The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

Of all the daughters, Checheyigen had the least prestigious marriage and the hardest life, since the Oirat of the northern forest was the least powerful and least important tribe. Three of her sisters became queens along the Silk Route, ruling over the grand Turkic nations of Onggud, Uighur, and Karluk. They ruled countries with walled cities, ancient histories, written languages, sacred scriptures, brick temples, and commercial and diplomatic relations all around them. They wore garments made from fine camel and goat wool and sometimes imported silks from China and brocades from Persia. They sipped hot tea in the winter and nibbled on cool melons in the summer. One even had a specialist in making refreshing sherbet drinks.

Checheyigen’s other sisters married into herding tribes of the steppe who were relatives of her mother and her grandmother. Even if they did not have all the luxuries of the Silk Route cities, they had vast herds, and in the summer they drank rich yogurt and bowls of heavy cream, and ate an array of dried and fermented dairy products; in the winter they kept vast stores of frozen beef, mutton, goat, and yak, from which they enjoyed steaming bowls of nourishing hot broth.

Yet Checheyigen maintained such close social ties with the Mongols that the Oirat and the Mongols borrowed heavily from each other’s culture, language, and lifestyle. Through these intermarriages, the Oirat thus became the first nonherding tribe to join Genghis Khan, eventually creating a single nation with two major lineages.

The daughters of Genghis Khan formed a phalanx of shields around their Mongol homeland. They marked the nation’s borders and protected it from the four directions as they ruled the kingdoms of the Onggud, Uighur, Karluk, and Oirat. With his daughters in place as his shields surrounding his new nation, Genghis Khan could now move outward from the Mongol steppe and conquer the world.

4

Queens at War and Commerce

WITH ALL THE SMALLER KINGDOMS SECURELY UNITED behind him and under the control of his daughters, and with an adequate, if not entirely amicable, alliance with the Tangut in control of the Gansu Corridor of the Silk Route, Genghis Khan could move and challenge one of the larger kingdoms. For the remainder of his life he would pursue two major operations: first, the North China campaign from 1211 to 1215, and then the Central Asian offensive against the Muslims from 1219 to 1224. His daughters played critically important, but different, roles in each of these two massive quests.

In 1211 Genghis Khan attacked the Jurched rulers of North China, but his perfect plan failed almost immediately. As soon as his cavalry became hotly engaged with the Jurched forces, the Onggud erupted. The disgruntled faction suddenly revolted against young Alaqai. The rebels tried to kill her, and although they failed to capture her, they assassinated Ala-Qush and many of the other Mongol sympathizers. Alaqai barely escaped the rebels, but in addition to saving her own life, she managed to take both of her stepsons to the temporary refuge of her father’s army.

While Genghis Khan had fostered a close alliance with a single Onggud clan, the others resented kowtowing to a foreign queen, particularly one from such a wild people as the Mongols. When Genghis Khan’s daughter dismissed the other wives, she also destroyed the power base for their clans. The families of the old wives failed to share in the prestige and rewards of the new system and turned against her. They did not realize that because Ala-Qush was Genghis Khan’s faithful ally in marriage, killing him constituted one of the gravest crimes against the Mongols.

Only twenty years old, Alaqai Beki faced these enemies at a time when it still remained unclear how successful the Mongol army would be and how powerful her father would become. Although Genghis Khan had made Ala-Qush the ruler of the Onggud, the old elite still favored their traditional alliance with the Jurched rulers of northern China, who had supplied them with a constant flow of silks and trinkets, as well as invited them to feast at grand political events at the imperial court. Those Onggud shared the more general Chinese view of the Mongols as unwashed savages who dressed in ragged wool and the skins of beasts, lived in felt tents, and gorged on unflavored meat boiled in large cauldrons that contained whole animals from the eyeballs to the tail.