The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

Khatun is one of the most authoritative and magnificent words in the Mongolian language. It conveys regality, stateliness, and great strength. If something resists breaking no matter how much pressure is applied, it is described as khatun. The word can form part of a boy’s or girl’s name, signifying power and firmness combined with beauty and grace. Because of the admired qualities of khatun, men have often borne names such as Khatun Temur, literally “Queen Iron,” and Khatun Baatar, “Queen Hero.”

The Mongols recognized the role of the father as the provider of sperm, which created the bones of a new child, but the mother gave meat and blood. Thus male lineages became known as the yas, meaning “bone of the father,” while the larger kinship system was known as the urug, meaning “the womb.” Genghis Khan gave his royal family the name Altan Urug, the Golden Womb.

Repeatedly in Genghis Khan’s genealogy, the paternity of a child was in doubt. One of the most important ancestors of the Mongols, Alan Goa, had three sons after the death of her husband, but she insisted to all her sons that it did not matter from which father they came. The origin of a child’s bones played a less important role than the womb from which the child sprang.

When Genghis Khan’s wife Borte conceived her first child close to the time of her kidnapping, Genghis Khan insisted that, aside from the mother, it was no one’s business how she became pregnant. “It happened,” says the chronicle repeatedly. “It happened at a time when men were fighting; it happened at a time when men were killing. It happened at a time when the starry sky twisted in the heaven, when the nation twisted in turmoil, when people could not rest in their bed, or birds in their nest.”

All that mattered was the parent’s success in raising the child. The Secret History eloquently described a mother’s devotion to her children: “She choked on her own hunger in order to feed them. She worried constantly how to make them into adults. She cleaned them and pulled them up by their heels to teach them to walk.” It took the effort of a mother to transform boys into men. She “stretched them by the shoulders to pull them up to become men. She pulled them by their necks. She pulled them up to the height of other men. She did these things because she was the mother with a heart as bright as the sun and as wide as a lake.”

Outlawing the sale or barter of women marked Genghis Khan’s first important departure from tribal practices regarding marriage, and gradually through a series of such changes he transformed the social position of his daughters, and thereby of all women, within his burgeoning empire. His laws regarding women did not spring from an ideological position or special spiritual revelation so much as from personal experience and the practical needs of running a harmonious society. The natural accord between male and female, the sky and the earth, the sun and the moon had a practical application in the relations of men and women in the family and in society.

Genghis Khan was certainly ambitious and had much larger desires in the world than merely uniting the warring tribes of the steppe. Yet, in order to expand his empire, he needed someone to rule the newly conquered people. He had to leave someone in charge. Ideally, he would have had a stable of talented sons and given each one of them a newly conquered country to govern, but his sons were simply not capable. Without competent sons, he could leave a general in charge, but Genghis Khan had been betrayed too many times by men inside and outside his family. He probably knew well the result of Alexander the Great’s overreliance on his generals, who subsequently divided the empire among themselves as soon as their leader died.

The women around Genghis Khan motivated him, and he constantly strove to make them happy. “My wives, daughters-in-law, and daughters are as colorful and radiant as red fire,” he said. “It is my sole purpose to make their mouths as sweet as sugar by favor, to bedeck them in garments spun with gold, to mount them upon fleet-footed steeds, to have them drink sweet, clear water, to provide their animals with grassy meadows, and to have all harmful brambles and thorns cleared from the roads and paths upon which they travel, and not to allow weeds and thorns to grow in their pastures.”