The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

When the hunting was bad, they scavenged off the herding tribes, stealing animals, women, and whatever else they could before dashing back to the security of their mountainous hideouts. The older Turkic steppe tribes had herded for many centuries, and they looked down on the primitive Mongols, treating them as vassals and expecting them to bring forest gifts of fur and game. They found the Mongols sometimes useful as warriors to help them in a raid, or to herd their animals, and they sometimes stole women from them. Overall, however, the sophisticated herding tribes of the Tatars, Naiman, and Kereyid despised the Mongols.

With round faces, high cheekbones, and legs markedly bowed from their life on horseback, the Mongols’ appearance set them apart from their Asian neighbors. They had extremely pale skin, kept lubricated by cleaning with animal fat, and had almost no body hair, leading a South Asian chronicler to write that the Mongols “looked like so many white demons.” From frequent exposure to the bitter cold, their cheeks became so red through the nearly translucent skin that they were described as having “faces like fire.”

They had wide mouths and large teeth of a uniform size, which, because of the lack of starches in the diet, did not rot or become discolored. Aside from skin color, the most distinctive Mongol trait was the eye shape. Several Chinese commentators remarked on the unusual eyelids of the Mongols, because these nomads did not have a crease or fold. Only late in life, or when they became tired, did a large wrinkle or fold begin to appear in the skin covering the eye. Persian observers referred to the Mongols as having “cat eyes.” Another Muslim chronicler wrote that “their eyes were so narrow and piercing that they might have bored a hole in a brazen vessel.”

Queen Gurbesu of the Christian Naiman tribe to the west summed up the attitude of civilized steppe people toward the Mongols: “The Mongols have always stunk and worn filthy clothes. They live far away; let them stay there.” Only begrudgingly did she acknowledge some potential use for the Mongol women. “Perhaps we can bring their daughters here, and if they wash their hands we might let them milk our cows and sheep.”

In this marginal and insignificant tribe, Genghis Khan grew up in an insignificant family of outcasts. He was born the son of a captured woman and was given the name Temujin because his father had recently killed a Tatar warrior by that name. His father belonged to the Borijin clan, and although they had once had an independent khan, they now served as virtual vassals for hire for whoever needed them. Before the boy was nine years old, the Tatars had killed his father, but his own Mongol relatives committed the worst offenses against Temujin’s family. Feeling no responsibility for this captive wife and her brood of children, his uncles seized his dead father’s animals and cast the widow and children out on the steppe to die of hunger and exposure in the brutal winter. When they survived against all odds, young Temujin was captured by the Tayichiud clan, who enslaved him and yoked him to a wooden collar like an ox. After escaping from bondage, he fled to the most isolated place he could find to care for his mother and siblings.

Living as a pariah with three brothers and two half brothers, but only one much younger sister, Temujin grew up surrounded by boys in a household oddly bereft of adult men or girls. From the beginning of his life, Temujin’s male relatives repeatedly failed him and threatened his life at the most critical moments. At age twelve, Temujin so intensely disliked the bullying of his older half brother that he killed him.

Around 1179 he married Borte, a girl from a steppe clan distantly related to his mother, when he was about sixteen and she was seventeen. Although the couple expected to spend their lives together, enemies from the Merkid tribe stormed down on them, kidnapped Borte, and gave her to another man. Desperate to rescue his new wife, Temujin tracked and saved Borte, killing a large number of Merkid in the process, revealing a tenacious spirit and a nearly ruthless willingness to use whatever violence necessary to achieve his goals.

The kidnapping of Borte initiated young Temujin into steppe politics, with its perpetual low-grade hostility interrupted by spasms of amazing violence and destruction. In order to rescue Borte from the Merkid, Temujin made alliances with Ong Khan of the Kereyid tribe, the most powerful steppe chief at the moment, and with his childhood friend Jamuka. With new allies came new enemies, and the boy who had been raised as an outcast on the steppe found himself thrust into the maelstrom of dynastic struggles, clan feuds, and all the desperate treachery of steppe politics.