The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

Genghis Khan’s mother and wives were too old to take command of these new nations and to enjoy the full benefits of what he had to offer, but he had a new generation of women who seemed as capable as the previous one. After uniting the steppe, Genghis Khan turned his attention to foreign nations, and now women assumed a far more important role in building the empire abroad. At least three daughters had been married to closely related clans, and those marriages had helped to solidify bonds within the newly formed Mongol nation; however, now four other daughters faced a far more challenging task beyond the Mongol world, in the lands of neighboring countries.

By the end of the summer of 1206, Genghis Khan had transformed the steppe tribes into a nation, or perhaps more precisely into a large army with a small mobile country attached. Normally, at the end of a large steppe conference, the various tribes would return to their way of life with little real change in the daily routines, but after the khuriltai of 1206, Genghis Khan prepared them to move out and conquer the world. Now that all the steppe tribes acknowledged him as their khan, he was ready to begin his next and greatest phase of life by turning the Mongol nation into an engine of conquest. In the coming twenty years, Genghis Khan and his Mongol army conquered and ruled the largest empire in history. In these two decades they would acquire far more people and territory than the Romans, Persians, Greeks, or Chinese had been able to do in centuries of sustained effort.

How could he take such a tiny nation of 1 million people with 100,000 warriors and conquer countries of many millions with armies of many hundreds of thousands? How could he conquer territories that were more than one hundred times the size of his small nation and more than a thousand times the size of his army?

Genghis Khan had hardy horses and excellent riders well trained in archery, but the steppe had had such horses and archers for thousands of years. His unique success derived not from any secret technology; it came out of his unique charisma and his ability to organize human effort.

To achieve the conquests for which he was aiming, Genghis Khan had to use every resource available to him to the fullest extent. To confront armies several times the size of his own, he had to maximize the effectiveness of every warrior and the talents of every Mongol—including the women. Thus, when he laid down the laws and created the organization of the state in 1206, he had special responsibilities for his mother, his wives, and, above all others, for his daughters. A generation later, a Persian chronicler wrote: “After Genghis Khan had tested his sons and discovered for what each of them was suited, he had some hesitation over the throne and office of Great Khan.”

The isolation of the Mongolian Plateau had protected the people for millennia. They had occasionally forayed out beyond the Gobi to attack sedentary people, but in the past, conquering meant leaving their homeland forever and settling in new places. Genghis Khan was about to permanently overcome the geographic obstacles separating the Mongols from the world. Under his system, Mongol warriors could travel back and forth, maintaining their home base on the steppe and commuting to the battlefront. The Gobi changed from an obstacle into a way station on the route to world domination.

Prior to 1206, no one outside of Mongolia seemed to pay much attention to the comings and goings of the nomads there. Whoever the barbarians selected to be their khan had no more importance to the city people than whether these savages ate rats or sheep for dinner. The great centers of civilization had much more important issues to chronicle and more important politics to play than fretting about some savage tribe of herders far beyond the protective buffer formed by the vast Gobi.

Beyond the Mongolian Plateau at the beginning of the thirteenth century, civilization languished. The world was full of frenetic activity, but little significant achievement. The twelfth century that had just ended had been a stagnant era. Theology and religion had spent their meager power to move history forward and instead left the world churning in a series of endless religious wars and silly theological disputes. The old empires of the past had crumbled, but the modern nation state had not yet arrived. The era of heroes such as Alexander and Caesar had given way to petty criminals claiming to be princes of men or designated representatives of gods. The world seemed to be searching and waiting, but no one expected that the next shaper of world history would come on horseback, dressed in fur, and smelling of milk and mutton from the frozen plains of the north.