The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

For a short time the Mongols stopped coming. As the Mongol units became fewer and as the rumor spread that the sultan had defeated the Mongols, the people grew anxious for revolt and revenge. They thought that the Mongol wave had passed, and they were glad to be rid of both them and the sultan who had ruled them. As Juvaini described the situation, “The demon of temptation laid an egg in the brains of mankind.”

The Muslims seemed not to realize that the main Mongol army had not yet arrived. Thus, in November 1220, when Tokuchar, a son-in-law to Genghis Khan, arrived with a tumen, a unit of ten thousand warriors, he was the vanguard of the main army under the command of Genghis Khan’s youngest son, Tolui. On the third day, an arrow fired from the ramparts struck Tokuchar and quickly killed him. According to Juvaini, the Persians had no idea who the unknown fallen warrior was, and thus when his army withdrew, they thought they had defeated the Mongols. Throughout the remainder of the winter of 1220–21, the people of Nishapur seemed to believe that they had successfully and permanently driven the Mongols away. The defenders of Nishapur had three thousand crossbows, three hundred seige engines, and a supply of naptha that they could set afire and hurl from their ramparts against the Mongols.

The Mongols attacked on the morning of Wednesday April 7, 1221. By noon prayers on Friday, they had filled the moat, breached the wall for the first time, and brazenly raised their flag on a piece of the wall that they now controlled. The fighting raged on, and the Mongols continued to press onward through the night and the next day, until they controlled all the walls and fortifications around the city. According to a potentially accurate account written much later, seventy thousand defeated warriors lost their lives in the battle for Nishapur.

The people of Nishapur found themselves trapped inside their own walls. For the Mongols, this was precisely the way that they hunted wild animals—forming a fence around them and then killing them off at will. First, Tokuchar’s widow, one of Genghis Khan’s daughters, shut off the flow of water into the city and ordered the people to leave. After Nishapur had been evacuated onto the plains, she entered the city with her escort of warriors to round up those who had refused the order to evacuate.

When Mongols hunt, they always let some animals escape in order to reproduce. In a similar way, even when a whole city was condemned, a few people would be allowed to live. Tokuchar’s widow separated out the craftsmen who might be useful in the future. Mongols had a great respect for people with any skill, from metalworking or writing to carpentry and weaving, but they had no use for defeated soldiers or people without skills, and in this category they included the rich.

In comparison with Alaqai Beki, who defended her nation even after it had rebelled against her and killed her husband, this daughter felt no connection with the rebels who had killed her husband. She ordered the burning of the empty city and then the execution of everyone except the selected workers. In the words of the chronicler known as Khwandamir, “She left no trace of anything that moved.” Although the reported number of 1,747,000 executed exceeded credibility by a factor of about one hundred times the actual number, it nevertheless shows the horror felt for the Mongols. In the words of the Persian chronicler Juvaini, who loved the cities of his homeland, “In the exaction of vengeance not even cats and dogs should be left alive.” By the time the Mongols finished with Nishapur, he wrote, the “dwelling places were leveled with the dust,” and “rose gardens became furnaces.”

Muslim scholars believe that this daughter was likely Tumelun, but the original Persian records do not mention her name. The Mongols conquered so many cities that they did not keep a written record of them, and thus the account does not appear in their documents either. Unless some hitherto unknown text surfaces, her name will possibly never be known.

In the long list of cities conquered by the Mongols, the fall of Nishapur lacked much strategic importance, but it produced profound terror in the Muslim world because of the cultural importance of the city and its horrifying fate at the hands of an infidel woman. Any educated Muslim of the era would have keenly felt the looming doom promised by the Mongols, which seemed to have been presaged in the words of the beloved Persian poet Omar Khayyam: “Whether at Nishapur or Babylon, the Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop; the Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.”