The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

Just as the Tatar had Tolui in position and was ready to thrust in the knife, Altani leapt on him. In the words of the Secret History, “With one hand she seized his plaits” (referring to the large braid over each ear), “and with the other she seized the hand that was drawing the knife.” She fought to keep the Tatar’s arm down and the weapon away from the boy, and “she pulled it so hard that he dropped the knife.”

Even after disarming the attacker, Altani clung to him as tightly as he clutched the child, and the Tatar fought to escape her hold. She could not overpower him alone, but because of her weight and tight grip, he could not throw her off to escape with the boy.

Behind the ger, the guards had just slaughtered the ox and commenced butchering it when they heard the screams. Dropping the meat, they ran around the ger toward the sound of the struggle between Altani and the Tatar. The two men reached her, clutching their butchering tools in “their fists red with the animal’s blood.” The guard with the ax raised it and struck the Tatar. Altani grabbed Tolui and pulled him aside while the two guards finished off his assailant “with ax and knife.”

Soon after the incident, the guards began to vie over which one of them deserved the credit for having saved the child: the one who knocked the kidnapper unconscious with the ax or the one who cut him open with the knife. With a strong tone of self-congratulation, they wondered aloud: “If we had not been there and if, by running fast and arriving in time, we had not killed him, what would Altani, a woman, have done?” The attacker “would have harmed the life of the child.”

Altani heard their boastful talk and objected to their claiming credit for saving Tolui. She demanded recognition for what she had done. “I ran up and caught up with him, seizing his plaits and pulling the hand that was drawing the knife,” she declared to the men. “If the knife had not dropped, wouldn’t he have done harm to the child’s life before Jetei and Jelme arrived?”

Although Jelme and Jetei both received awards and promotions, Genghis Khan made it clear who was the true hero of the episode, and “the chief merit went, by general consent, to Altani.” Genghis Khan held her up as a model for everyone. In the Mongol perspective, challenges choose us, but we choose how to respond. Destiny brings the opportunities and the misfortunes, and the merit of our lives derives from those unplanned moments.

The Mongols, and certainly Genghis Khan in particular, placed great importance on sudden individual acts of unexpected heroism. Those are the moments that reveal not just the character of the person, but the soul itself. Many people are paralyzed by fear or, equally as debilitating, by indecision. The hero acts, and often fails, but acts nonetheless. Such a person belongs to the spiritual elite of the divinely blessed and heavenly inspired baatar, a person filled with a firm, strong, unyielding spirit. Usually translated simply as “hero,” the word is much more important in Mongolian, containing an emphasis on the personal will behind the act; the heroes formed an honored group known as the baatuud.

Genghis Khan always sought out the service of the baatar, the hero who acts immediately and decisively without concern for personal benefit or even survival. Unlike the Greek heroes, who were males of superhuman physical strength, the baatar might be male or female, young or old, and frequently, as in this case, only a child. Most important, a baatar might spring from any family, but, in Genghis Khan’s experience, the baatuud rarely came from rich families or aristocratic and powerful clans. He placed such importance on the spirit of the baatuud that he built his military and political system around them. The ideal government for him was rule by these heroic elites, by a true aristocracy of the spirit.

In this regard, Genghis Khan differed remarkably from those around him who believed in a natural aristocracy of birth. These old clans had dominated the steppe tribes for generations and claimed power as a birthright earned by the actions of their ancestors. More than any other barrier, this attitude and the actions derived from it had held Genghis Khan back in life. The aristocracy of birth had been his eternal enemy, and he sought to defeat it through his assembly of heroes: the aristocracy of brave spirits, the baatuud.

All his life, Genghis Khan had been treated as an outsider, as an inferior underling. The Mongols were interlopers onto the steppe. They were hunters from a far northern land of lakes and forests, where they had originally lived in temporary cone-shaped tents made of bark. Over the generations they had gradually moved out of the forests in the area of Mount Burkhan Khaldun at the source of the Onon and Kherlen rivers in the north-central region of modern Mongolia.