The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

The simmering resentment turned to bitter anger, and war quickly broke out between Genghis Khan’s Mongols and the Kereyid. This time, Genghis Khan was losing. Until now his bravery and skill had been exercised under the patronage of the Kereyid, but, left completely to his own devices, he found little support from other tribes. In 1203, the Kereyid routed his Mongols, and he fled with a small remnant to the east of Mongolia. It was the lowest time in the professional life of Genghis Khan. After fighting for almost a quarter of a century, he was a failed and defeated middle-aged man who had dared to rise above his position in life and think himself equal to the noble clans of the steppe. His sworn brother and childhood friend, Jamuka, had long ago turned against him. Many of his relatives had deserted him, and he had lost contact with others in the confusion after his defeat. He had not even been able to make a successful marriage for a single one of his children. His sons offered little assistance, and it now became clear that none was a hero.

During the most severe crises and gravest dangers, Genghis Khan usually fled to Mount Burkhan Khaldun. He felt a strong spiritual connection to the mountain and to its protective spirit. Mongols viewed mountains as males connected to the Eternal Blue Sky; waters were female, the sacred blood of Mother Earth. However, because of the proximity of the Kereyid court and army, Genghis Khan did not feel safe fleeing to Burkhan Khaldun this time. Instead he went far to the east in search of refuge near the Khalkh River.

Genghis Khan had only a small contingent of his army and former followers. The east, however, was the homeland of his mother, and his only sister had married there. In the intervening years, Temulun had died without children, but he hoped it might be possible to negotiate a new marriage for one of his daughters. In desperation, he sought out Terge Emel, one of his mother’s relatives, in an attempt to build an alliance.

Terge Emel had never sided with Genghis Khan in the past and showed no affection for Mongols in general. He had been an ally of Jamuka and seemingly every other rival Genghis Khan had faced. Despite all this earlier antagonism, Genghis Khan believed that the offer of a marriage alliance might persuade Terge Emel to overlook those past differences and now save him.

The proposal would be a gentle plea for peace and cooperation through a marriage, but if that proposition failed, Genghis Khan was prepared to fight to bring his mother’s relations into his fold. “If they do not come and join us of their own accord,” he explained, in a graphic evocation of the way women gathered fuel to build a fire, “we shall go out, wrap them up like dry horse dung in a skirt and bring them here!”

“Your daughter looks like a frog,” Terge Emel said to Genghis Khan, echoing one of the derisive descriptions hurled at the Mongols because of their unusual appearance. “I won’t marry her.”

Terge Emel’s contempt for Genghis Khan indicates how low the Mongols ranked in the hierarchy of steppe tribes. At this moment, Genghis Khan resembled little more than a petty chief of an insignificant band, unlikely to be known beyond a small circle of enemies who seemed about to extinguish him and his followers forever. Even Terge Emel’s kinship with Genghis Khan was no honor, having happened only because Genghis Khan’s father had kidnapped his wife from her first husband in another tribe. Such a crime hardly constituted an affectionate kinship tie.

Having failed to persuade Terge Emel into a marriage alliance and having little else to lose, Genghis Khan killed him.

In the summer of 1203, after the death of Terge Emel, Genghis Khan wandered with the remnants of his army near a now unknown place in eastern Mongolia that he called Baljuna Waters. With no food left, he and his men had only the muddy water of the lake to sustain them, their single horse having already been eaten.

At this moment of dire physical need and emotional exhaustion, Genghis Khan looked out at the horizon and saw a man coming toward him on a white camel, almost like a hazy mirage breaking through the shimmering summer heat. Behind him came more camels, laden with trade goods, and a flock of sheep. The man was Hassan, a merchant who had crossed the Gobi into Mongolia leading camels and bearing food and merchandise to trade for sable furs and squirrel pelts. He happened to arrive in search of water at just the moment when Genghis Khan’s army seemed threatened with a lingering death by starvation or falling into the hands of his enemies.

Hassan was identified as a member of the Sartaq, a term used by Mongols for both Muslims and merchants, but he came in the employ of a different ethnic group. He had been sent by Ala-Qush, a chief of the Onggud people, a Christian Turkic tribe from six hundred miles south, well beyond the Gobi, which marked the edge of the nomad’s world.