The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

Genghis Khan handed over the already conquered territories to his wives because now he was about to begin a new round of conquests, and for this he needed a new set of allies. A major part of the work that summer consisted in granting new marriages, ratifying marriages that had already been agreed to, and formally sanctifying some that had already occurred. He had won the wars by fighting, but now Genghis Khan sought to ensure peace through a thick network of marriage alliances. Traditionally, steppe khans took a wife from each of their vassal clans, but Genghis Khan never had more than four wives at a time. Borte always remained the chief one, and her children assumed precedence over all others.

Rather than taking a large number of wives, Genghis Khan sought to make marriage alliances for his children instead. Having twice failed to negotiate new alliances through marriages to his eldest son and daughter, he returned to a safer option. He negotiated another union with an already trusted ally, Botu of the Ikires, who had married Genghis Khan’s sister, Temulun. Genghis Khan arranged for his eldest daughter, Khojin, to marry Botu.

This time Genghis Khan had no trouble negotiating marriages for his sons and daughters. He married three of his daughters to Mongols in the traditional system of qudas, marriage alliances. The three grooms were related to his mother, Hoelun, and his wife Borte. In addition to Khojin, a daughter married a relative of his wife Borte, and his fifth daughter, Tumelun, married another of his mother’s relatives, though this marriage caused some confusion for chroniclers because of the similarity of her name to Genghis Khan’s sister, Temulun.

Most of the participants in the khuriltai of 1206 came from the steppes, but a few delegations from the world beyond also participated; among these were Genghis Khan’s newfound allies, the Onggud. The fortuitous meeting with the merchant Hassan at Baljuna had evidently made as deep an impression on the Onggud as it had on Genghis Khan, because some of them also became his followers. The decisive test for this impromptu alliance between the Mongols and the Onggud had come in 1205, two years after the Baljuna rescue. After rallying his followers to defeat the Tatars and the Kereyid, Genghis Khan faced only a single powerful confederation left on the steppes, the Naiman. The Naiman leader dispatched envoys to Ala-Qush, an Onggud leader, to woo him away from Genghis Khan and join them in a war against the upstart Mongols. Such an alliance might have been able to crush the newly emerging nation from opposite sides, or at least keep it from expanding further. Ala-Qush not only rejected the Naiman offer of an alliance but sent envoys to warn Genghis Khan of a planned Naiman trap.

According to tradition, when the Onggud envoys approached the camp of Genghis Khan, they brought with them a gift from civilization; this time it was wine made from grapes, a commodity previously unknown to the Mongols, but one destined to have a major impact on them and the success of their world empire. In recognition of their unique relationship, Genghis Khan agreed to a future marriage between his daughter Alaqai Beki and the son of Ala-Qush of the Onggud.

After the earlier failed marriage negotiations for his offspring, Genghis Khan always married his daughters to only the most trustworthy of allies. He never permitted one to marry a rival, nor did he allow them to marry any of his generals or other subordinates. Despite the emphasis on rising in rank according to merit and deeds, he maintained strict lineage segregation. His daughters married men from the aristocratic lineages of the steppes, and later he extended this practice to the ruling lineages of specially chosen neighboring kingdoms.

Genghis Khan’s sons also married women from the same quda alliance lineages as his daughters. In addition, the sons, and Genghis Khan himself, sometimes took a different type of wife from the royal wives and daughters of defeated tribes. In each case, Genghis Khan and his sons married a widow or daughter of the dead khan, thereby unmistakably demonstrating that the men of Genghis Khan’s family had replaced those former rulers. Thus Genghis Khan took two Tatar queens and a Merkid princess as wives, while arranging for his eldest and youngest sons to marry the Kereyid princesses who had been Ong Khan’s nieces.