The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

Alaqai’s only child, Negudei, the son born from her marriage to Jingue, had inherited his late father’s title Prince of Beiping, and she groomed him to succeed her in power. She arranged an excellent marriage for him with a daughter of her brother Tolui. During the 1230s, after nearly a quarter of a century ruling northern China, Alaqai suffered one of the cruelest blows of her life; her recently married teenage son went to fight the Song army in southern China and was struck down in battle. This ended her dynasty, and she was too old to bear more children. With the same spirit she had shown throughout her life, she devoted herself to the care of Boyaohe’s other children, offering them a secure future by arranging the best marriages for them that she could within the ranks of her own Mongol family.

In the absence of her own son who could follow her, Alaqai improvised a new system that would set the pattern for Onggud rule for the next several centuries; she arranged a series of marriages of Onggud male subjects to women from her Borijin clan of the Mongols. Since Alaqai ruled for a long time, she arranged many similar marriages, which grew into a permanent part of the Mongol kinship system. When Marco Polo came to China more than half a century after Alaqai’s death, this system still functioned. He explained that the leaders of the Onggud, whom he called Tenduc, “always obtain to wife either daughters of the Great Khan or other princesses of his family.”

Throughout her twenty-year career, Alaqai Beki remained loyal both to her father, who sent her to rule, and to the Onggud people over whom she reigned. She laid much of the foundation for the later expansion of the Mongolian Empire into China, and she became a major conduit for selectively designating parts of Chinese civilization to be emulated by the Mongols and choosing aspects of it to be incorporated into their culture. Yet, in the end, without sons to follow her, the name of Alaqai Beki would fade quickly.

By 1226, Mongol queens controlled the Silk Route, with the exception of one small area, the still troublesome Tangut kingdom occupying the Gansu Corridor. Genghis Khan had grown tired of the perfidy of the Tangut, who promised obedience one year only to disregard it the next, sending tribute at one time and then refusing to later. Determined to finally remove the Tangut ruler, destroy his dynasty, and fully incorporate his subjects into the Mongol Empire, Genghis Khan launched a new invasion.

His principal wife, Borte, had too many responsibilities and too large a family to go with him, but on each campaign he chose one of his other three wives to accompany him. For this campaign he chose Yesui Khatun, the Tatar queen and younger sister of the second-ranking queen, Yesugen. The fourth wife, Khulan, had become the emotional favorite of his old age, but he chose Yesui because of her superior intellect and better education. It turned out to be a prescient choice.

Soon after beginning the campaign, Genghis Khan fell ill, and, unable to lead the campaign but unwilling to leave the front, he relied on Yesui to administer the government without either his enemies or his soldiers knowing of his debilitating condition.

In his final public words before his death, Genghis Khan addressed his nation as “My people of the Five Colors and Four Foreign Lands.” The five colors referred to the Mongol territories he left to the five men of his family—his four sons and one surviving brother. The four foreign lands were the kingdoms of his four daughters.

At the end of his final talk, one of his retainers was quoted as making a dark prophecy. “The jade crystal that is your realm will shatter,” he said. “Your many people brought together and collected together, will be scattered in all directions. Your lofty rule will be abased.”

Upon hearing these words, Genghis Khan asked his people to help his children whom he was leaving behind, to offer them “water in the desert” and “a road through the mountains.” He ended with the plea of his people and his descendants to “guard the good rule of the future.”

“I leave you the greatest empire in the world,” he said to his children. “You are the peaceable possessors of it.” He begged his children to preserve his empire by remaining united: “Be then as but one tongue and one soul.”

Genghis Khan greatly disliked cities, and usually just before a city surrendered, even after the hardest-fought campaigns, he departed from the scene to begin the next campaign while his officers finished the last one. Thus it was, in August 1227, just prior to the fall of the Tangut capital and the surrender of their khan, that the spirit of Genghis Khan abandoned his body. Genghis Khan’s followers took his body back to the sacred mountain in Mongolia for burial in a hidden place, but they erected his sulde, the “spirit banners” made from the manes of his horses, to blow eternally in the wind.