainties and dried dairy dishes. She also offered him a drink of twice-distilled mare’s milk, the potent “black drink” of the steppe tribes. As the minister quickly showed signs of inebriation, she told him, with deceptive humility and feigned appreciation, what a great debt she owed him “for making my poor person important, for making my insignificant person great, for making me a queen.”

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.