The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

His four wives had their territories occupying most of Central Mongolia. His son Ogodei acquired western Mongolia; Chaghatai received Central Asia. Tolui, the youngest son, received the ancestral homeland of eastern Mongolia. Jochi, the eldest son and the one whose brothers doubted that he was their father’s son, had already died, but his heirs received Russia, the most distant part of the empire, in the hope of keeping them far removed from the rest of the family who did not recognize their father’s legitimacy.

The daughters also had their lands: Checheyigen ruled the Oirat territory of Siberia. Alaqai ruled northern China. Al-Altun ruled the Uighur. Presumably Tolai was still alive with the Karluk, but too little is known about her fate. Yesui Khatun ruled the Tangut in addition to her original ordo along the Tuul River of Mongolia.

Genghis Khan left his Mongol nation rich and well protected.

Genghis Khan used sequences of spiritually meaningful numbers to organize his empire. Each number had a particular use: a social and cultural role in addition to its numerical value. Practical matters were organized in even numbers: two shafts of the cart or ten men to a military unit. Odd numbers held much greater supernatural power. Seven was to be avoided whenever possible, but nine and thirteen were the two most important numbers for him.

Genghis Khan’s father was named Yesugei, which meant “With Nines,” a name thought to bestow good fortune because its bearer would always be at the center of the eight directions and thus never be lost.

Mongols are often called by the name of the parent; thus Genghis Khan was “Son of Yesugei,” or “Son of Nines.” Mongols considered a name or title to carry a fate and a mission with it. Genghis Khan took his name and his patronymic seriously and literally. He structured life so that he was always the ninth, surrounded by eight. He had his primary group, known as Yesun Orlus, the “Nine Companions,” or the “Nine Paladins.” This set comprised the most talented and powerful men in the empire, including the four principal army commanders, known as the Four Dogs, plus the commands of his personal guard, known as the Four Horses. As always, Genghis Khan occupied the pivotal ninth position in the formation.

His personal guard originally consisted of eight hundred by day and eight hundred by night. After 1206 he adopted the older Turkic decimal system of organizing the lower military ranks into units of ten, building to the largest units of ten thousand. At this time he also increased his guard to ten thousand, but he arranged the army into eight units; the guard around him became the ninth.

In his arrangement of family government, he divided power and responsibility among eight of his children—four sons and four daughters. He had other sons and daughters, but he placed the future of the empire in the hands of these eight. Four sons held the steppes of the nomads, four daughters held the sedentary kingdoms, and Genghis Khan, the ninth in the system, ruled over them all. The system was simple, practical, and elegant. With the placement of four of his daughters as queens and four of his sons as khans, Genghis Khan had fulfilled the destiny bestowed upon him by his father’s name.

Genghis Khan, however, sought to surpass his father, and for this the number thirteen had a special, but largely secret, importance for him. In the formation of his nation in 1206, he organized the khuriltai, and thereby the empire, into thirteen camps, and he sometimes referred to his nation as the Thirteen Ordos, or Thirteen Hordes. His four dowager queens controlled the territory surrounding the mountain in the first circle, and then in the outer circle lay the territories of his four daughters and four sons. Thus in death, precisely as at the moment of creating his empire, Genghis Khan was in the center, the thirteenth position.

In the summer of 1229, two years after Genghis Khan’s death, all his offspring and the other officials of the Mongol Empire gathered to ratify Ogodei, the third son, as the Great Khan. The area of the 1206 khuriltai now lay a little too close to Genghis Khan’s burial site on Mount Burkhan Khaldun, but the family still wanted to be near to the area. Ogodei chose an open steppe on the Kherlen River, a little to the south of the original khuriltai, near a spring where, according to oral tradition, his mother had nursed him, and possibly where he was born.

All the officials, generals, and Borijin clan members came. The daughters and the sons of Genghis Khan affirmed Ogodei, since their father had told them to do so. He had been chosen not because he was the smartest or the bravest, but because he was the most congenial to the largest number of people in the family, a situation created, at least in part, by his apparently being the heaviest drinker of all the heavy-drinking sons.