The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

The Gobi has occasional springs and wells, but there are so few that there is almost always someone camped around each one. The prince knew that in order to reach water, he had to pass through the encampment and certainly would be seen. Nearly dying of thirst, he took a chance and went anonymously into a small camp, where he obtained some airag from a young girl. Although he did not reveal his identity to her, he rode a fine white and chestnut horse, and was dressed in his brocade deel lined with squirrel fur and tied with a golden belt. He looked an unusual sight in the middle of the desert.

After the prince hurriedly refreshed himself, he headed back out into the desert. The young girl found several young men and told them about the wealthily clad young man, and five of them saddled their horses and raced off after the unusual visitor.

Although the prince and his horse had water, the horse was slow and worn. The men easily overtook him. When they reached him, one shouted at him, “What sort of man are you?”

“A traveler,” the prince responded, trying not to reveal his identity to them.

“Give us your belt,” the attackers demanded.

The prince refused. The belt was an emblem of manhood, and being of gold made it both a precious object but also a higher symbol of his royal rank. To rob a man of his clothes, particularly his belt, constituted one of the gravest insults, as well as a financial loss. The very word “beltless” stood as a synonym for “woman.” It was almost all that the prince had left in this world.

One of the men grabbed the bridle of the prince’s beloved horse while the others pulled him from the saddle and killed him.

Because a man’s deel is next to his skin, it absorbs not only his sweat and odor but a part of his soul and his fate. No matter how beautiful and costly his deel, the assailants dared not put it on and possibly assume the fate of this Golden Prince. Instead, they seized his gold belt, took his beautiful chestnut horse, and left him.

Many dreams ended there in the Year of the Tiger. The beautiful prince, whose mother hid his genitals to save his life, who crouched in an iron pot under a mound of dung, who was tossed in the air at the tip of a bow and rescued by a man racing on horseback, who grew up in obscure poverty but briefly reigned beside a khan who dressed him with gold and silk and told him that he could conquer the world, was dead at age nineteen. Bayan Mongke Bolkhu Jinong, the Eternally Rich Rising Golden Prince of the Mongols, lay stretched out on the Gobi rocks, beltless and lifeless in a silk deel embroidered with threads of gold and lined with squirrel fur.

No one mourned him, and as his body rotted in the desert, the survivors of his drama had to go on living. With all the important actors now dead, the twenty-three-year-old Manduhai stood alone on an empty stage. Her fate seemed hardly more auspicious than that of the dead prince. Her first husband was dead and so was his heir. The widowed queen was only a junior wife from a distant place. She had been given in marriage by her family, but now the clan to which she had been given was empty. Everyone was gone.

Death had taken away every role Manduhai knew; life had taken away her fate. The dead khan left no male heir to marry her. Manduhai was still queen of the Mongols with every right to continue ruling, but for the first time since Genghis Khan created the nation, it appeared that he had no descendant to be khan.

Life had not prepared Manduhai for this moment. She did not yet know of what she might be capable. She had no man to fight for her, no woman to advise her. The road before her had no destination and no markers. There were no myths or stories to instruct her, no sayings to guide her. Even if the young queen had learned to read, she had no scripture to inspire her and no priest to counsel her.

There was no time to learn. An unprotected widowed queen was the target for any ambitious man who wanted to become khan. With the khan and crown prince both dead and no other heir around, marrying the dead khan’s wife was the only legitimate path to power. She was the target and trophy for any ambitious man on the steppe. It was a unique moment when the office of khan was completely open to whoever could claim and occupy it. Whatever warlord or general powerful enough to seize the queen would prove that he had the blessing of the Eternal Blue Sky to become khan.

It was better for her to choose among the contenders rather than wait for one of them to take her by force. Who would be her new husband? Une-Bolod, the accomplished warrior whom it was supposed she loved, would be the safest and most traditional Mongol choice. As a descendant of Khasar, he was a member of the Borijin clan, even if he did not belong to the lineage of Genghis Khan. With him, her life might be the closest to what she had known in the past.

But the ambitious warlord Ismayil was already the taishi of the Mongols, and he had cleverly manipulated the downfall of the prince. With his connections to the trade caravans, he offered exotic trinkets and other delights, and she could return to live in the warmer climate among the southern oases of the Silk Route. She would drink grape wine from glass goblets made in Italy and enjoy luscious melons cooled in underground irrigation chambers. Throughout the winter she could nibble delicacies sweetened with raisins, and the men around her would wear gleaming white turbans and carry swords of sparkling Damascus steel.

The tempting luxuries of the Muslim warlords paled, however, in comparison with those offered to Manduhai by the Ming court of China. If she would but follow the choice of the slain prince and flee to the Chinese border and request refuge, the officers of the Ming court would almost certainly provide her with a good life, in return for which she need only swear loyalty to them. As the widow of the Great Khan, she would be a starring addition to their menagerie of captive barbarians. She would live as a coddled symbol of the final acknowledgment by the Mongol royal family, and thereby the Mongol nation, of the power of the Ming Dynasty and the superiority of Chinese civilization.

Under Chinese cultural protocols, a new dynasty demonstrated legitimacy and heavenly favor not only by seizing the government and taking control of the country but also by receiving the formal surrender of the defeated dynasty. Nothing short of this official surrender could mark a legal and final conclusion of the Yuan Dynasty. If Manduhai would only perform this public ritual and kowtow to the Ming emperor in a lavishly staged ceremony, she would be guaranteed a life of luxurious ease. She might even be admitted into the emperor’s harem as a concubine and have her every need catered to by a phalanx of eunuchs. If she sought to live alone, they would provide a pampered widowhood for her, with a household of servants and retainers. She could even take a husband if she pleased. Comfortably within the cocoon of the Chinese elite, she would never have to endure another worry or responsibility so long as she lived.

She had to choose quickly: the handsome Mongol noble, a fierce Muslim warlord, or a pampered Chinese widowhood.

Une-Bolod certainly presented the most compelling case. “I will light your fire for you,” he said in his proposal of marriage sent by messenger to Manduhai. “I will point out your pastures,” he promised. The reference to the fire meant that he would give her sons by which to start a new dynasty. For a woman with no male heir, the offer must have seemed tempting, but she showed no hesitation in emphatically rejecting his offer.

“You have a tent-flap I must not raise,” she responded to Une-Bolod. “You have a threshold I must not step over.” To make sure that he did not think she was merely being coy, she added firmly, “I will not go to you.”

The people around Manduhai in the Mongol court knew of the proposal, and they knew of precedent by which she should marry the popular, dashing general. Manduhai asked the people for their advice to her.

“It would be much better for all of us,” the first person answered, presenting a simple and practical reason that the nation needed a fully grown man. It will be better for the nation “if you would accept the proposal of Une-Bolod.”

The second speaker disagreed, with a longer and more profound explanation. For Manduhai to marry outside the lineage of Genghis Khan, even if it were to a descendant of his brother, “your path will grow dark.” With such a marriage, she would no longer be the queen. “You will divide yourself from the people, and you will lose your honored and respected title of khatun.” If Manduhai would devote her life to the Mongol people without thinking of personal comfort or benefit, she was told, she would follow the white road of enlightenment for herself and her nation.

Manduhai thought about the responses for a moment, and then she turned to the one who recommended that she accept Une-Bolod’s proposal. “You disagree with me just because Une-Bolod is a man and I am only a widow,” she charged. Growing angrier as she spoke, she said, “Just because” I am only a woman, “you really think that you have the right to speak to me this way.”

Queen Manduhai raised a bowl of hot tea and flung it at the head of the supporter of this marriage. Manduhai had made the first independent decision of her life. She had decided not to marry any of her suitors. She was the Mongol queen, and she would make her own path.

It was the Year of the Tiger.

PART III

Wolf Mother

1470–1509

Queen Manduhai the Wise, recalling the vengeance of

the former khans,

set out on campaign.

She set in motion her foot soldiers and oxen-troops, and

after three days and nights she set out with her cavalry.

Queen Manduhai the Wise, putting on her quiver

elegantly,and composing her disordered hair,

put Dayan Khan in a box and set out.ALTAN TOBCI § 101

Family of Manduhai Khatun and Batu Mongke Dayan Khan

10

The White Road of the Warrior Widow

MANDUHAI WISHED TO RULE, BUT NOT ONLY DID SHE have no experience, she had no army. All the soldiers were loyal either to their respected general Une-Bolod or to Ismayil Taishi, the highest ranking official in the government.

Yet Manduhai had one thing they did not have—a baby boy. This was not her own child; he was the abandoned infant of the Golden Prince. He was the only living male descendant of the bone of Genghis Khan, the son of the jinong and the heir of the Great Khan.

The boy’s name was Batu Mongke, son of Bayan Mongke and Siker. The child was born in the South Gobi—one of the most sparsely settled areas of the Mongols’, with broad expanses of rocky steppe essentially void of vegetation except sparse clusters of grass. The harsh area, however, was not hostile to herding. With easy movement, the herders could take their animals from a place with no grass into one where the rain fell.

A thin ribbon of mountains, known as the Three Beauties (Gurvan Saikhan Nuruu), slices through this part of the Gobi. The mountains form the tail end and the most southeastern extension of the larger Altai range. Here they gradually disappear into the gravel and sand of the Gobi. On an otherwise flat terrain, their relatively modest-sized peaks seem lofty and dramatic; they climb high enough to snag some of the moisture passing overhead in the winter. These snows melt in the summer and run into ravines and small brooks that make this area an ideal place for herding animals. Mountain springs provide water during the summer, and the canyon walls block the Arctic winds in winter. The ravines and canyons form a labyrinth that offers quick protection to the local residents from intruders or passing armies. A network of goat tracks across the mountains connects the larger canyons with one another.

Although sparsely inhabited, trade routes crisscross the area, keeping it from being truly isolated. The vast open area of the Gobi connects the northern part of the fertile Mongolian steppe with the southern part of the plateau in China’s Inner Mongolia. Similarly, the mountains moving toward the northwest connect the area into the more fertile expanses of western Mongolia.

With his father murdered and his mother kidnapped, Batu Mongke passed from hand to hand. His mother, Siker, now the wife of Ismayil, in time had children and created a new family with her husband, seemingly without regret for the husband or the child she had lost.

At first, Batu Mongke apparently lived alone with an otherwise unknown old woman referred to as Bachai of the Balaktschin. In her extreme poverty, she seemed barely able to survive by herself and proved either unable or unwilling to care for the infant. In an exceptionally harsh and sparsely populated environment such as the Gobi, a child is more dependent on its mother or other caretakers than children growing up in a benign climate surrounded by people.

The temperature drops so low at night that, even under blankets, children cannot generate enough warmth to survive. They must sleep next to larger adults or at least clumped together with several other children. During the day, the child must be carefully monitored with frequent rubbing of the hands, feet, and exposed parts of the body to prevent frostbite. In a milder climate, a urine-soaked child might develop painful skin irritations with the potential for longer-term problems, but in the Gobi, the urine can quickly freeze and threaten the life of the child immediately. Even a simple fall outside can quickly lead to death if the child is too slow to get up again. In the fall and spring dust storms, a child can become lost within only a few feet of the ger and gradually be buried and suffocated in the dust.

Children typically nurse for several years, and supplement this with the rich dairy products available in the fall, but when winter sets in, the child must eat meat or very hard forms of dried and cured dairy products. To survive on the meat and harsh foods of the Gobi, the child must have the food partially chewed by an adult or much larger child in order to swallow and digest it.

Bachai did not provide the intensive care the boy needed, and after three years of neglect, Batu Mongke was still alive, but just barely. As one chronicle states, he was “suffering from a sickness of the stomach.” Another reported that he acquired “hunchback-like growth.” Manduhai learned of the child’s existence and his perilous situation, and she arranged for allies to rescue him and place him with another family. Had the existence or location of the only male descendant of Genghis Khan become generally known, it was nearly certain that one faction or another would have tried to kidnap him or kill him in pursuit of some nefarious plan.

A woman named Saichai and her husband, Temur Khadag, who is sometimes credited along with his six brothers with being the child’s rescuer, became the new foster parents for the boy, and set about trying to restore his health and rehabilitate his body. His new mother instituted a long treatment in the traditional Mongolian art of therapeutic massage or bone setting known as bariach. Gentle massage and light bone adjustment still forms a regular part of child rearing among the Mongols and is viewed as essential to the child’s body growing in a properly erect and aesthetically pleasing manner. Older people in particular, such as grandparents, sit around the ger in the idle hours, rubbing the child’s muscles and tugging at the bones and joints.

Saichai rubbed the child’s wounds with the milk of a camel that had recently given birth for the first time. The milk was prepared in a shallow wooden bowl with a veneer of silver over the wood. Both the milk and the silver had medicinal properties important to Mongol medicine. The treatment required persistent massage by rubbing the milk onto the damaged parts of the boy’s body and rubbing the warm silver bowl itself against the afflicted area. By this persistent massage of his damaged, but still growing, body, the bone setter gradually adjusted the boy’s bones and gently pushed them back into proper alignment. In the words of one chronicle, she wore through three silver bowls trying to repair Batu Mongke’s broken body. As is so often the case with suffering, the physical damages proved easier to treat than the emotional ones.

After the good care of the foster family, Manduhai sent for Batu Mongke when he was about five years old. His foster father set out with him on a horse to escort him across the Gobi to the royal court, but while crossing a stream, the boy fell from the horse and nearly drowned before the father could jump from his horse and rescue him. Since the streams of the Gobi are quite small and only rarely have water in them, it seems strange that the boy would have had so much difficulty getting up and remounting his horse unless he was already badly injured or was severely hurt in the fall. For whichever reason, he arrived at the camp of Manduhai in quite bad physical condition, and his survival remained in doubt for some time.

Manduhai’s first challenge was to install him as Great Khan in a way that people would view as legitimate. Genghis Khan left precise laws in place prescribing that the Great Khan must be elected at a khuriltai. If the candidate, and there was only one at a time, did not attract representatives of an overwhelming majority of the tribes and clans, then anyone not attending could always deny the legitimacy of the election. Genghis Khan’s descendants had violated the spirit of the law from the start. Khubilai Khan made a mockery of the khuriltai, and Khubilai’s descendants abandoned it entirely. Subsequently, a khan sought legitimacy by being installed in office before the sulde, the horsehair banner of Genghis Khan that usually remained in the area of Burkhan Khaldun. But in the turmoil of Manduul and Bayan Mongke’s battles, it temporarily disappeared or was under the control of someone not sympathetic to Manduhai’s quest.

Without the legitimizing process of the khuriltai or control of the sulde of Genghis Khan, Manduhai had to find another way to make the installation of a new Great Khan both legal and known to everyone. Manduhai needed the support of the people, and to achieve this, she also knew that she herself needed some semblance of spiritual or religious support for what she wished to undertake. Every time Genghis Khan wanted to rally his people to a cause that he thought might be difficult for them to support, he made a very public pilgrimage up the sacred mountain and prayed there until he felt that he had been granted the support.

Manduhai chose to install Batu Mongke at the hitherto seemingly unknown Shrine of Eshi Khatun, the “First Queen.” The shrine, like many others, was little more than a tattered felt tent mounted on a cart and pulled by an ox or camel from one Mongol camp to another and from one sacred site to another. The importance of a nomadic shrine to the people on the steppe far exceeded its humble and worn appearance.

Mongols worshipped male spirits on mountains or rocks piled up like a miniature mountain, called an ovoo; rocks, mountains, and cliffs constituted the bones, and therefore the male element, of the earth. Female spirits were worshipped near bodies of water, which formed the life-giving female parts of the earth, or else in caves, which were the wombs of Mother Earth. In contrast to the stationary ovoo, the ger became a sort of portable cave that allowed worshippers to honor the female spirit wherever she was taken.

Both the male sulde and the female ger had a home territory, but as befitted the needs of a nomadic society, each could be easily transported anywhere it might be needed. When the sulde needed to be moved, a mounted warrior carried it by hand. The ger was always transported on a special ceremonial cart similar to the one normally owned and driven by women. When the tribe moved into a new homeland, their shrine led the way and sanctified the land as the people followed behind.

Some elements of the shrine derived from ancient female Earth Mother worship in Inner Asia, but it also contained elements and possibly relics of Mongolian women such as Alan Goa, from whom all Mongol clans traced descent, and Hoelun, the mother of Genghis Khan. The Shrine of the First Queen may have been one or several of the Eight White Gers erected in honor of Genghis Khan’s queens at Avarga. Between the confiscation of women’s gers by Khubilai Khan and the repression of female shrines by a later form of Buddhism, little information survives about them. Had it not been for the importance of Manduhai’s visit to the Shrine of the First Queen, we would not know that it had existed.

In choosing for the first time to install the Great Khan in the shrine dedicated to a female, Manduhai was not merely seeking to restore the dynasty of Genghis Khan. She also sought to restore the male and female spiritual balance that had been so important to the success of Genghis Khan, but so persistently ignored by his heirs. While the Eternal Blue Sky offered inspiration, only the Mother Earth could offer success and fulfillment of the endeavor. Manduhai already had the inspiration of the Eternal Blue Sky; now she needed the support of the Earth Mother to bring her plan to reality.

Before a small crowd of her apprehensive supporters, in the fall of 1470, still the Year of the Tiger, Manduhai dismounted from her horse at a respectful distance away from the shrine. Some of her retainers gathered behind her in support, others remained on their horses and watched from a distance, clearly as spectators rather than participants. She approached the final distance toward the shrine on foot as a humble petitioner approaching a sacred cave. When she came close to the front of the cart, she stopped and performed the tsatsal ritual, tossing fermented mare’s milk into the air as an offering to the spirits.

Although her words would be addressed to the shrine and she would face away from the crowd, there could be no question that, in addition to being the spiritual outcry of a pilgrim, these words constituted a desperate plea of a queen to her people. This would be the most important political speech of her life. She had to make it clear to her people not only which choice she wished to make, but why she wanted them to follow it and accept her.

Everyone knew the danger, both supernatural and bodily, that hung over these appearances of a national leader before a sacred shrine. Only a few decades earlier, the son of Samur Gunj had appeared at one of the shrines dedicated to Genghis Khan as a supplicant to take the office of Great Khan, but he had been killed. Whether one believed the popular explanation that the arrow had been fired supernaturally by the spirit, or one accepted a more mundane source for the killing, by the end of the ceremony, the supplicant lay dead on the ground in front of the tent.

Despite the ritual precision of the ceremony and the real dangers lurking within it, Manduhai called out at the door of the tent. She began her emotional plea with a statement of deep personal desperation and confusion. In language reminiscent of religious hymns and sacred scriptures, she described her own life as wandering senselessly in a place “where black cannot be distinguished from white.” Her world was so dark, she lamented, that she could not distinguish the different colors on a multicolored horse.

She addressed the spirit of the First Queen as the source from which emanated light and wisdom. Manduhai pleaded for wisdom to pass out from the divine gates of the First Queen’s world into the visible world of humans. Still standing in the open air outside the tent after this emotionally strained and somewhat frightened plea for help, Manduhai began to present her case in a formal, legalistic manner, calling upon the dynastic and cultural traditions of the Mongol state. She was laying out her case before the people, and she obviously had already made a choice of husband that she wished them all to accept.

First, she stated the problem confronting the Mongol nation because the royal family had no men to serve as Great Khan. “The Borijin clan is under the threat of extinction,” she explained. The Mongols were living in a time of discord and violence. As articulated clearly by one of her descendants, “there was suffering,” and the state of the world was not stable. The Mongols did not resolutely distinguish between “khans and commoners” nor between “good and evil.” As the chronicler summarized the situation, “At that time the Borijin Golden Clan deteriorated.”

After expounding on the dire condition of the Mongol people, Manduhai presented her own personal predicament. As though pleading for mercy before a judge, she lodged her complaint that she was being forced into marriage by another man and by the public support that he had.

Speaking about Une-Bolod, the favored candidate to take her in marriage and become Great Khan, she acknowledged his power and popularity. “Because he is big and powerful,” she explained, he “wants to take me for his wife.” She made clear her unwillingness to marry the popular candidate, and to make her rejection of him unambiguous and irrevocable, she closed the door on him forever with a special oath and request of the First Queen. If she should ever yield to him, she placed a curse upon herself: “If I do it, I beg you First Queen, punish me harshly.”

For the people gathered at the shrine, it must have been disappointing and perplexing as they sought to understand what the queen wanted. If she ruled out so steadfastly the most popular of the Mongol generals, then would she choose one of the Muslim warlords or an already arranged deal through the Ming court? Was their queen about to deliver her nation into the hands of foreigners? Was she about to betray them and the office she had served?

Knowing the suspicious questions and fear in the minds of those around her, and possibly remembering the killing of the previous royal pilgrim, Manduhai quickly dispelled all these options and reasserted her loyalty. “If I desert you and your descendants,” she proclaimed to the First Queen and to the Mongol people in the simple imagery that every herder would immediately comprehend, “then take your long horse snare and lasso me.”

She continued, in the strongest and most vivid form of oath that a Mongol could make, asking that if she brought any harm to her people or failed to protect them, “then may you break and rip apart my body.” For the Mongols, execution through mutilation constituted the least noble and most feared way of dying because it allowed all the soul-bearing liquids, especially the blood, to flow out onto the earth. Such a death not only kills the body but destroys the soul and pollutes the earth. Manduhai made it clear to everyone that if she failed in her duty and promises, she was requesting precisely such an ignominious death for herself. She added the wish that in killing her, the First Queen or the Mongol people should separate “my shoulders from my thighs.” In tearing apart the body, the oath breaker would surrender all connection to everyone, since the dismemberment would break the bones symbolizing the father and rip apart the flesh symbolizing the mother.

The graphic oath made reference to one often employed by men going to war and swearing loyalty to one another in the face of all enemies; it was an explicitly male form of oath taking. Traditionally as part of the oath, the men killed three male animals—a stallion, a ram, and a dog—by cutting them in half. They separated the halves of the three animals and, standing between them, they made their vow: “O God! O Sky! O Earth! Hear that we swear such an oath. Here are the males of these animals. If we do not keep our oath and break our word, let us be as these animals are.” For Mongols, this vow before the Sky and the Earth constituted the highest oath possible. A lesser version of the oath was to hold out an arrow, break it into two pieces, and then hold the two pieces stretched far apart to show that the oath taker expected to be broken and pulled equally far apart for breaking the vow.

After thus vowing never to desert her people, Manduhai invoked the protection of the First Queen. “I act as a daughter-in-law,” she said to the First Queen, emphasizing her loyalty to the Borijin clan. Manduhai’s plea made it clear that in rejecting Une-Bolod, she rejected all the options presented and had not considered the Muslim or the Ming alliances. Instead of the three options, Manduhai was seeking a new path unknown and unexpected. She would surrender her power to no man.

With a sense of public drama and experience in how to build popular support, Manduhai called forth her choice to present to the First Queen and to her subjects. The figure who stepped forward from the crowd was not even a real man at all, but an awkward child only six or seven years old, dressed in big boots. Despite the extra height provided by the triple-soled boots that he wore for the occasion, he could scarcely control his own body, much less guide a nation. At an age when he had barely learned to command a horse, how could he command the armies needed to protect his office and his people?

Manduhai introduced the boy to the spirit of the First Queen and to the assembled crowd as the grand-nephew of her late husband. “By coming to your tent,” she said very clearly to the spirit of the First Queen, “I wish to make your descendant Great Khan even though he is still a young boy.”

Even if he trembled in fear in his oversized boots, merely by standing before the shrine of the First Queen and the assembly of Mongol nomads, Batu Mongke showed both tremendous bravery and total reliance on Manduhai, who guided him. Twice before in the previous generation, boys of his age had been proclaimed Great Khan, only to be murdered by their rivals before they could reach full maturity. Other fully grown men who bore the title were also ignominiously struck down and killed by the Muslim warlords who tried to control them. Any one of the new boy khan’s rivals for power might descend upon the unorthodox inauguration to seize Manduhai, but now that she had publicly proclaimed him Great Khan, any usurper would have to kill the young boy to make his own claim supportable.

Batu Mongke stood at the Shrine of the First Queen before the people who were supposed to be his subjects, and was acclaimed by Manduhai as the new Great Khan, but his battered body still bore the signs of ill treatment. Fortunately for him, the heavy Mongol boots of manhood not only increased his stature, but the thick, stiff hide that came all the way up to the knee formed an inflexible brace that served to hold him erect even if his knees weakened and began to buckle during the long public ceremony.

In his short but miserable life, he had cultivated a keen ability to discern other people’s motives and an intuitive recognition of their strategies in what they sought from him. In this life of betrayal and suffering, he had one attachment to one ally and guide, to whom he showed unswerving trust. Batu Mongke’s willingness to stand bravely and tall before all these dangers showed an extraordinary confidence in the judgment and guidance of the one person who had orchestrated this event.

He had little choice about relying on Manduhai, but he soon learned that, in her, he had found not only a savior but also a guardian and mentor. She would be the one person who remained loyal to him and protective of his safety and his political interests until the day she died. Though no one else in the mounted throng may have had the confidence in her ability to protect him and to unite the nation, he showed no sign of doubt in her on that, or any other, day in his life.

She perceived something in him that escaped the notice of others, and he found in her something that no one else could see. They had an understanding and faith in each other that seemed to surpass the limited views of those around them. Over the next thirty years, the two of them, like Qaidu Khan and Khutulun two centuries earlier, formed an indivisible if unlikely team, united by a bond that transcended generation and gender and which allowed them to achieve together what neither could have done alone.

Manduhai and young Batu Mongke shared something important. They were both totally alone in the world. Both had been taken from their places of birth by circumstances beyond their control, and both had to live without the vast kinship network so important in tribal society. In Mongol society, a person depended almost totally on kin to provide all the supports needed in life. No religious, market, or fraternal organizations existed outside of the kinship network. The most dreaded misfortune in life was to be without family. The tragic figure in Mongol mythology was always the orphan. Many songs and poems bemoaned the sad fate and the empty future of such a person. The second most tragic figure was the widow whose husband left no male relative to marry her.

Queen Manduhai and Batu Mongke formed a strange dyad of precisely these two outcasts. They had no parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, or even cousins. Everyone had either died or disappeared to some unknown place and fate. In a sense, both had been abandoned by life. Yet, through some tortured sequence of events and unusual circumstances, they had found each other and made an odd emotional alliance and political union. The orphan and the widow could scarcely be expected to survive alone, but they were not alone. They had each other.

In officially making him Great Khan, Manduhai was also formally marrying the boy. While the office of Great Khan was conferred until death, the marriage would be considered a temporary formality until the boy was grown. At that time the two of them would negotiate whether to continue it or for him to take another wife. In the meantime, she was still the Mongol khatun and would rule alone in her own name as well as in his. For now, an inexperienced young queen who was barely more than a girl herself stood united with a crippled little boy of seven. Nothing about them appeared encouraging or inspiring. It scarcely seemed plausible that such an unlikely pair could survive the coming winter, much less conquer the quarrelsome Mongol tribes and take on foreign enemies.

Throughout their reign, as on this awkward inaugural day, they frequently benefited from the underestimation of their abilities by those who struggled against them. In the world where physical strength and mastery of the horse and bow seemed to be all that really mattered, no one seemed to anticipate the advantages of patient intelligence, careful planning, and consistency of action. Neither Manduhai nor Batu Mongke possessed the physical strength of even a lowly soldier in their army, and yet they had some form of charisma that must have come as a direct gift from the sky.

Henceforth the chronicles no longer referred to Manduhai as Manduhai Gunj or Lady Manduhai; instead she was clearly the queen, Manduhai Khatun.

She proclaimed this unlikely candidate as the Great Khan of the Yeke Monghol Ulus, the twenty-seventh successor to Genghis Khan, and the ruler of all the lands and peoples within the world ocean. In keeping with Mongol imperial tradition, she had already picked out an auspicious title that resonated with meaning on many symbolic levels. She bestowed upon Batu Mongke the title Dayan Khan. Believing in the power that sounds have to make ideas and wishes into reality, she had chosen a name with deep meanings for both the Mongols and the Chinese. When heard with the Mongolian ear, the name meant the “Whole Khan,” or the “Khan of the Whole,” a title that stressed unity, the most elusive yet necessary of goals for survival of the steppe tribes. Her choice of title clearly asserted her goal to overcome the divisions by clan and locality. She would unite them, and he would be the khan of all Mongols. In particular, the title showed her rejection of the taishi’s claim to rule over the Oirat of western Mongolia. Dayan Khan would rule the north and the south, the east and the west. He was the Whole Khan.

As if the Mongol claim was not sufficiently presumptuous or excessively ambitious, the same sounds of the Dayan Khan title carried a more ominous meaning when heard with a Chinese ear. To them it meant the “Great Yuan,” reasserting loudly and clearly the Mongol claim to be recognized as the rightful rulers of China and the loyal heirs of the old Yuan Dynasty.

His new title could easily provoke the highly sensitive and insecure Ming court to send out an army to avenge the affront to its honor and inflict some horrifying form of public execution. For a less serious offense, the earlier Jin Dynasty had seized one of Dayan Khan’s ancestors in the twelfth century and nailed him onto a wooden contraption in order to force his submission, a goal that he denied them throughout the agonizing crucifixion. If the Chinese captured the new young khan, they could easily do far worse to force him to give up his title, resign his office, and surrender all control of his dynasty to the Ming emperor.

Manduhai’s arrogance at giving him the title Dayan irritated the Ming officials, but they could only respond with symbols since they lacked the resources to impose their will militarily. The Ming chose to fight words with words and titles with titles. They refused the words Dayan Khan, and instead they conferred upon the boy a far lesser status in their own records. They ignored both his barbarian name and his presumptuous title and mockingly referred to him as Xiao wang zi (Hsiao-wang-tzu), the “Little King” or “Little Prince.” Chinese chroniclers had occasionally used that title in earlier records, particularly when an underage boy sat on the throne, but for Dayan Khan, they used the title throughout his reign. This contention over the khan’s title plagued Mongol-Ming relations through the reign of Dayan Khan.

Despite giving the young boy the title that staked a claim to rule all of China for the Mongols, Manduhai pursued a specific policy that showed no plan to invade or conquer China, much less to rule it. She seems to have learned from the earlier experiences of the steppe tribe, mostly notably of Genghis Khan, that the strategy of fighting, conquering, and then administering so large an empire cost the Mongols far more than they gained.

The failed efforts of her predecessors, such as Esen, her husband’s great-grandfather, had shown that the Mongols lacked the military strength to conquer the massive armies and fortified cities of China. Although Genghis Khan had used firepower very effectively in his time, the advancement in firearms had negated the Mongols’ most important asset, their ability to use bows and arrows very effectively from horseback. No matter how well trained and extensively practiced, a warrior with a bow and arrow could not compete with cannons and firearms. Ultimately, gunpowder favored the sedentary civilizations over the nomadic.

Rather than conquering the Chinese, Manduhai seemed clear in her actions that she wanted to utilize Chinese production to the benefit of her people. She sought to trade with the Chinese where possible, but to raid them when trade failed. Either through trading or raiding, she showed clear determination to get what she needed.

Among the Mongols, not everyone accepted the khan, newly proclaimed at the Shrine of the First Queen. Some thought such an act should be taken at the Shrine of Genghis Khan, who had founded the dynasty and the nation. With so many irregularities accompanying the ordination of this young man as khan, anyone who wanted to find a reason not to support him could certainly do so.

After the installation of Dayan Khan, Manduhai returned with the boy to her royal camp. Like all Mongol capitals, hers moved constantly throughout her life according to the seasons, the changing weather, and the needs of the time. Her summer camp moved around the fertile steppes and returned frequently to the Kherlen River, but as important as that area was for the history of the Mongols and the Borijin clan, it was not her home. Manduhai Khatun and Dayan Khan were ultimately people of the drier steppe. The softly rolling hills, vast stretches of green pasture, and above all the trees of the northern steppe remained alien to her.

She was a woman of the open land, where the eye would never be blocked by mountain or tree and where nature yielded a more sparing but highly appreciated life than in the luxuriant extravagance of the green steppe. Her home was a rocky but firm soil. The pebbles, sand, and gravel might shift underfoot, but they provided a secure base on which to stand or build a ger. The ground never rotted, and even in winter the soil was too dry to freeze as it did in the steppes and forests of the north.

For people of the Gobi the sight of standing water in a lake or flowing water in a river seemed unusual and slightly unnatural. Water belonged in the clouds above, and when it fell to earth, it immediately made its way down into the sand, where it waited to be dug out when needed. Just as the grassy steppe of the north had more grass than the animals could eat at once, the rivers and lakes had more water than they could drink.

In the winter, Manduhai moved her capital down the Ongi River into the edge of the Gobi. The Ongi was the only river that flowed south into the Gobi, and it had long been a major route connecting Karakorum with the old empire in China. The Ongi had water for only a few months of the year, in the summer when the snow in the mountains melted and the spring rains combined to create this small river. Occasionally, it carried enough water to make a small lake called Ulaan Nuur, but usually the empty lake bed and the river stood dry.

Of course, even when the water ceased to flow aboveground, moisture still seeped below the surface. It occasionally bubbled up to form a spring, or one could dig a short way into the light soil and quickly find water. The backdrop of mountains on the northern side offered some protection from the winds blowing directly from the Arctic. The drier conditions prevented blizzards except in the most exceptional of years.

In changing her capital camp from the more isolated place she had inhabited with Manduul Khan, Manduhai made a break with the past. Whether intentionally signaling her plans or merely following her own preferences, the move south and out into an open area closer to a trade route indicated a new engagement with the world. She herself probably did not yet know the precise nature of the new policies she would pursue, but she certainly knew that they would be different from the past. Perhaps she would expand Mongol commercial participation in the Silk Route; she might confront the Muslim warlords or even the Ming Court. Or, she might do all of those things.

Manduhai Khatun and Dayan Khan went to their new camp to enjoy it for a short while and to give the boy a little time to adjust to her and the new people around him. He needed to become comfortable with them because she was about to take him to war. As a khan, even as a little boy, war would be his profession, and it could never be too soon to begin learning it.

With a Great Khan at her side, her newly found firmness and strength, Manduhai was ready to set out on her white road of life.

11

Winning the War and Raising a Husband

VOWS, PRAYERS, AND RITUALS BEFORE A SHRINE ADDED much needed sacred legitimacy to Dayan Khan’s rule, but without force of arms, they amounted to empty gestures and wasted breath. Only after demonstrating that she had the skill to win, as well as the supernatural blessing to do so, could Manduhai hope to rule the Mongols. She had enemies on every side, and she needed to choose her first battle carefully. She had to confront each enemy, but she had to confront each in its own due time. Manduhai needed to manage the flow of conflicts by deciding when and where to fight and not allowing others to force her into a war for which she was not prepared or stood little chance of winning.

The enemies she faced after proclaiming Batu Mongke as Dayan Khan were the same who had vied for control over her before she made the proclamation. The Ming Dynasty to the southeast, although weakening, still presented a major threat to the Mongols and claimed the right to rule over them. The Muslim warlords of the Silk Route, fractious and quarrelsome as ever, continued to grow in power in the southwest and still sought to control the Mongols by controlling their khans.

Throughout their history, the steppe tribes had periodically experienced population and military pressure from both China and the Turks, but for thousands of years, the way west remained open as the escape valve. The Slavic people had never been able to close that valve or resist the Asian tribes’ thrust toward Europe. In the fifteenth century, however, for the first time, Ivan III managed to close it and even reverse the pressure by pushing some of the Mongols back toward their homeland. By 1470 when Manduhai installed Dayan Khan in office, Mongolia had effectively been sealed shut. The Siberian Arctic to the north prevented movement in that direction, and the Chinese Ming, the Muslim states of Central Asia, and the Slavic Russians of the West sealed off the Mongolian Plateau on every side.

Manduhai’s first, and possibly most strategically important, victory came without a battle. She managed to prevent a failed suitor from becoming an enemy. Une-Bolod, the descendant of Khasar and the general under her husband Manduul, remained loyal. She had rejected his marriage proposal, but he recognized the legitimacy of her insistence that all Mongols should rally behind the boy khan.

By remaining loyal to her, and thereby to the descendant of Genghis Khan, he stood next in line to inherit the office of Great Khan and to marry her if anything should happen to the sickly child. Considering Dayan Khan’s condition, caused by his mistreatment as an infant and then the injuries from the fall into the stream while being brought to Manduhai, such an untimely death must have seemed quite possible.

Manduhai had pressed a legalistic case for installing the boy on the throne, but the same logic and adherence to Genghis Khan’s law would force her to accept Une-Bolod next. In the absence of the boy, all the same arguments would support him, and by remaining loyal to her and the boy now, he prepared the way for a legal succession in the future.

Similarly, if Manduhai should be killed in battle or be incapacitated in any way, Une-Bolod stood as next in line to become regent for the boy. By remaining loyal to both Manduhai and Dayan Khan, Une-Bolod would already be well positioned in the middle of the camp, and if anything happened to either the queen or the khan, he would assume power. He would not need to rally an army and descend on the royal camp; he and his warriors would already be in place.

Manduhai’s power base was in the central Mongolian steppe, a well-watered land good for animals and easily traversed. By having Une-Bolod’s loyalty, she had no worry about the immediate eastern area, since he controlled it. The Siberian tribes to the north had never posed much of a threat to the steppe people. The western tribes offered her the least support, but her most dreaded enemies lay to the south, across the Gobi—the Ming in the southeast and the warlords in the southwest.

Manduhai decided to confront her enemies at home first, before looking south, by strengthening her western flank. After consolidating her rule over the Mongols and attaining a firm grip on the whole of the Mongolian Plateau, she might consider leaving home to confront her southern rivals, but she could not do so with the possibility of resistance or revolt at her back.

Western Mongolia was home to a variety of tribes, independent clans, and factions in shifting alliances. They were Mongols with a mixture of Turkic steppe tribes as well as Siberian forest tribes in a constantly changing array of ethnic, clan, and geographic names. Groups could be referred to by the name of their individual clans, lineages, or tribes. Or they could be referred to by the name of a dominant group in their area, as well as by a geographic feature of the area. As the people moved from one area to another or as one lineage rose and fell in local prominence, the identification might change.

A more diverse assortment of tribes lived in the west than in the more homogenous east. The topography and microenvironments of the Altai Mountains and adjacent steppes offered sustenance for a larger variety of animals than eastern Mongolia. Camel herders lived in the southern deserts. Herders of goats, sheep, cows, and yaks occupied the mountain areas, and reindeer herders lived in the north. All the herders kept horses if the animals could survive, but if not, they rode camels, yaks, oxen, and reindeer.

Through the centuries, the area attracted a variety of ethnic groups from other places as well. When Islam first spread into Central Asia, many Christian tribes sought refuge here, as well as some Buddhists and Manicheans. Later, Muslims joined them, sometimes as traders, but often fleeing from their own political and schismatic struggles.

Stretching back more than a thousand years, to the time of the Huns and then to the eighth-century Turkic empires, the Mongol state always had its base in the center between the Tuul and Orkhon rivers. The Mongols had strengthened their hold on this area, in part by moving other steppe tribes into the west along the Altai Mountains to serve as a buffer against the unknown but threatening forces of Muslim Central Asia, the Europeans, and the Mongols’ steppe neighbors.

Through the centuries, the Oirat, called Kalmyk by the Muslims and Russians, had spread out of their original forest home in Siberia; by the time of Manduhai’s reign, their name had expanded into a generic term encompassing all the western Mongol and Turkic tribes around the Altai Mountains. Since the time of Genghis Khan’s daughter Checheyigen, the Oirat, as a son-in-law nation, usually had a female of the Borijin clan come to marry their leader. Over time, the leader of the Oirat came to be known as the taishi, while the title khan was reserved primarily for the Borijin leaders. For a while, the joint titles and the marriage alliance kept the two parts of the Mongol nation closely connected.

When the Mongols weakened in the time of Elbeg Khan, both the Ming court and the Silk Route warlords tried to separate the eastern and western Mongols and play them off each other. Both foreign powers sought to promote the Oirat as a separate nation, apart from the Mongols in the east, with equal leaders deserving of their own titles.

As the Ming Dynasty declined in vigor and the ties with western Mongolia became harder to maintain, the warlords of the Silk Route began pursuing the same strategy of dividing eastern and western Mongols, and they had more success. Until the time of Esen, the taishi was a western Mongol and lived among the people over whom he ruled. After Esen’s assassination, the Turkic warlords such as Beg-Arslan and Ismayil claimed the title and the right to rule the Oirat, although they preferred to stay close to their trade oasis cities along the Silk Route and to control the Oirat indirectly from a distance. As long as the taishi kept trade goods coming into the Oirat territory, no one seemed to mind.

Manduhai had to retake control of the Oirat, unite the Mongols, and thereby deprive Ismayil, and the future warlords, of the title or power to rule over the Oirat. She did not yet have an army large enough to cross the desert and conquer the oases of the Silk Route where the warlords held their power base and where large segments of the Oirat lived. But she was ready to challenge Beg-Arslan and Ismayil for command over the Oirat living north of the Gobi. Even if she could not conquer them completely, she needed to neutralize the warlords’ ability to use the Oirat against her.

In preparation for the first major campaign, Manduhai sent a train of ox carts laden with equipment and provisions with an infantry escort to guard them. She and the main army would leave later and pass by the infantry and supply carts. The organization of the army showed clearly that Manduhai’s plans for making war reached a much higher state of forethought and execution than the usual raids that had characterized much of steppe warfare over the previous two centuries. In an organization uncharacteristic of steppe leaders, she used infantry and cavalry as well as the caravan of supply carts; her army more closely resembled that of a sedentary state than that of a nomadic one.

Three days later, the young queen was ready to depart. The chronicles all agree that she fixed her hair to accommodate her quiver. The hairstyle of noble married women of that era precluded fighting or any other manual endeavor. She removed the headdress of peace and put on her helmet for war.

By taking off her queenly headdress, known as the boqta, she removed virtually the only piece of clothing that separated a man from a woman. The boqta ranks as one of the most ostentatious headdresses of history, but it had been highly treasured by noble Mongol women since the founding of the empire. The head structure of willow branches, covered with green felt, rose in a narrow column three to four feet high, gradually changing from a round base to a square top. A variety of decorative items such as peacock or mallard feathers adorned the top with a loose attachment that kept them upright but allowed them to flutter high above the woman’s head. The higher the rank, the more elaborate the boqta, and as queen, Manduhai would have worn a highly elaborate one. She would have worn her hair in a knot underneath a hood that helped to balance the boqta. The contraption struck many foreign visitors as odd, but the Mongol Empire had enjoyed such prestige that medieval women as far away as Europe imitated it with the hennin, a large cone-shaped headdress that sat toward the back of the head rather than rising straight up from it as among the Mongols. With no good source of peacock feathers, European noblewomen generally substituted gauzy streamers flowing in the wind at the top.

As in many martial cultures, the bow and arrow served not only as a major weapon in war but also as a major political and martial symbol. For the Mongols, hanging up the bow and arrow in the ger symbolized peace, and taking them down symbolized war. Even a young boy such as Dayan Khan could have easily taken down the bow and quiver of arrows and strapped them on to symbolically lead the army. By stressing that Manduhai did it, the chronicles show clearly that she personally commanded the army.

As described in the Altan Tobci, “Queen Manduhai the Good, like the great khans of former times, set out on campaign.”

She did not, however, leave the boy behind. He was the khan, and he would accompany her army whether he was yet capable or not. In the words of the Altan Tobci, she put the young khan “in a box and set out.” Other sources described the container as a leather case, a woven basket, or a wooden box strapped to a horse.

When moving from camp to camp, Mongol parents often put young children in a specially made box without a top that they tied to the side of a camel’s two humps. From this secure place the children could be easily moved and kept out of the way, and they could often be seen with their heads poking out of such boxes as they bounced along on the camel.

By age seven, however, Dayan Khan certainly should have been able to ride a horse with some degree of mastery. Children began riding at age three or four, and by age five, many of them, both boys and girls, were able to engage in grueling races of more than fifteen miles. Particularly since the boy now occupied the highest office in the Mongol world, it seems odd that he would not be riding a horse. At the same time, the chronicles mention that his box was carried by a horse, and not a camel; horses are not used as pack animals, so the choice of animal indicates an unusual situation.

The young khan possibly still suffered from the ailments of his earlier childhood, and perhaps he could not ride. Several times in his life he had accidents falling from a horse, and therefore Manduhai seemed to be taking no chance of having the young khan injured as she went off to battle. Because she led the troops in his name, his presence, in some form or other, was vital to the legitimacy and success of the campaign. For generations, the men who held the title of Great Khan had rarely ventured forth on a real military campaign, but Manduhai was showing that although he might be a crippled boy, he was still the khan and would go with her into battle. Her leadership and his bravery inspired others to follow her as well.

The Mongol armies at the time of Manduhai still utilized the left-right organization of Genghis Khan. Whether in camp or on the battlefield, the leader remained always at the center of the army, surrounded by several concentric circles of protectors. The main detachment then spread out as two large wings from the center. Even when moving across the countryside, the army moved in this spread-out formation rather than in the single-file formation of most batallions. In this way, the Mongol army was constantly in formation to move into battle.

In some armies, the commander rode at the front of the troops. But in the wing formation, with the commander in the center, the two wings moved out somewhat ahead of the leader. From this position at the rear, the commander could see the entire army and be in a much better position to make decisions and give orders. The commander could call for a large number of battle formations to be used in attack, and these could be changed frequently in a cascade of attacks that confused the enemy.

At the beginning of the Mongol Empire, uninformed opponents sometimes mocked even Genghis Khan as a coward for staying behind the front line in battle, but the effectiveness of the Mongol strategy proved itself not only in their consistent victories, but also in the rare loss of life of their commanders. Despite her untraditional approach to organizing her army, Manduhai knew better than to depart from this proven military formation. She took her position at the center of the army.

A herd of horses can move only as quickly as its smallest and youngest members can run. Horses can outrun most dangers, but wolves are swift, nimble, and wily. The wolf pack cannot threaten the strong stallion, who can attack with his hooves and severely injure or kill an adult wolf, but because there is only one such stallion, he poses little threat to the pack as a whole. To protect the vulnerable foals and colts, the females herd them into a tight circle that the mares then surround in a tight fortification, thereby forming a wall of hooves against the attackers. Thus fortified, the mares easily beat off with their hooves any wolf that may nip at them, but the horses remain rigidly in place until the wolves move on toward easier prey. The lone mature stallion circles around almost helplessly as a sentry, lunging ineffectively at the wolves that easily jump out of his range.

From thousands of years together on the steppe, the two animals know each other’s threats and each other’s defenses. The wolves stand little chance of breaking the mares’ defense, but sometimes they can lure out an overconfident and easily provoked young male that lacks the instinct or experience of the females. Such an untested male will strike out against a wolf that then lures him toward the rest of the wolves, which are hiding in ambush. They race out, attack the startled young male, and rip his flesh apart.

Manduhai already knew the lesson of the mares, but now she needed to learn from the wolf. She could already protect and guard, but Manduhai needed to learn to hunt, stalk, retreat, lure, attack, and win. She first sought to lure out her enemies from their protected stronghold and confront them in the place of her choosing.

Manduhai carefully selected the battle zone. She led her army toward the large open area west of the Khangai Mountains and east of the Altai. Whoever controlled this area, now mostly located in the modern Mongolian province of Zavkhan, had the best position for controlling the west. Because the area comprised the large open steppe, it was the best place in the west for horse herds. The numerous small rivers of the area drained the ice that melted from the mountains, and abundant meandering streams provided adequate moisture for what would otherwise be too dry a zone for extensive herding. The places without such moisture became sandy deserts, giving the large area a highly varied landscape, with patches of drifting sand dunes and verdant pastures adjacent to the many streams.

The combination of ample water and extensive grass made for fertile grazing in an otherwise arid west. Whoever controlled this central area would have the largest herds of horses in the area, and thereby food and transportation for the largest army. They would be able to dominate the entire area from central Mongolia to the Kazakh steppes. For these practical reasons, Qaidu Khan and his daughter Khutulun came to the same area for their major confrontation with the armies of their Mongol cousins in the Yuan Dynasty, and it was here that Qaidu Khan died.

Zavkhan lay north across the Gobi from the oasis where Ismayil had his stronghold, and it was difficult for him to cross such a vast, dry expanse with a large army. For him to make a campaign so far away from his base would have attracted the attention of the Ming army along the Chinese frontier, and they might have seized the oases that they claimed, but which he controlled. If he lost control over the oases, he would also have lost control of the Silk Route. He would have been left without a military or a commercial base.

Because he could not send in a large force to protect his claim on the Oirat territory, Ismayil sought to govern the Oirat by controlling their access to Chinese and Middle Eastern trade goods. Manduhai had no such material incentive with which to entice the Oirat. Nevertheless, from the time of Genghis Khan’s daughter Checheyigen, the Mongols and the Oirat had maintained close social and marriage ties. Manduhai came from the Choros clan of the Oirat, as did Dayan Khan’s great-grandfather Esen. In addition, many of Dayan Khan’s female ancestors had been Oirat of different clans.

The chronicles do not explain how Manduhai chose the area or how she came to have the strategic knowledge that she exhibited consistently throughout her military career. Did she know about the battles of Qaidu Khan and Khutulun? Had she learned about the techniques of Genghis Khan? Did she follow the direction of her best general, Une-Bolod? Or did she merely possess some kind of born genius for strategic thinking?

Manduhai’s expedition of conquest resulted in a number of moderately sized skirmishes, but few large battles. She found little opposition in the west. She came with the true khan, the descendant of Genghis Khan; even the most ardent supporter of the taishi knew that the Great Khan outranked him and that it was to the Great Khan that they owed their ultimate allegiance. Some of the Oirat sided with Manduhai from the start, and others eventually came to her side.

In the midst of one of the battles, Manduhai’s helmet slipped. This was her first military campaign, and she may not yet have been accustomed to the battlefield. Since craftsmen usually made helmets to fit men, her helmet likely was large on her head and insecure. The displaced helmet dangled briefly from her neck before falling away completely and landing in the dirt.

For any warrior, much less for a commander, only the loss of the horse would be more dangerous than the loss of the helmet. Without it, her head immediately became an open target for any Oirat who wanted to shoot her or attack her with a sword. But for her or one of her underlings to dismount to retrieve the helmet would be to face the even more dangerous prospect of being trampled under the hooves of either the enemy or her own soldiers.

An Oirat warrior was the first to notice the unfortunate loss. “The Queen has no helmet,” he called out. Such a cry almost certainly seemed like an invitation to mob her like wolves on a wounded deer, but instead of taking advantage of her unexpected vulnerability, the Oirat soldier shouted for someone to “bring another.” When it appeared obvious that no one had a spare helmet to offer, he removed his own helmet in the midst of the battle and presented it to her. The chronicles do not name the Oirat who, quite probably, saved her life; they only specify his ethnicity. She possibly had a contingent of Oirat fighting with her, or he could have been a chivalrous enemy warrior. No matter whether he had already joined Manduhai’s side or fought against her in the skirmish, the record of the incident showed the level of respect she maintained among the Oirat.

Manduhai cleverly managed to turn the loss of her helmet to her advantage. The headgear of a person is so closely associated with the soul and its heavenly protection, since the sky is seen as the hat of the Earth, that Mongols sometimes deliberately discard a hat as a way of changing that fate and striving for a new one. Realizing that the sight of the commander losing her helmet could frighten her followers enough to cause them to flee from the battle, Manduhai dashed forward even more boldly and fiercely, determined to demonstrate that her change of headdress promised certain victory. In the words of the Altan Tobci, her enemy reportedly swarmed at her as thick as a cloud of dust, but she fell upon them and “destroyed them entirely, and annihilated them.” She took prisoners beyond counting, and she killed their leaders who had been disloyal to her and Dayan Khan.

Victory was often marked by imposition of some relatively unimportant but symbolically meaningful laws on the defeated. The Yellow Chronicle of the Oirat (Shira Tughuji) listed several such punitive laws issued by Manduhai after her victory. She limited the crest on the Oirat helmets to a length of two fingers. They could not call any ger in their land an ordon, the Mongol word for palace; and when in the presence of khans, they had to sit on their knees.

The text also mentions a law that the Oirat could no longer eat with a knife but instead had to gnaw their meat. Such a law probably never existed, but Manduhai may have confiscated their knives as a security measure, thereby temporarily depriving them of knives for eating meat until they were again allowed to acquire them.

Manduhai had reunited the Mongols, and she now controlled the strategic area of Zavkhan, necessary to assert her power over the west. Without that control, she would face the dangers posed by a rebel tribe, foreign warlords, or even the possibility of wealthy merchants luring her followers away. Une-Bolod gave her control of the east, and now she had added control of the west.

In addition to its strategic importance, the western campaign against the Oirat was a notable propaganda victory, demonstrating that Manduhai had the blessing of the Shrine of the First Queen and the Eternal Blue Sky. Manduhai showed that she was in control of her country. The khan may have been a small boy in a box, but her strength and determination inspired confidence. For the first time in more than a century, a united and strong central government had control of Mongolia. Manduhai had succeeded in uniting western and eastern Mongolia under the Borijin clan for the first time since Elbeg Khan’s fateful encounter with the rabbit in 1399, nearly a century earlier.

Going to war in a basket box may have been an odd way for the young Dayan Khan to grow up, but after the trauma of his earliest years, Manduhai provided the boy with a stable and secure, albeit unusual, childhood. For much of the prior centuries, the domineering warlords had kept a sequence of boy khans as prisoners, whom they exploited, abused, and humiliated. The warlords certainly showed no interest in educating or preparing these boys for leadership because they would never lead. No one expected any of the boys to live to become a fully functioning adult, much less the ruling khan. At most, a boy might be required to reproduce a male heir before being dispatched, or some other male relatives could be substituted as khan or as progenitor.

From the start, Manduhai’s actions made clear that she planned for Dayan Khan to rule. He would be a fully functioning and ruling khan, not a figurehead. Manduhai could easily have left him under the charge of nurses or have built a small, isolated camp for him in one of the many canyons of the Gobi or the Altai Mountains. She could have sent him to live in the remote steppe where she had lived with her first husband, Manduul. Instead, they bore the campaign hardships together. Although we have no quotes from him at this time in his life, he well might have said the same words that Genghis Khan said to one of his most loyal followers: “When it was wet, we bore the wet together, when it was cold, we bore the cold together.”

Manduhai seemed determined not to repeat the painful mistake of Genghis Khan, who had been a genius in war, politics, and governing but had failed as a father, particularly to his sons. They grew up fearful of him, but undisciplined. They were rowdy and drunken, more intent on hunting, racing, gambling, and womanizing than on learning how to rule. Genghis Khan’s shortcomings as a father, in the end, helped bring down his empire and thus undid his lifetime of work.

Manduhai did not have the luxury or the problems of so many extra sons. She had but this one boy, and she was determined to make him into a leader in war and in peace.

She kept him constantly close to her and guarded and sheltered him without delegating that responsibility to anyone. In the words of the The Jewel Translucent, Manduhai “protected her jewel-like son.” She sought divine blessings for him, and “she truthfully and strongly prayed” to the Eternal Blue Sky: “Lord Tengri, you must watch out for sinful and evil-thinking people!” Constantly but “fearfully she watched over and kept safe her important son.” Through her actions she saved the lineage of Genghis Khan, or in the more ornate phrasing of the Buddhist chroniclers, she facilitated “the spreading of the wish-granting, jewel-like Borijin Golden Clan.” In this way, “by protecting the infallible Dayan Khan, she lit the Borijin hearth fire.”

Manduhai may have united the Mongols under Dayan Khan, but she had not lessened the threat from the enemies outside Mongolia. The Ming Dynasty in China, to the southeast of Mongolia, and the warlords of the Silk Route to the southwest each claimed the right to rule the Mongols, and each eagerly sought to exercise that right. Whoever controlled the Mongols had access to the richest supply of horses anywhere on Earth. For the merchants of the oases, such a treasure promised infinite riches in trade. For the Ming military, access to the horses would provide them with the basis for a larger and more powerful cavalry.

Manduhai’s western campaign captured the attention of both rivals. They welcomed the increased turbulence in the Mongol steppes, but the victory of Manduhai and her success at uniting the fractious eastern and western Mongols created a new source of concern for them. Both the warlords and the Chinese still smarted from the pains inflicted on them and the capture of their leaders when Esen nearly united the Mongols. Both wanted to avoid a repeat of those episodes.

While strengthening military control over the Mongols, Manduhai’s victories jeopardized existing commercial links. Mongolia had no need to be united if the result was to be left alone in isolation without trade and commerce. Unlike the first Mongols, who only needed a few trade goods such as metal, Mongols of the fifteenth century required commodities from cloth and incense to tea and medicines. The political turmoil and social upheaval since the fall of the Mongol Empire had done nothing to lessen Mongol appetites for the variety of goods they had learned about during the empire’s height.

The only thing that the Mongol steppe could produce in substantial excess was animals. The Mongols produced many times the number of animals that they needed for their own subsistence, but they had no one with whom they could trade except the Chinese. The civilizations of Central Asia and Europe lay much too far away, and this left only the Chinese trade as the way that the Mongols could convert their extensive animal production into any other type of goods.

In response to the new round of potentially threatening behavior from the tribes on the Mongolian Plateau, the Ming court in Beijing tried to cut off, or at least control strictly, trade with the Mongols. The lack of trade created a widespread and persistent scarcity of luxury goods for the Mongols, but for the Chinese it created a small but very specific problem. Chinese farmers devoted almost all arable land to the production of crops and to a few animals, such as pigs and chickens, that could live from the scraps of an agricultural society. In so doing, in order to irrigate and plant the fields, they destroyed the pasturelands where horses might graze.

Most Chinese did not care about the reduction in horses, but for the military it was a crucial issue. To fill the need, the Chinese army sought other suppliers of horses when they could not get them from the Mongols. They sometimes imported horses from incredibly faraway places, including Korea, Japan, and even the distant Ryukyu Islands. But no matter how much the officials in the Forbidden City tried to curtail trade with the Mongols, the Chinese soldiers continued it on the border. To ensure the constant supply of horses, they had to provide a constant flow outward of trade goods coming from all over China.

The instability of the horse trade drove up prices. The presentation of an average horse by a Mongol required the payment of a bolt of high-quality silk, eight bolts of coarse silk, and a cash payment equal to an additional two bolts of coarse silk. At the horse markets maintained along the border, similarly disproportionate terms remained in effect. A good horse required payment of 120 chin (132 pounds) of tea, and even a poor horse required payment of 50 chin (about 55 pounds) of tea. Not only did the Chinese have to pay for poor-quality horses, as tribute they even had to pay for horses that died on the way to presentation.

By the 1470s, the black-market trade in horses had resumed in a vigorous but unofficial way that benefited private merchants more than the government officials, who were barred from participating. The government officials divided into two camps. Some favored allowing the black market to operate because it prevented the large, armed Mongol convoys from marching on tribute missions to the capital. Others, however, regretted the loss of imperial revenues and control of the horses. By 1479, even the authorities had to recognize the importance of the horse trade, and in an effort to recoup control of the profits from it, the Ming monarch restored its legality as an official matter of policy.

The influential eunuchs in the court struggled to confine the horse trade to the traditional system of allowing barbarians to submit tribute. In the official ideology of the Chinese court, by coming to the court and seeing firsthand the world’s most opulent and advanced civilization, the barbarians would naturally become at least semicivilized. True civilization for the Chinese consisted of three primary parts: acceptance of Chinese writing; urban or otherwise sedentary living; and loyalty to the emperor. While barbarians probably would not adopt all three, the closer they came to doing so, the better, in the Chinese view.

To facilitate the spread of these three primary aspects of Chinese civilization during the Han Dynasty in the first century, strategists had recommended five types of bait certain to lure the barbarians, strategies still followed by the Ming Dynasty more than a thousand years later. The lures included luxurious clothes to corrupt their eyes; superior cuisine to corrupt their mouths; beautiful women and music to corrupt their ears; massive buildings, slaves, and granaries to corrupt their appetites; and, finally, wine and feasts to corrupt the minds of their leaders.

The Mongols rejected all three aspects of Chinese civilization; they had their own writing; they were committed nomads; and they would never bow to a foreign ruler. Manduhai needed trade, but she refused to go through any of the ceremonies of submission or the rituals of tribute, and she was not tempted by a single one of the five types of bait. The Chinese struggled to understand it. The rejection posed more than a mere insult; it challenged the fundamental worldview of the Ming authorities and threatened to undermine their power if they could not convince a barbarian queen of their superiority.

When she looked southward beyond the Gobi and below the Mongolian Plateau, Manduhai saw enemies on every side, but she also saw home. She knew this land because she was born and reared there. This knowledge and experience gave her an advantage over Genghis Khan and earlier conquerors. Over millennia, the steppe tribes had focused on raiding and conquering cities because that was where the wealth accumulated. With such minute populations compared with the vastness of China, the steppe tribes could rarely conquer more than a few cities before spreading their armies too sparsely. The most successful conquerors had formed dynasties by leaving behind a thin stratum of the Mongol elite at the top of the local social hierarchy, but rarely did these regimes last for long. The enormous population of China eventually swallowed the barbarians or spit them out again.

Sentiment and nostalgia make poor diplomacy, and even worse military strategy. The emotion behind Manduhai’s move remains difficult to ascertain, but she had a clear strategy for specific military and commercial goals. The army that controlled the Silk Route controlled the trade. To maintain the east-west unity of the Mongol people that she had imposed through war, she needed the cooperation of the Mongols south of the Gobi to obtain trade goods. If she could keep the trade goods flowing, whether through military force or by a more peaceful means, she could keep the Mongols united.

Focusing on an external goal and foreign enemies offered a small opportunity to keep the quarrelsome Mongol tribes from directing their hostility toward one another. Manduhai realized that she could protect her government and nation by channeling that aggression toward the Muslims and the Ming armies.

Manduhai proved unwilling merely to sit north of the Gobi, as her first husband had done, and wait for caravans of traders to arrive with whatever goods they happened to have left over, demanding whatever price they could. She needed to control the caravans from their source to determine which goods they carried and in which direction they flowed. She needed to develop a new approach to China. She had learned from the negative example of the Golden Prince how difficult it was to unite the Mongols north of the Gobi with the ones south of the Gobi in a concerted effort. Even if united, she knew that they could not control China.

In contrast to the expansive territorial acquisition favored by prior generations of steppe conquerors, Manduhai pursued a strategy of geographic precision. Better to control the right spot rather than be responsible for conquering, organizing, and running a massive empire of reluctant subjects. Control of the area between the Tuul River and the Orkhon gave her power over central Mongolia; control of Zavkhan gave her power over western Mongolia. Now, rather than trying to conquer and occupy the extensive links of the Silk Route or the vast expanse of China, she sought to conquer just the strategic spot from which to control them.

12

Facing the Wall

MANDUHAI MAY HAVE BEEN THE KHATUN AND BATU Mongke the khan, but by claiming the office of taishi, foreigners such as Ismayil and Beg-Arslan still had a stranglehold on Mongolia by controlling the Gobi and thereby all the trade with China. Not yet strong enough to confront them directly, Manduhai consolidated her authority north of the Gobi. Although she steadily increased her power, ever since Genghis Khan’s conquests more Mongols actually lived south of the Gobi than north. A majority of the Mongols remained loyal to Beg-Arslan and Ismayil rather than to Dayan Khan and Manduhai.

To make Dayan Khan ruler of the whole people, as promised in his title, Manduhai had to win the loyalty of the southern Mongols. Unable at this juncture to mount a military offensive across the Gobi, she chose a more sensible, but still risky, plan. For now, she would let the massive Chinese army contend with Beg-Arslan and his aggression in the hope that they might crush him. The danger, however, was that if the Chinese could not defeat him, Beg-Arslan might emerge with an even stronger claim to being the right ruler for all the Mongols.

Beg-Arslan and Ismayil turned their attention away from Mongolia because the continued crumbling of the Ming defenses presented them with new raiding opportunities. Under Beg-Arslan’s control, the southern Mongol army was gradually nibbling away at the Chinese borders, pushing back the Ming forces. Under its weak and distracted emperor, the Ming Dynasty had become an empire in retreat. Beg-Arslan sensed that he might now make his biggest conquest by challenging the Ming for command of the Gansu Corridor and thereby the doorway into China. To occupy the corridor, he needed to attack the Chinese stronghold at Yinchuan, the main city of modern Ningxia. This was the final place besieged by Genghis Khan back in 1227, and it was near here that he died. Thus, in addition to its tremendous strategic and commercial value for anyone seeking to dominate trade, the whole area had acquired deep symbolic importance in the cultural psyche of the Mongols.

If Beg-Arslan could seize this place so closely associated with the memory of Genghis Khan, he would have all the greater hold on the Mongols serving around him. Manduhai’s claim to legitimacy derived from the blood link of Dayan Khan to Genghis Khan, but if Beg-Arslan controlled such an important site, it would show that Genghis Khan and the Eternal Blue Sky supported him. Victory in battle would always surpass any other type of legitimacy. Beg-Arslan could claim the mandate of Mongol history.

Beg-Arslan’s strongholds at the Turfan and Hami oases were too far out in the desert to function as supply bases for the conquest of Ningxia and control of the Gansu Corridor. He had moved his troops much closer to his target, into a great loop in the Yellow River. The immense river, known to the Mongols as the Black River, to the Turkic people as the Green River, and to most of the world as the Huang Ho or Yellow River, begins its nearly three-thousand-mile journey toward the sea from the Kunlun Mountains in Tibet, flowing north across the Asian continent. Without an obstacle blocking its course, the river could continue northward across Mongolia and Siberia and out to the Arctic, but the giant Gobi and the massive Mongolian Plateau bar its way. The river forms a large loop before turning eastward and heading to the Pacific instead of the Arctic.

The land enclosed by the Great Loop covers about 83,000 square miles, or an area about the same size as the Korean Peninsula. The river provides for agriculture along its sides if irrigated, but the interior area can only support grazing. The topography consists of a plateau that rises up to an average altitude over three thousand feet.

The landscape offers steppes of dry gravel, salt lakes, and shifting sands that farmers and sedentary people found alien and hostile, but which the Mongols found inviting and comforting to their aesthetic sensibilities and beneficial to their pastoral way of life. In contrast to the incredibly hot deserts of the interior or the wet agricultural lands of the river plains, the inner loop offered land sufficiently fertile for grazing, but not appropriate for extensive agriculture. It formed a miniature Mongolia, only farther south and with a more benign climate; threateningly close to the Gansu Corridor, it was also the ideal strategic outpost for the Mongols, from where they could easily strike at the heart of Chinese civilization and commerce.

In a series of elegant battlefront reports that survive from the Ming commander Wang Yue, a clear picture of the issues emerges. He suggested a novel tactic of using trade to lure in the Mongols and then attacking them. Because it proved difficult for the Chinese soldiers to go out and find the Mongols, Wang Yue proposed that government officials should send out large supply trains whose movements could be easily monitored by the Mongols and which would pose tempting targets for their raids. Thus the Mongols could be lured in close and then attacked by the waiting military. Although the policy would not prevent Mongol raids entirely, it would discourage them “to dare to penetrate deeply.” Wang Yue began implementation of his policy with campaigns against the Mongols in the summer of 1470 and again in 1471. Although they produced few casualties, they succeeded in heightening the tensions along the border.

After only seven months on his assignment at the frontier a rival officer, Commander Yu Zi jun, opposed Wang’s offensive strategy. Yu prepared an alternative report, hoping to prevent the Mongols from raiding the frontier settlement at Yulin by reviving an ancient, but long neglected, approach of building a wall. According to his proposal, the wall should be made stronger and larger than the walls of earlier dynasties by constructing it of earth to a height of about thirty feet. Rather than just enclosing specific populated areas, it should be erected along the top ridges of the mountains to provide maximum visibility for spotting approaching marauders and for the relay of signals from one part to another. The signaling alone allowed the creation of an unprecedented long-distance communication network, permitting information to travel faster than a horse, thereby creating the possibility for the coordination of military action along a lengthy line at a much faster rate than the attacking cavalry could facilitate.

Yu proposed building the wall as a more humane response to the Mongol problem, and, as such, it seemed to him more appropriate for a beneficent, civilized nation such as China. The wall would prevent invasion without harming the barbarians. Then, as the Chinese literati had maintained for hundreds of years, the exposure to the complete superiority of Chinese culture would, inevitably in its own natural way, pacify and civilize the steppe warriors. Thus, unable any longer to wage war on the Chinese, the Mongols would become civilized.

The wall would cut across the base of the Great Loop that the Mongols had called the Ordos; eventually, the wall would begin and end at the Yellow River, thereby protecting the agriculturally productive lands within the loop. Yu saw no reason to allocate men and resources to defend empty land that was not productive.

The senior military officials rejected Yu’s plan as too expensive, whereupon, at the end of 1472, he wrote another report offering a cost-benefit analysis that showed how his superiors could, in the long run, save money by building the wall. The financial argument also carried a strongly implied but unstated message. The wall would prevent the soldier-farmers stationed on the border from selling their crops to the Mongols or, worse yet, deserting to the Mongols and farming for them. The desertion rates on the border had risen steadily, and the openness of the border prevented the central authorities from exercising power not merely over the steppe tribes, but also over their own soldiers. The carefully constructed wall would keep the Mongols out and keep the Chinese in. From the wall and its watchtowers, the guards could just as easily keep watch over the farming soldiers as they could the approach of potential enemies from the steppe.

Beg-Arslan’s invasion deeper into Chinese territory created a sense of fear that propelled the discussion of alternate strategies toward planning for a necessary and quick response. The immediate question was not whether to build the wall, but whether to attack and fight the Mongols or to retreat and let them have the territory they were invading.

Commander Wang waited along the frontier of the Ordos for the Mongol attack. It would come soon, but he could not predict whether they would hit him with a frontal attack on his forces or try to bypass him and raid one of the cities under his protection. Would they loot his stores in a quiet attack under cover of the frequent dust storms from the desert, or would they focus all their fury directly on him, perhaps in a night effort to kill him and thus cripple his poorly trained and poorly supplied army?

Like the lonely commanders who had guarded this remote spot for more than a thousand years before him, Commander Wang stood at the edge of an immense empire, waiting and watching for the next onslaught. He knew that, in a truly concerted struggle, his embittered and disheartened men could not stop the Mongols. All they could possibly do was send a warning to the cities and then stand their ground and die one by one, in a vain effort to slow the assault by a few days and allow the city residents to flee or to hastily improvise some protective strategy. Commander Wang and his men were no more than guard dogs whose sole function in life was to bark at the right moment and then die.

At age forty-seven, far from the family he loved and the comforts of the life he craved, Commander Wang waited. To fill his time, he wrote poems, letters, and long reports, hoping he could still be a part of civilized life by sending his words and name back to be read by someone in the city. From these words, we can see the kind of man that he was, or at least the kind of man he wished to portray to the desk-bound bureaucrats and the supernumerary courtiers who read his work back in the Forbidden City.

In an empire where military men ranked barely above the barbarians whom they were supposed to fight, Commander Wang stood out as a misplaced mandarin, a man trained to become an official in the government hierarchy, not in the military. His assignment to oversee the military command along the border came, in part, as a result of the constant mistrust that the imperial court had in its own army of misfits, exiles, and criminals sent to guard the country. Unable to depend upon them, the court, from time to time, sent out civilian administrators to bring them into shape and keep them from joining the enemy. Wang was more of a guard over the guards than a real functionary.

Knowing that the path to advancement in the Ming military ranks derived more from their ability to use language than weapons, the officers on the front cultivated a style of literary military writing, substituting words and metaphors for victory. As another officer had written: “I braved the snow storm to attack…. I ate dry provisions, drank water found along the route, placed myself under the danger of arrow and rock, and caused myself to suffer. I traveled the desert back and forth for three thousand li, and for more than forty days. I went to bed with my armor. At that time I thought that I would not be able to survive.” Fortunately for the author of this field report, despite failing in his military mission, he survived, managed to secure imperial favor, and lived out his old age in leisurely and comfortable retirement. After all, what cultivated official back in the comforts of Beijing could resist such a literary battle report?

But Wang liked being seen as a man of action, and he knew the value of a well-placed dramatic gesture. When he first appeared at court in 1463, he could not stand the long sleeves that covered the hands and impaired movement; so in a potentially serious breach of court etiquette, he cut down his sleeves to allow his hands to move.

Fortunately, the emperor approved of his innovative style, thereby saving him from the ever-vigilant eunuchs and their efforts to keep the young mandarins under control.

When he found himself stationed in the Ordos near the border with the Mongols, his tactical abilities and his military talents became more obvious as he found success in repeated skirmishes with the raiding tribes. In due time, the court relieved him of all his administrative civilian duties so that he could concentrate exclusively on the military ones.

By February 1472, Commander Wang controlled approximately 40,000 soldiers and territory covering three hundred miles of border in the Great Loop of the Yellow River. Yet a detachment of Mongols, probably under the command of Beg-Arlsan, attacked in a raid that decisively defeated Wang’s poorly trained army. After the defeat, the court in Beijing summoned Commander Wang to the capital for a high-level discussion of how to deal with the Mongol threat in the Great Loop. They wanted the tribes pushed entirely from the Ordos area and forced north of the Yellow River.

At the meeting, Wang became trapped between the demands of his superiors and the reality of the troops and resources at his disposal. Commander Wang knew clearly that to defeat the Mongols, he needed an army of 150,000—at least three and possibly four times the size of the one that he had. Yet it would be difficult to supply such a large army in an inhospitable and infertile frontier zone.

Wang devised a new strategy. He lacked the soldiers to defend the border he had, and he lacked the soldiers to pursue the Mongols, defeat them, and expel them from the Great Loop. It was his tactical ability, however, that his superiors had counted on when they placed him in charge. He could find a way when they had not.

His chance came in the autumn of 1473, when Beg-Arslan launched the surprise attack on Ningxia to the south. Commander Wang knew he could not catch up with the Mongols, since by the time he arrived at one ravaged city, the invaders would already be looting another. However, he had decided that if he could not defeat them on the battlefield, he would strike at their civilian camp, where the raiding warriors had left their families and animals in presumed security. If he could not force the Mongol army out of China, he knew how to make them want to leave.

Commander Wang sent out reconnaissance missions into the deserts of the Great Loop. In October he received word that his spies had located Beg-Arslan’s Mongol base camp where the army had left their families near the Red Salt Lake.

From their perceived safety by the lake, the families could wait out the winter while their men raided one settlement after another and sent back the looted goods to the encampment. Late in the winter, while the Yellow River remained firmly frozen, the army would return across the ice into safe territory, where they could graze their animals and tend their flocks during the spring and summer before returning the following fall to resume the cycle of winter raids.

Knowing that the Mongols did not expect him to mount more than a token defense, Commander Wang abandoned the prior policy of waiting passively; he set out after the civilian camp. Wang Yue headed out with ten units of 1,000 cavalrymen in each. They marched some sixty miles in two days and nights, and when they neared the camp, the ten military units divided into two large pincers, surrounding the civilians. An effective strategy used by Ming forces in earlier fights with the Mongols involved trapping them along a river or lake that prevented their fleeing. Unable to swim, the Mongols could either die by drowning or by slaughter at the hands of the attackers.

The camp probably had the protection of a small guard, but Mongols depended less on military strength in such cases than on the ability of women, children, and animals to flee quickly. Normally, the Mongol guard set up stations some distance from the camp, and from this advance position they could see the dust of the approaching army, hear it, or simply feel the vibrations in the ground long before it came into the range of ears or eyes. Once alarmed, one of the sentries took responsibility to race back toward the camp and sound the warning to flee, while the remaining guard then attacked the invaders in a delaying ploy to give the others more time to escape. This October attack by Wang Yue’s army, however, came during one of the windiest times of the year. The autumn winds sometimes whip across northern Asia, and as they cross the Gobi, they pick up huge quantities of sand and dust.

Just such a storm formed as the Chinese crossed the desert toward the Red Salt Lake. Initially, the Chinese warriors became distressed and nervous with the bad luck of the storm in a hostile and alien environment they already feared. One of them, however, suggested that they could use the storm as a cover while they continued their advance. Wang Yue rewarded the man for his ingenuity and bravery, and he ordered his army forward.

They struck the Mongol camp without warning from both sides. According to Wang Yue’s account, his men killed or captured 350 Mongols, mostly women and children. They looted the camp, herded up the animals, and torched the gers. Invigorated by their victory over the civilians, the soldiers sought another opportunity to attack. Wang Yue suspected that the Mongol army would soon receive word of the massacre and race back to find whoever in the camp might have escaped or, if possible, to rescue the captives. He set up an ambush and waited. As suspected, the Mongol soldiers came in pursuit of the Chinese attackers, and Wang Yue’s army fell on them, managing to retake much of their loot but with few casualties on either side. Although it was not an important strategic battle, the Mongols suffered a profound emotional loss.

At least in the short term, attacking the civilian camp produced the desired impact on the Mongols. As Wang proudly reported, “When the unfortunate Mongols learned of the massacre of their wives and children they fled with tears in their eyes and for a long time afterwards did not show up in Ho-t’ao.”

The few Mongols who managed to escape fled the area, and Beg-Arslan was forced to retreat with his Mongol warriors from the Great Loop; they crossed back across the Yellow River and temporarily disappeared back into the unknown wastes from whence they came. The defeat of the Mongols and the massacre in the Ordos achieved the Ming court’s short-term goal of driving the Mongols back north of the Yellow River, but it did not extinguish the Mongol desire and determination to take and reoccupy their former territory. The retaking of the pasturelands south of Gobi became the primary objective of the Mongols under Beg-Arslan, and control of the Ordos ranked as the most important objective toward that goal. Like a wolf retreating into the brush or finding a cave to lick its wounds, the Mongols had left, but they certainly would return.

In the meantime, Commander Wang had become a hero, and a triumphant excitement surged through the court in the Forbidden City. He had achieved the first Chinese rout of the Mongols since Esen’s military capture of the emperor in 1449. Rather than detracting from the conquest, the clever ruse by which Wang had won the victory only added to his credit, since it cost so little money and was accomplished with so few troops. Commander Wang had fulfilled his superiors’ hopes for him when they had counted on his tactical cleverness to drive out the Mongols.

The Chinese military reports categorized the Mongol casualties together according to age and sex but gave no names or individual information. By contrast, the Mongol chronicles, as they almost always did with a horrendous or shameful loss, ignored the massacre with no mention at all. The Mongols never record the names of the fallen in cases such as these.

The Ming court lacked the will or the means to follow up on the victory in the desert. The Mongols withdrew, and the Chinese army could have retaken and occupied the entire Ordos. They could have crossed the Yellow River and driven the Mongols back up onto the Mongolian Plateau and north of the Gobi. Instead, the Ming forces abandoned offensive strategies and turned to the older defensive mode of rebuilding the wall.

For Manduhai Khatun, the encouraging news of the Chinese victory offered only limited grounds for optimism. The Ming commander had stopped the advance of Beg-Arslan and Ismayil, but he had not killed them. The civilian massacre at Red Salt Lake forced the Mongol army farther back, but Beg-Arslan had lost few soldiers. In some ways he now posed a greater threat to Manduhai than before the defeat.

Despite the Chinese victory, the Ming court recognized that the expulsion of the Mongols from the Ordos would offer no more than a temporary abatement of the struggle. Knowing the reprieve would probably be brief, the Ming officials needed to make a long-term decision.

Lacking an alternative plan of action for a permanent solution, the central government finally acquiesced to Yu’s request to build a wall. Rather than wait for the autumn, both Wang and Yu were ordered to begin building different parts of it simultaneously. Yu began immediately in the spring of 1474 with a building corps of forty thousand men. Despite the uncertainty about the stability of structures erected along the highest ridges, Yu built the wall precisely as he had proposed it, stretching out approximately 600 miles or 1,770 li. The total cost exceeded a million taels of silver, more than 1.7 million ounces. The final wall consisted of approximately eight hundred connected units of forts and beacon or sentry towers. It had a tower or other fortification about every three-quarters of a mile along the connecting wall.

Wang built his part of the wall farther to the west, and it stretched 387 li, or 125 miles. Together, however, the two walls created an impressive barrier. Although the two commanders saw these fortifications as temporary measures until the Mongols could be pacified and peace imposed, they had initiated a major change in Ming military policy that would take more than a century to unfold. For the time being, however, the long-term effectiveness remained difficult to ascertain.

As the wall neared completion, both men received transfers. In 1474 Wang Yue was called to work in Beijing, and in the following year Yu Zijun received a new assignment and remained in public service almost until his death in 1489. During this time, he continued the building of walls and defensive measures for the empire. He applied his engineering skills to the design of only one offensive creation—a large war chariot that could carry ten armed warriors at once. This forerunner of a tank or an armored personnel carrier proved too expensive and unusual, however, and never played a major role in steppe warfare.

The building of the Great Wall posed a problem for Manduhai’s strategy of waiting out the struggle in hopes that the Chinese would crush her rivals. The decision to build it meant that the Ming court had given up hope of chasing down the Mongol warlords. Instead, the court had marked a new defensive line and in effect surrendered everything beyond it to them. The Chinese had defeated Beg-Arslan and driven him away from the border, but Manduhai would have to deal with him without their assistance.

By 1475, when Wang Yue came to serve in the court, the emperor had entered the eleventh year of his reign, and he had not been able to produce a viable heir with Lady Wan or any other woman in his household. He was not yet thirty, but Lady Wan was fifty-five, and it was unlikely she would bear another child.

The court eunuchs working in the palace of the deposed empress, who had flogged Lady Wan in a pique of jealousy ten years earlier, appeared at court with a five-year-old boy. According to the story, as the emperor looked into a mirror one day while a eunuch combed his hair, he sighed in regret that he had no son. The eunuch revealed to the emperor the startling news that he already had a son and that he lived hidden in the palace of his first wife, the disgraced Empress Wu.

Since the emperor apparently had not had conjugal relations with the former empress, the eunuchs claimed that the boy had been born to one of her attendants, a woman captured from the Yao nation in the south in 1467. Despite the unusual circumstances, the emperor needed a successor, and he took the boy to Lady Wan. They accepted the boy and officially installed him as imperial heir. The boy’s birth mother then died under unexplained circumstances. Suspicion for the death fell on Lady Wan, but the deed may have just as easily been done by supporters of the old empress, who hoped to control the boy and thus have a return route to influence and power in the court.

Lady Wan and her cadre of eunuchs worked hard to stimulate the sexual interests of the emperor so that he might father more children. The chief eunuch in charge of the central stores scoured the country for stimulants, and in the process he acquired vast amounts of pearls, which were thought to have special reproductive powers. In his capacity as the chief publisher of the empire, he gathered pornography and sexual manuals and had them reproduced in elegant volumes meant to enlighten and motivate the emperor. Lady Wan brought in magicians, Taoist and Buddhist monks, and a diversity of charlatans to perform magical rites to help him. Happily for the court, the emperor fathered seventeen children with five women in a little more than a decade.

He continued to live primarily with Lady Wan, who increasingly spent her time supervising financial issues and managing the office of eunuchs, since they controlled the commerce of the empire. Through them, she oversaw most of the major transactions related to tribute and trade, while ensuring that the imperial monopoly over commodities such as salt was maintained. Just as she served as de facto “wife of the emperor,” she also became the virtual chief financial officer of the empire.

Too many immediate issues and scandals distracted the Ming officials for them to focus on the long-term concern of Mongols at the border. The problem seemed taken care of. They had repulsed Beg-Arslan’s invasion, and now they were building the wall to keep him out. The expenses posed a problem, but they proved a much less interesting topic than the political and sexual dramas of the court.

Manduhai had not been waiting idly behind the Gobi. She had begun creating alliances with some of the southern Mongols in preparation for her eventual move to unite the two parts of the country. To control the south up to the Great Wall, she needed somehow to dispose of both Beg-Arslan and Ismayil, preferably by killing them, or at least chasing them from the area. Rather than fighting both at once, it would be easier to deal with them one at a time. It is not clear if she managed to lure Ismayil into a temporary alliance or if she merely took advantage of a dispute with Beg-Arslan. No matter what the cause, she prepared to move against Beg-Arslan at a time when Ismayil was conspicuously absent.

One of the largest factions of Mongols living along the Chinese border was the conglomerate of old clans and lineages known as the Three Guards. These were Mongols who stayed behind when the Mongol royal court fled north in 1368, and as implied in their name, they had declared loyalty to the Ming Dynasty and worked as border guards. After eighty years of loyal service, they had rebelled and joined Esen about thirty years earlier, just around the time of Manduhai’s birth in 1448. Since Esen’s death they had operated as free agents, following first one and then another leader while raiding and extorting the Chinese when they could and temporarily serving them when profitable.

The son of one of the main leaders of the Three Guards married one of the two Borijin women whom Manduhai called daughter and who had been closely related to her first husband, Manduul, possibly as daughters or nieces. The other daughter had married Beg-Arslan, but she disappeared after helping the Golden Prince escape. Regardless of whether Manduhai arranged this marriage tie with the Three Guards or not, she took advantage of the relationship. As Beg-Arslan retreated to the west, he found himself geographically farther away from the Three Guards, who were based in the east. Manduhai made her alliance and prepared to deal with Beg-Arslan.

The Mongol chronicles commonly employed personal stories to summarize large-scale events. Thus, the desertion of the Three Guards from Beg-Arslan was presented in terms of a private grudge rather than in political terms. Beg-Arslan fell because of his cruelty and the vengeance it evoked.

According to the story, the Three Guards’ break with Beg-Arslan occurred after a visit from their leader, the same one whose son was married to Manduhai’s so-called daughter. The commander called at Beg-Arslan’s ger one day just as Beg-Arslan was sipping from a bowl of butter soup that he had just cooled. A large pot of the soup boiled on the fire, and smelling the rich aroma of the soup, the visiting commander said that his mouth was “thirsty for its tastiness,” and he asked for some.

Beg-Arslan set aside the bowl of cool soup and, without the visitor noticing, maliciously poured boiling soup into another bowl, which he handed to the visitor. Having just seen Beg-Arslan gulping from the bowl without difficulty and not realizing the switch in bowls, the thirsty visitor eagerly took a large mouthful of the nearly boiling, greasy liquid.

Mongols pride themselves on their ability to abide both heat and cold; dropping or refusing food as too hot shows unmanly weakness. Spitting food out is an unforgivable insult. According to Carpini’s report on his visit to the Mongol court in the thirteenth century, “If a piece of food is given to anyone and he cannot eat it and he spits it out of his mouth, a hole is made beneath the tent and he is drawn out through the hole and killed without mercy.”

The visiting commander thought to himself: “If I swallow the soup, my heart will burn. If I spit it out I will be shamed.” So he pretended that nothing untoward had happened. He held the burning soup in his mouth to let it cool, and in so doing, “the skin of his palate came away and fell off.”

The commander vowed silently: “Until I die I shall never forget this hate. One day I shall think of it.”

The story of Beg-Arslan’s cruel disrespect for the commander circulated amid the rumors and stories of the steppe. The Three Guards joined Manduhai Khatun and Dayan Khan, and their first action was to move into the vacuum left by Beg-Arslan’s rout by invading the Ordos. With their allies in control of the Ordos, Manduhai and Dayan Khan at last had the base that they needed south of the Mongolian Plateau, from which they could launch an open attack against Beg-Arslan. Manduhai prepared for Dayan Khan to lead the expedition.

In 1479, when Dayan Khan was about fifteen or sixteen, Manduhai sent him out on his first command. Dayan Khan took “the Chakhar and the Tumed [clans], and assembled them to set out against Beg-Arslan.”

He first sent a spy out west to locate Beg-Arslan. The man chosen was from the same clan as the Three Guards commander who had been burned. The spy approached the ger of Beg-Arslan under the pretext of being sick and needing medicine. He said to Beg-Arslan: “Alas! When this poor body of mine is peaceful, there is an enemy; when it is in good health, there is sickness.” Beg-Arslan poured some alcohol in a small silver dish and gave it to him to drink.

The visitor drank it, and then in remembrance of the earlier episode when his kinsman’s palate was burned, the spy put the silver dish inside his deel. “This is a souvenir of my drinking,” he was quoted as saying, and he probably wanted to bring the stolen trophy as evidence that he had located the right person.

After the man left, Beg-Arslan became suspicious and consulted an oracle, but received an ambiguous response that left him as uncertain as before. Nevertheless, the lack of a clearly good sign from the oracle was cause enough to call for his army to gather. Because the land was dry and supported minimal vegetation, the army had been spread out over a large area, and they did not arrive in time to mount a defense for Beg-Arslan.

When he saw the dust of Dayan Khan’s approaching army, Beg-Arslan raced to his horses and fled with a handful of his guards. Dayan Khan’s soldiers saw him and pursued him. But before the Mongols could overtake Beg-Arslan, he removed his helmet and put it on one of his men in an effort to deceive the attackers, while he fled in the opposite direction from his men.

The Mongol force quickly caught the man in Beg-Arslan’s helmet, but to save himself he pointed out the direction in which Beg-Arslan had fled. “They caught up with Beg-Arslan and seized him,” according to the Altan Tobci, “and killed him at the depression of the Kiljir.” With finality, the chronicler recorded: “It is said that salt grew at the place where he was killed.”

The nomads of the steppe had an ancient tale of the wolf and a boy. The story told of a female wolf finding a human baby boy whose feet had been cut off and who had been abandoned on the steppe to die. The mother wolf nursed the boy back to health, protected him, and reared him. When the boy grew older, there was no one else to love him, so he mated with the wolf. From their offspring descended all the Turkic tribes that spread out from Mongolia. From them arose all the notable Turkic nations of history.

Dayan Khan had been born when his father, Bayan Mongke, was fourteen, but Dayan Khan passed his fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth years without an active marital relationship. Manduhai had either married or, more likely, promised to marry him when she made him khan. The Mongols did not usually make a distinction between engagement and marriage. A betrothed couple was referred to as husband and wife, but the marriage was not official until the groom-to-be completed his bride service. While exempt from the formal bride service, in a sense Dayan Khan was performing it by proving himself capable to fulfill his duties as Great Khan.

Around the year 1480, Dayan Khan and Manduhai took the final step into marriage and began to live together as husband and wife. At this time he was approximately seventeen years old, and she was thirty-three. They had already been together for ten years in a formal relationship as intended spouses. Of course, no mention survives to say when or how their intimate relationship began. Unlike some societies that crush together the marriage and sexual union, even forcing both events into the same day or within a few hours of each other, the Mongols had no such artificial scheduling. Boys and girls became engaged or married as part of a social union, but their physical intimacy remained entirely private and up to their own desire and discretion.

In the many marriages where the wife was older, she led the way with her own sense of timing and appropriateness. Certainly, in the case of Manduhai and Dayan Khan, she most likely set the agenda. Because the wives are biologically more mature than their husbands, they are often ready to bear children as soon as the husband passes through puberty.

Dayan Khan did not become a father until he was nineteen years old; probably most of the young warriors of his age were already fathers by this time. By comparison, the relationship between Dayan Khan and Manduhai, no matter when it began, seemed less hurried and somewhat more mature. In 1482, two years after their marital union, the couple produced twin boys. Over the next twelve years, Manduhai gave birth to eight children, including three sets of twins.

The Mongol mother did not normally take to bed for delivery or recovery, and she was expected to get up to care for the newborn child immediately. A nomadic people, who need to move constantly in search of water and grass for the animals or in flight from human or animal predators, could not afford to allow any members of the community, even a new mother, to remain immobile in bed for long. If Manduhai’s delivery followed common procedure, then immediately after birth the mother scrubbed the infant’s body with wool to clean it.

As she cleaned the baby, the mother usually examined the body carefully, searching for blemishes of the skin or irregularities beneath it. She also looked for the telltale sign that marked all children of the Mongol and Turkic tribes, the blue spot. The spot, which could easily be mistaken for a large bruise by someone unfamiliar with it, appeared clearly at the base of the spine, just at the top of the crack between the buttocks, and after a few years it faded away. For the Mongols, the spot had a nearly sacred significance that marked them clearly and distinguished them from other people. It may have been caused by the blood vessels showing through the very white skin on a place in the body with little fat to obscure the vessels; or perhaps, as they were taught, the Blue Spot marked them as the children of the Eternal Blue Sky. From long interaction with other peoples, the Mongols and Turkic tribes had taken this mark on the child as a distinctive separation that made them special as the Blue Spot People.

Once she cleaned the newborn baby, the mother typically swaddled it tightly in a sheep’s fleece. Most babies spent the first year of life packed snugly into the fleece that, in turn, fit into a portable cradle made of bark, twigs, or leather that fit snugly under the mother’s arm when she needed to go outside the ger. As the child grew a little older, he or she could ride on the saddle in front of the mother and father, carefully protected by the embrace of their two arms and legs. For longer trips, such as moving camp, the parents needed both arms for other tasks, and the young children would be put in a small basket strapped to the side of a camel or horse, as Manduhai had once transported Dayan Khan.

Just as the selection of a reign title for her husband showed Manduhai’s clear political agenda, the names of her children made it even clearer, proclaiming her agenda loudly. She named each of her sons Bolod, “Steel.” The first two were Toro Bolod and Ulus Bolod, meaning “Steel Government” and “Steel Nation.”

Manduhai and Dayan Khan now controlled all the Mongols and Oirat north of the Gobi, and south of the Gobi they had the alliance of the eastern and central clans. By 1483, Ismayil had been driven all the way to the Hami oasis at the farthest edge of the Mongol territory, almost where it turns into uninhabitable desert. With his old ally and rival Beg-Arslan removed, he was the undisputed leader of the ragtag army left behind, and at any moment he might choose to attack again. He certainly would not sit idly at Hami pursuing the life of a melon farmer or winemaker. If the Mongols showed any sign of weakness or distraction, he would return.

Ismayil’s presence at Hami served as a constant alternative to the rule of Manduhai and Dayan Khan. It would be hard for them to assert much authority over the southern tribes if they faced the constant threat that those tribes might bolt to Ismayil. He had to be removed.

Of course, Dayan Khan had a much deeper and more powerful reason to go after Ismayil. After being kidnapped by Ismayil nearly twenty years earlier, Dayan Khan’s mother, Siker, was still with him. Hami was located too far across a barren strip between the Gobi and the sand desert to send a large army after Ismayil. There simply would not be enough grass for the animals to get there and return safely. But sometime around 1484, Manduhai and Dayan Khan assembled a select group of men with the mission to bring back Dayan Khan’s mother and to kill or capture Ismayil.

Heretofore Dayan Khan had not expressed much interest in finding his missing mother, but something in him was changing. Now that he was fully grown and had become a father, some new longing awoke in him to connect again with his original family that had been shattered so soon after his birth.

13

Her Jade Realm Restored

MOST OF THE MEN CHOSEN FOR THE RAID AGAINST Ismayil came from Manduhai’s Choros clan. She trusted them, and they best knew the area that had once been ruled by her father. Because of the difficulty of fielding and supplying an army over vast stretches of desert, Manduhai sent out a small, but highly skilled, detachment that probably consisted of between 200 and 250 men. A man named Togochi Sigusi commanded the raiding party and had 22 experienced officers with him; each of them probably led a squad of about 10 men.

Ismayil lived out in the open fresh air of the desert in a nomad’s camp of gers and horses, where a man could breathe free and also freely flee if needed. The circumstances revealed in the chronicles suggest that he may have lost much of his support. Though he once ruled over vast areas, Ismayil had now been forced to flee to the distant oasis of Hami, which he did not actually control so much as harass its inhabitants. The desert beyond the oases certainly could not support a large army. Therefore Ismayil’s troops had been sent elsewhere at the time, or they had deserted him. He apparently retained so few followers that he no longer had sufficient men to post an adequate guard.

The chronicler of the Altan Tobci described how, well before anyone could hear their hoofbeats, a servant woman in the ger of Ismayil sensed the vibrations in the ground made by the approaching horsemen. “Why is the ground shaking?” she called out in panic, instinctively bolting from the ger and running to the hitching post, where several horses always stood ready.

She untied a horse for Ismayil to ride out and investigate the noise. Ismayil set out alone, perhaps suspecting these might be a returning party of some of the men who had deserted him or someone on a trading mission. Although he was seemingly concerned, there is no mention of real anxiety, and he apparently made no effort to flee.

Ismayil approached the Mongol detachment. The leader, Togochi Sigusi, had an arrow ready, but he waited until he could see clearly enough to determine the rider’s identity as Ismayil. When Ismayil came within firing distance and apparently did not suspect any harm, Togochi Sigusi raised the bow, aimed at Ismayil, and released the arrow. He was an experienced marksman who judged the shot well. The first arrow found its mark, and Ismayil Taishi fell dead from his horse onto the harsh desert ground.

His death came more as a final settling of scores than as a sustained struggle between adversaries. In a certain way, the killing in the desert paralleled the killing of the Golden Prince in the Gobi.

Killing Ismayil accomplished one of the two major goals of the raid; the other was to bring back Dayan Khan’s mother. The party raced to the camp before the people there could suspect the fate of Ismayil and flee. The men would take everything from the camp in a clear demonstration that not only had Ismayil been killed, but his whole property and power base had been seized and distributed by the Mongol victors.

Togochi Sigusi found the mother, Siker. She had not attempted to flee but sat down inside her ger, unwilling to fight, yet refusing to be rescued. In the intervening two decades, Siker had not only accepted Ismayil as her husband, she had raised two new sons, Babutai and Burnai, with him as well. She had lost her first son, Dayan Khan, but she did not want to lose these two.

She had surely expected that this day would eventually come. Perhaps she sometimes longed for it and sometimes feared it. Now that the would-be rescuers had arrived, she was not happy to see them. She seemed to hope that if she refused to cooperate, they would leave her.

Togochi Sigusi ordered Siker out of her ger, but she began crying. He repeated the command, telling her to mount a horse and follow him, but she obstinately refused. Her stubbornness angered him, and yet he seemed to feel some compassion for her.

As a soldier loyal to her first husband and to her still living son, he asked her if the Golden Prince had been mean to her, because he could not understand why else she would be crying instead of celebrating her liberation from the man who murdered her husband. “Was your husband the jinong bad?” he asked her.

She did not answer.

He reminded her of her loyalty to her son and of what an important man he had become. “Is your son the Great Khan of no importance to you?” he asked. “Do you hold your people … in such contempt?”

Still she would not reply. She seemed to have no words and quite possibly did not know herself which of the many emotions she should be feeling at that moment.

Her continued silence and refusal to obey or cooperate increasingly irritated Togochi Sigusi. “Why are you weeping for another man?” he demanded, “for this traitor, our enemy Ismayil?”

Togochi Sigusi pulled out his sword and threatened her with it. He would not harm her. No matter how she frustrated or angered him, she was still the birth mother of the Great Khan, and he had been sent on the assignment to rescue her. He was determined to fulfill that mission even if she did not want to cooperate.

When Siker still refused to answer or obey, the exasperated officer ordered his men to seize her and forcefully mount her on a horse to be taken away as a captive. He ordered everyone in the camp rounded up and taken prisoner, including Siker’s two sons and a young woman, either an older daughter of Ismayil or a younger wife. Later, in appreciation of his successful raid, Togochi Sigusi received her as his wife.

Upon his return, Togochi Sigusi announced to the khan, “I have killed the one who was envious of you. I have subdued the one who hated you.”

He presented Dayan Khan to his mother, a woman of whom the Khan had no memory and whom he had not seen in twenty years. No chronicle mentions what she said to him—or he to her—but she was by no means happy to see him.

The convoluted kinship, political, and emotional lines between them were inordinately complex, and no one had a precedent by which to act. Even if Siker was the birth mother to Dayan Khan, Manduhai had raised him and married him. There was no more of a place for Siker in the present or the future of her son than there had been in the past.

The failed effort to reconcile with Dayan Khan’s mother left him and Manduhai where they had always been, emotionally alone. They remained totally dependent on each other and bereft of relatives who might help them.

Around the time of Ismayil’s defeat, and only two years after the birth of her first two sons, Manduhai gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Toroltu—a name similar to Toro, meaning “State” or “Government,” but which had the more specific meaning of giving life or birth and was part of the word for humanity. Over the next decade Manduhai had three additional pregnancies, resulting in five sons. Although the chronicles disagree as to precisely which were twins, they generally agree on the names and birth order. After Toroltu’s birth, Manduhai had two boys, Barsu Bolod, meaning “Steel Tiger,” and Arsu Bolod, “Steel Lion.” Soon after came Alju Bolod and Ochir Bolod, followed by the final single birth of Ara Bolod.

After the birth of two sons, Manduhai or Dayan Khan could straightforwardly have terminated their relationship, or if they had been so inclined, disposed of each other. With such heirs, Manduhai could have ruled as regent without sharing power. Had she wished to live with Une-Bolod for example, she could easily have rid herself of her husband and taken whomever she wished.

As he grew older, Dayan Khan also had the option to replace Manduhai with another woman; he could simply have left her with her retainers in some distant part of the country, or if he feared what she might do under those circumstances, he could easily have arranged her death. Many rising young soldiers would be anxious to curry favor with the monarch by committing such an act, by testifying against her in a trial, or by assisting in any one of a dozen other methods to dispose of an unwanted queen. Such killings of khans and khatuns had occurred routinely among the Mongols in the generations since the successful attacks on Genghis Khan’s daughters. Despite such opportunities to each be rid of the other and have a different life, Manduhai and Dayan Khan stayed together willingly and seemingly with great affection. They had a solid political and marital union.

As the sons grew older, Manduhai sent them to live with allies in different tribes. In this way, they became acquainted with different parts of the country in preparation for their role as rulers. At the same time, each son provided Manduhai with information about the tribe where he lived and served as her link to the local population. Manduhai began using her sons as “intercessors” in much the way that Genghis Khan had used his daughters.

The Chinese had left the Mongols to fight among themselves and scarcely noticed the comings and goings of the barbarians. The court had never been a vibrant place, but with the aging of Lady Wan and her increasing attention on keeping the emperor comfortable while making her formerly impoverished relatives rich, life in the court grew stagnant and stale.

Being pregnant, giving birth, and raising children did not initially slow Manduhai’s military campaigns. She and Dayan Khan continued to live the life of nomadic warriors. Like Genghis Khan, Manduhai recognized that a nation conquered on horseback had to be ruled from horseback. Genghis Khan had fought and lived in the field, but his sons and grandsons had settled down to build cities, and eventually their descendants had lost all that Genghis Khan had acquired for them.

The couple crisscrossed the land fighting border skirmishes, raiding into China, trading along the Silk Route, putting down revolts, and imposing a stronger centralized rule than Mongolia had enjoyed in the intervening centuries since Genghis Khan’s death. The combination of fighting and giving birth became ever more strenuous for Manduhai. She was forty years old when she became pregnant for the fourth time, with what turned out to be her final set of twins, and when she entered into what would be almost her final battle.

Although advanced in her pregnancy, Manduhai insisted on leading her troops into battle, just as she had so often done over the past fifteen years. In a scene reminiscent of her helmet falling from her head in the middle of battle during her first campaign against the Oirat, Manduhai unexpectedly lurched in her saddle. She then swiveled awkwardly and plunged to the ground, where she lay in a twisted heap. Had she been wounded, fainted, gone into labor, or simply fallen? Was she alive or dead?

The sudden fall of the highest commander on the battlefield presents a shocking spectacle for the soldiers, and such a misfortune can easily change the outcome of an engagement by disrupting the chain of command and confusing the warriors, as well as disheartening them at a crucial moment in their struggle. If seen by the enemy, the fall will almost certainly encourage them and reinvigorate their fighting.

Such an event can also provide an unexpected opportunity for potential rivals within the commander’s army, giving them an opening into which they might rush forward and seize control. The year 1488 was the Year of the Earth Monkey, a capricious creature in whose era earthshaking events like this could be expected.

Horse-herding nomads, who spent their lives in the saddle, understood well that such a fall from a horse not only could result in serious damage, paralysis, or death, it carried extra symbolic significance. For a khan or other leader, the horse can symbolize the nation, and control of the horse parallels control of the state; a rider who cannot master a horse certainly cannot master a tribe or nation of unruly people. Thus Manduhai’s fall from the horse held a deeper and more sinister meaning. The death of Genghis Khan himself had been preceded only a short time earlier by a fall from his horse. Through the literate history of Mongolia, chroniclers and observers had recorded the falls of khans from horses with more avid precision than their marriages, battles, or other events to which sedentary people might attribute greater importance.

For Manduhai, the fall occurred not only at an unfortunate moment in the battle, but at a potentially devastating moment in her life. After almost two decades of struggle, she had nearly, but not yet, achieved the complete reunification of all the steppe tribes that had followed Genghis Khan. Her goal loomed tantalizingly close as she led her troops into battle that day, but this one fall could jeopardize all that she had struggled to achieve.

Manduhai no longer displayed the physical strength or emotional stamina that she had had as a younger woman. She had fought many battles on and off the field of war; she had struggled against seemingly impossible odds to unite and rule the Mongol nation. It would seem only logical that at this stage in her life, even her most ardent followers might begin to waiver in their support or to wonder how much longer her destiny would allow her to rule and to lead.

Her husband, the Great Khan, who was still in his early twenties, lacked the necessary military and leadership experience, though he had succeeded against Beg-Arslan, and he had not shown the aptitude for command needed to control the vigorous and independent Mongol tribes. He had also shown no sign of wishing to oppose his wife or to contest her leadership. Instead, he remained doggedly faithful to her, just like the thousands of men who served under her command.

If the fall incapacitated Manduhai for even a few hours, one of her powerful or popular generals might step forward to replace her. At this moment, as she lay sprawled on the battlefield, her empire could easily be dismembered, or simply crumble. All an ambitious new commander need do, if he had the backing of even a small but dedicated band of warriors, was to grab one of her young sons, declare the child to be the new ruler, and exercise power as a self-declared regent.

At this moment, four of her closest warriors quickly raced around her like a protective wall. This maneuver came habitually to the warriors from years of training in both hunting and fighting. The protective wall that they formed on their hunts served to push the game ahead of them from an expansive area into a smaller, contained area where the hunters could more easily shoot it. In fighting, the same formation became a defensive maneuver when used to shield someone from the enemy like mares protecting their foals. Only once the protective wall had been put in place with the now stationary men did another jump from his horse to pull Manduhai up. Behind the human wall, the soldiers hoisted her onto another horse and escorted the injured queen, still surrounded by the now moving wall of men, from the field.

Not only did her men save Manduhai’s life, they preserved her rule without anyone making a treasonous move or showing any inclination other than following her and fighting for her. The loyalty of her men had been tested, and the effectiveness and power of her years of military training and leadership had proved itself.

The chroniclers who recorded the event carefully transcribed the name of each man who helped her in this moment of crisis, as well as a description of the yellow horse that took her to safety. More important than the names of the men, the chronicle also recorded the tribe and clan of each of them. Each man came from a different tribe, and none from Manduhai’s tribe or that of her husband. The chroniclers showed clearly that the queen not only had survived the fall, she had created a fast and strong loyalty among a wide range of steppe tribes. For the first time since the collapse of the empire of Genghis Khan, she had managed to unite the tribes into a single, reconstituted nation.

Manduhai’s loyal warriors fought on to victory that day, and one month later she delivered twin sons, whom she named Ochir Bolod and Alju Bolod. They, too, would one day share in the power accumulated on the battlefield by their mother, as she gave them vast stretches of land to command in the east. Each of the men who helped to protect and rescue her that day received recognition and titles for what they had done.

In Beijing’s Forbidden City on February 3, 1487, at the approximate age of fifty-seven, Lady Wan died. She had been the emperor’s sole comfort and the one true love of his life, and he was not able to survive the loss. Seven months later, on September 9, 1487, he followed her into death. He was thirty-nine years old.

The defeat of Ismayil, followed closely by the death of the Ming emperor, opened a new opportunity for improved relations and new trade between the Mongols and China. Manduhai Khatun and Dayan Khan sent a trade delegation to Beijing in 1488, and with it they sent a letter written in Mongolian in which Dayan Khan asserted clearly his identity as the Great Khan of the Yuan. Had it been written in Chinese, the Ming probably could not have tolerated the title claimed by Dayan Khan, but being written in Mongolian made it more tolerable, or at least more easily overlooked. With some complaining about the inelegance of the Mongolian writing, the Ming officials accepted it and permitted the trade.

The new diplomacy of that year showed some flexibility on both sides and an indication that the Mongolian and Chinese governments would tolerate each other. Without completely altering their official stances and ideology, the Mongols tacitly acknowledged that they no longer ruled China and had no plans to do so again, while the Chinese officials recognized that that they did not control the Mongols beyond the Great Wall. Future relations would still be marred by raids and skirmishes, but the two countries were beginning to move toward a mutually acceptable form of commercial and diplomatic relations.

Manduhai had finished the fighting part of her career, but she had not yet completed her mission. As Genghis Khan taught, “The good of anything is in finishing it.” He had accomplished far more than Manduhai, but the arrogant greed of his sons and grandsons had destroyed his lifetime of work. Manduhai concentrated the remainder of her life in protecting what she had accomplished and making certain that the nation could sustain itself after her departure. With the same assiduous devotion she had applied to the battlefield and the unification of the Mongol nation, Manduhai and Dayan Khan now set to the reorganization of the Mongol government and its protection in the future.

When Genghis Khan took over the leadership of his small Mongol tribe, he was installed as khan. After fighting to unite the tribes for two decades, he called the khuriltai of 1206 to reorganize the government and to be recognized as the ruler of all the tribes. In the same way, when Manduhai installed Batu Mongke as Dayan Khan when he was seven years old, they ruled only a very small group. After nearly three decades of struggle to unite the country and to raise a family, they were ready to formally install him as khan over the entire nation.

In 1206, most of Genghis Khan’s subjects had lived north of the Gobi, but by 1500, the majority of the Mongols lived south of the Gobi. The royal couple decided that the appropriate place to re-create the united Mongol nation would be in the south, which was also the land where Manduhai had grown up prior to being sent north to marry Manduul Khan. Genghis Khan’s death at the edge of the Ordos also made it a sacred place associated with his memory.

Manduhai and Dayan Khan came south to strengthen their hold on the area and possibly to move their capital there. Sometime in the previous fifty years, the collection of gers mounted on carts and known as the Shrine of Genghis Khan had been brought south of the Gobi for the first time since he had died nearly three hundred years earlier. The dual monarchs’ control of the shrine together with the sulde, the banner of Genghis Khan, illustrated to everyone that they had attained the blessings of both Genghis Khan and the Eternal Sky.

Dayan Khan had not been installed in front of the Genghis Khan shrine; Manduhai had used the Shrine of the First Queen instead. Now in the 1490s, at the height of their power, Manduhai and Dayan Khan wanted to reinstitute their Mongol nation in a manner similar to the way Genghis Khan had created it in 1206. Manduhai Khatun and Dayan Khan planned to reorganize the clans, install their sons in offices over them, and enthrone Dayan Khan for a second time, recognizing that he now ruled all the tribes.

The ceremony would not merely be a renewal of Dayan Khan’s office but, more important, a renewal of the Mongol nation. Since the episode of the Great Khan with the rabbit in 1399, the Mongol khans had not been the true rulers of the country. Now, nearly a century later, the power of the lineage of Genghis Khan was being restored.

In preparation, the monarchs brought gifts for the shrine, including new lamps and large incense holders. Cattle and sheep were assembled for sacrifice in sets of nine before the sulde of Genghis Khan. Horsemen dressed in all white, riding white horses, and horsemen dressed in all black riding black horses formed an honor guard. Drummers beat on giant kettle drums, and heralds sounded the deep-throated roar of their large, five-foot-long brass horns. Here the monarchs proclaimed the new nation amid solemn ceremonies, banquets, and the three essential Mongolian games of horse racing, archery, and wrestling.

In long, alliterative recitations, the people learned again about their Mongol history. Genghis Khan was held up as the model for everyone: “Protecting those who were of peaceful conduct, exterminating those who were of violent manners, he was glorified as fortunate emperor.”

The sayings and words of Genghis Khan were recalled to his people, reminding the monarchs and their subjects of their duties: “It is necessary to accept hard and inconvenient advice, to punish bad people with merciless law, to protect the numerous subjects with kindness, to strive after a good name which is honored everywhere.”

The people brought gifts of fermented mare’s milk, meat, dried dairy products, and fruits to the shrine, which after being presented were then consumed by the participants in a great banquet. The crisp, fresh smell of burning juniper incense hung like a cloud over the people and their gifts. As part of each official event, singers and musicians performed songs of praise and the reverential wailing of the long song. After the feasts and the heavy drinking, songs were sung with more secular themes honoring fast horses and true love.

To consolidate power within their family, Manduhai and Dayan Khan abolished many of the old titles of the Yuan era, including chingsang and taishi, which had been given to men outside the royal family. For most of the prior century, the warlords who had occupied those positions had exercised the real power over the Mongol government and had held the so-called Great Khans as puppets, at best, and as prisoners when they wished. Ismayil would be the last foreign regent to control the Mongol khans. Henceforth the Borijin clan would hold a near monopoly on all political offices within Mongol territory.

Manduhai and Dayan Khan bestowed awards for bravery, made new marriages, gave out titles, created a new tax system, and presented gold seals to the new officeholders. Their actions deliberately and carefully recalled the deeds of Genghis Khan, but they had decided that, despite restoring the rule of his family, they would not restore exactly the same type of government he had created. In the last three hundred years, the needs had changed, and neither Manduhai nor Dayan Khan had any intention of creating an empire beyond the Mongol steppe.

In an effort to avoid future confrontations of the type that tore apart the family of Genghis Khan in the two generations following his death, Manduhai and Dayan Khan sought to abolish the title khan, save for the one single Great Khan. Genghis Khan permitted his children to use the titles khan and khatun, or “king” and “queen,” but now there would only be one of each: Dayan Khan and Manduhai Khatun. The highest-ranking son would be jinong, “the crown prince,” and according to their plan, he would one day be the only member of the family to take the title khan. All others would be called taiji, meaning “royal lord.” The one daughter would take the title gunj, another term for princess. Manduahai and Dayan Khan had no need for the old title guregen, “imperial son-in-law,” since they had only one daughter; they arranged a strategic marriage for her with a leader of the Khalkh tribe of the eastern Mongols.

Out of respect for the mother of the Great Khan, Dayan Khan and Manduhai gave Siker the title taikhu, “dowager empress.” They thought that, if treated with respect and living in comfort, she might gradually soften her heart toward her son. However, she had grown up as a common herding girl in the southern Gobi and had lived a nomadic life of raiding. Now the life of an empress mother seemed empty to her, and she died soon thereafter.

Manduhai and Dayan Khan confronted the same problem that had created so many difficulties for Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan found that no matter how many times he fought and conquered tribes such as the Tatars, they would soon be back at war again. No permanent peace seemed possible, and alliances held only so long as the allies maintained the mood to be at peace with one another. Just as Genghis Khan had finally decided to install his daughters and sons as the heads of the various vassal nations of the empire, Manduhai and Dayan Khan reorganized all the tribes by killing or otherwise removing the enemy leaders and installing their own sons in power.

Rather than enslave or exile any of the defeated tribes, Manduhai and Dayan Khan used a combination of old and some new structures to create a Mongol nation of two wings—the Left and the Right—each of which was divided into three tribes, or tumen, of ten thousand. Because of this primary feature, the Mongols called this system the Six Tumen, which would come to be used as another name for their country.

The new system of clans and tribes expanded the concept of Mongol to embrace everyone living in the territory, no matter what their former ethnicity. Included were diverse and often antagonistic groups such as the Three Guards along the border with the Ming; the old imperial Ossetian and Kipchak guards from the reign of Khubilai Khan; lingering remnants of the Onggud and Tangut; and some of the Uighurs. The Six Tumen consisted of new geographic-kinship groups. In the east were the Chakhar, Khalkh, and Khorchin, and to the west were the Ordos, Tumed, and Yungshiyebu. Each of these contained a set of otogs, which were something like the old clans but were comparable to an occupational caste or a geographic group as well and constituted the primary social units of allegiance for individuals.

Within the Mongols, there would no longer be a distinction between the competing lineages descended from Genghis Khan’s four sons. Henceforth, they were all part of the Borijin. Other branches of the family descended from Genghis Khan’s brothers were also folded into the main body, with one single exception. The descendants of Khasar, the people of Manduhai’s early general and supporter Une-Bolod, were allowed to keep an independent identity within the Borijin clan.

For a people not accustomed to reading, the Mongols had to learn the new organization by means of easily learned songs such as “Zurgaan Tumen Mongol” (“The Six Tumen of the Mongols”), which listed the tribes with some pertinent information about each group’s geographic location and its social function within the united Mongol nation. The Khalkh were described as “located in the Khangai Mountains, as a guard from strangers,” or the Uriyanghai as “hunters of gazelle and wild animals, protectors from thieves, and diggers of wells.” Through these and similar songs, the people came to know who they were or, at least, who they were expected to be in the new nation.

The monarchs devised a plan to station their sons, the Seven Steels, around the edges of the empire to protect it as a permanent wall of steel, and they established a series of permanent encampments along the Chinese border. These eventually grew to approximately thirty bases from which the Mongols could keep watch on the Chinese and from which they could launch raids into China. Each settlement had a permanent cadre of soldiers stationed there, as well as animals and food supplies if a larger army needed to be sent in to assist them.

For the Mongols, the bases required minimal cost to maintain. In addition to keeping their own herds of animals, the soldiers had ample supplies of antelope, which they hunted for meat and for hides. The bases seem to have created fear and concern in the Ming court far beyond the actual danger that they posed. The Chinese responded with a new round of wall building in order to place a permanent protection between the Chinese urban and agricultural population centers and these Mongol bases.

The new Mongol nation, or Six Tumen, included Buddhists and Muslims with a mixture of the earlier Christian groups who had long since lost all contact with the outside Christian world. Manduhai and Dayan Khan did not choose among these religions, and they let their people follow any that they wanted. The government and ruling family, however, maintained a spiritual focus on a state cult formed around Genghis Khan and his shrine.

Through the work of Manduhai and Dayan Khan, “the government was rectified and humanity was united.” In this time, “peace, unity and prosperity spread throughout all the people.” Yet not all of their reforms succeeded. The effort to curtail usage of the title khan failed as each of their sons scrambled to take the title in his own domain.

After the khuriltai, Manduhai Khatun and Dayan Khan maintained their capital south of the Gobi and the Mongolian Plateau, along the Chinese border, in what is today Inner Mongolia. Manduhai had abandoned the quieter northern grazing grounds of the royal family favored by her first husband, Manduul Khan. The southern area served as the source and route for the trade goods out of China, and as the ideal base for the Mongol raids. The Mongols often made their camp in the Ordos, which offered them the most varied points of access into China and the Silk Route. Their presence troubled the Chinese commanders along the border and encouraged them to raid the Mongols more frequently.

The defensive wall remained more of a plan than a reality, and the Ming officers still had to defend their territory against Mongol raids. Unable or unwilling to mount substantial campaigns against them or to engage in large battles, the Chinese army occasionally struck out against the Mongols in small raids. On one such occasion in 1501, the border authorities learned that Manduhai and Dayan Khan had set up camp in a lightly defended area in the Ordos. They launched a raid, and the pair had to flee in the middle of the night, barely escaping their pursuers.

Following their near capture in the Ordos, Manduhai and Dayan Khan recognized that despite the advantages of the location, it would always be hard to defend because they were south of the Yellow River, which they could cross only in the winter, when it froze. They had escaped this time, but the mere possibility of their entrapment or capture in the Great Loop might entice other Chinese generals to mount campaigns against them. As important as the area was strategically for the Mongols and as important as it was to Manduhai as the area where she was born and grew up, the monarchs decided to move their capital back north of the Gobi into Mongolia proper.

Because Manduhai was born in the south, she understood it, but she also understood the dangers for nomadic people living there. Eight hundred years earlier, a wise Turkish khan had cautioned the steppe tribes against staying too close to the cities. In stones carved with his words and erected near Karakorum, he told them that the steppe was the best place on Earth to live. He said that the city people “give us gold, silver, and silk in abundance,” and that their words “have always been sweet and the materials of the Chinese people have always been soft.” But if you settle in their area, warned Bilge Khan, “you will die!”

One of Bilge Khan’s ministers, Tonyukuk, also recorded similar words on another set of stones, stating that Heaven would kill them as punishment for giving up their steppe freedom and submitting to the agricultural kingdoms. He encouraged the steppe people to remain always nomadic, to erect no buildings, and to resist the settled people at all costs. If they became too weak to resist, they should retreat into the mountains, but under no circumstances should they submit to rule from beyond the steppe.

The spirit of these men had certainly defined the prevailing attitude of the steppe tribes and had been one also accepted by Genghis Khan. The Mongols would die if they left Mongolia. The Mongol nation would die if the people gave up herding and settled in cities. With such strong ideas in their minds, Manduhai and Dayan Khan did not return to the ancient ruins of Karakorum for their capital. They would have no city with walls of stone or buildings of wood; there would be no palace, no market, and no temple.

Manduhai Khatun and Dayan Khan rejected the trappings of empire and instead withdrew to the Kherlen River near the hearth of the Borijin clan, where Genghis Khan had grown up. Along these banks, Temujin had first gathered his noble people and founded his nation in the year 1206, taking for himself the title of Genghis Khan. Most importantly, he was buried close by at a secret spot in the silence of Burkhan Khaldun. The old palace gers of his wife and mother still resided here, and Mongols came from everywhere to pray and to remember him and them.

This was the first tribal capital of the Mongols, not the imperial capital of the Mongol Empire. This was the place where Genghis Khan divided his empire among his sons and daughters. This was the place where he had invested Alaqai Beki with the Onggud nation and Al-Altun with the Uighurs, and where he had made his nuptial speeches to them, charging them with their responsibilities to their nation. This was the place where the Secret History had been written. Perhaps more than anything else that she did, this choice demonstrated Manduhai’s commitment to the ancient history of the Mongols and showed her lack of interest in maintaining the pretense of an empire or of expanding into the territory of the Chinese or the Muslims. For her people and her children, she sought a secured and protected Mongol nation of herders, not a world empire of cities and foreign lands.

After Manduhai and Dayan Khan had been only a few years in their new northern capital, a delegation of the southern tribes crossed the Gobi to request their rulers’ return. The southern tribes had grown tired of the constant bickering, and they had once again felt the oppressive raids of the warlords from the Silk Route oases and the Chinese. In particular, they mentioned that they had paid lower taxes under Manduhai and Dayan Khan than they were now required to pay under their new warlord.

Rather than going south themselves, the couple decided to send a son to govern for them. In their last official act together, Manduhai Khatun and Dayan Khan appointed their second son, Ulus Bolod, as the new jinong. Manduhai retired, turning over the control of the empire to her husband and children.

In 1508, Ulus Bolod headed south to assume his office in front of the Shrine of Genghis Khan, where his parents had created the new Mongol nation. A small group of retainers accompanied him across the Gobi, but no army seemed necessary.

Yet another warlord had begun pushing into the area. Called Ibari, or Ibrahim, he wished to replicate the power once held by Beg-Arslan and Ismayil. He and his allies incited discontent against Borijin rule. “He has come saying he will rule our country,” they complained. “Has he come saying he will rule our heads?”

Ulus Bolod arrived at the Shrine of Genghis Khan and was installed the same day in his new office of jinong by allies there. The priests who operated the shrine seemed eager to have a descendant of Genghis Khan ruling in the territory where they were now located, since this development would only enhance their own position.

On the second day, Ulus Bolod planned a long ancestral tribute of honor to Genghis Khan, thereby stressing his direct lineal descent from him and the restoration of his family’s power. This kinship connection, of course, set Ulus Bolod clearly apart from the other local leaders who did not belong to his Borijin clan. On Ulus Bolod’s way to the shrine on the second morning, he could see a large crowd gathered for the ceremony which he was about to conduct.

Before he reached the entry to the ger, an unknown enemy stepped out of the crowd and stopped him. The man claimed that Ulus Bolod owed him a horse in payment for a wrong done by some other family member. Ulus Bolod refused to give up his horse, but the man would not let him pass. In anger, Ulus Bolod pulled out his sword and sliced off the man’s head. Such a bloodletting in front of the holiest of shrines upset everyone and proved a very bad omen for Ulus Bolod.

Having arranged this confrontation, Ibari and his men rushed forward and incited the crowd against Ulus Bolod. Another man jumped out from the crowd to offer his own horse to Ulus Bolod, on which he could flee, but the conspirators already had their troops ready and they barred any escape. Ulus Bolod and the few men with him dashed into the holy tent itself for refuge, where the priests tried to protect them, but the hostile troops began shooting their arrows. In the ensuing battle at the shrine, it is said that Ulus Bolod managed to kill one of the enemy, and one of Ulus Bolod’s men wounded Ibari, but the small group could not outfight the larger force attacking them. The new jinong Ulus Bolod was killed after only one day in office.

Dayan Khan vowed revenge for the assassination of his and Manduhai’s son, calling on the Eternal Blue Sky and the spirit of Genghis Khan to help him. “May you heaven, and next, you Holy Lord know the blood which has been shed and abandoned, and the bones which lie drying.”

Dayan Khan dutifully called his army and prepared to lead them south to reinstate control over the southern tribes, chase out Ibari, and install another son as jinong. He would henceforth rule from his base located in the central part of the Mongol territories south of the Gobi, in what is today Inner Mongolia, as head of the Chakhar clan of Mongols. His sons would occupy the lands to his left and right.

Now past sixty, Manduhai lacked the stamina to ride a horse across the Gobi one more time and charge back into battle. She had been at war for more than thirty-five years. Manduhai and Dayan Khan had scarcely been apart in those years. Ever since they came together, they had shared one life between them. Now the time had come for Dayan Khan to go on without her. He was in his early forties and had many years left ahead of him to rule, but she would not be there to see it. It seemed as though there would never be an end to the violence, that as soon as one rebel or warlord was struck down, another rose to replace him. The long struggle of Manduhai to unify her nation seemed to have been in vain.

Manduhai would never again see Dayan Khan—the crippled boy whom she had dressed in large boots and stood before the Shrine of the First Queen to make him khan, the boy whom she put in a basket and took to war, and the man whom she married and with whom she raised eight children. As Dayan Khan and his sons rode south from Manduhai’s ger, it had been almost exactly three hundred years since Alaqai Beki had stood before her mother, Borte, and presented her cheek to be sniffed before riding south to assume her rule over the Onggud. From the same area near the Kherlen River, Manduhai sent her sons and husband back to complete the work that she had pursued throughout her life.

Whether Manduhai sniffed her sons on both cheeks or not we cannot now know, but maybe she casually demurred the offer of the second cheek. “I will sniff the other one when you come back.” Of course, she would not cry. As Dayan Khan and her sons rode south toward the sun, she would pick up her pail and toss milk into the air with her tsatsal. They would not look back at their wife and mother, and she would stand there throwing the milk until they passed over the horizon. As long as she was able in the closing years of her life, she would arise in the mornings and repeat the ceremony of aspersing milk for her absent husband and children. Maybe she occasionally rode off into the deserted steppe to share her pain with Mother Earth.

Manduhai remained behind to die, but the nation she had resurrected did not die. She had saved the Mongols and created a government that would protect them for generations. Her Jade Realm now stretched from the Siberian tundra and Lake Baikal in the north, across the Gobi, to the edge of the Yellow River and south of it into the Ordos.

The lands extended from the forests of Manchuria in the east, beyond the Altai Mountains, and out onto the steppes of Central Asia.

More than two centuries after Genghis Khan’s death, Queen Man-duhai revived the dying dynasty and made it vibrant and new. When she could not defeat her enemies, Manduhai eluded them, learned from her losses, and prepared for the next battle. In keeping with the Mongolian admonition, if she did not win the first seven times, she would win on the eighth. Manduhai defiantly survived every tragedy, obstacle, and horror that befell her. Just as she gave control of her life to no man, she surrendered her army to no enemy, and she relinquished her people to no foreign nation. Heaven did not grant her a great destiny; instead, in the words of the Mongol chronicle, it allowed her to shape “the destiny of her own choosing.” In history, those individuals who refuse the options presented by the circumstances of life usually end up broken. Those few who reject what life offers and still find their own path are rightfully called heroes. In creating her own destiny, she also chose the destiny for her nation.

Dayan Khan lived on and continued to lead his people down the white road of enlightenment. He restored order to the south and ruled the united Mongolia without further serious disruptions. He married two more women, and had four more sons. He led numerous campaigns. The chronicles leave a frustrating mystery in stating that his reign ended in 1517, only a few years after Manduhai’s death; yet his death is not recorded until 1543, which would have been more than thirty years after her death, when he was seventy-nine years old.

In the sixteenth century, the Mongols began converting to Buddhism. In 1578, Altan Khan and Queen Noyanchu Junggen, both descendants of Queen Manduhai and Dayan Khan, bestowed on the Tibetan monk Sonam Gyatso the old Mongolian title of dalai, meaning “sea” or “ocean,” which had first been used by Genghis Khan’s son Ogodei as his title, Dalai Khan, meaning “Sea of Power.” Henceforth the lama and his future reincarnations would bear the title Dalai Lama, “Sea of Knowledge.” Not long afterward, in 1592, another of Queen Manduhai and Dayan Khan’s descendants was discovered to be the new Dalai Lama. Reigning under the title Dalai Lama IV, he was the only Mongolian to hold the office.

Buddhism brought Mongolia to new heights of literature, arts, and architecture. The Great Wall that divided the Mongol and Chinese nations did not guarantee peace, but it brought a new stability to the region. The foreign warlords did not return, leaving the Mongols and their neighbors to work out their own trade and commercial relations.

Manduhai and Dayan Khan’s descendants managed to keep the country independent until the conquest by the Manchu in the seventeenth century. Most of the royal family continued to thrive under the Manchu and their Qing Dynasty, founded in 1644, but the country as a whole and the common people suffered wretchedly until liberation in 1911.

The lineage of Manduhai and Dayan Khan remained in power until the twentieth century. In the political turmoil of World War II, together with the prior revolution in Mongolia during the 1920s, and subsequently in China in the 1940s, most of Manduhai and Dayan Khan’s identifiable descendants were deliberately killed by various factions seeking to eradicate the past for different reasons.

Almost all Mongols recognize Queen Manduhai the Wise and Dayan Khan as the two greatest monarchs in the eight centuries of Mongolian history after Genghis Khan. For Mongols, Manduhai continues to symbolize the one person who sacrificed all to save her nation and thereby to protect them, and for this reason they often call her simply Queen Manduhai the Wise. The earlier queens faded from public memory, but elements of their stories were folded into hers so that Manduhai Khatun became the quintessential Mongol queen, combining all the others into one persona and one lifetime.

No matter how assiduously the censors in the centuries that followed cut the Mongolian queens from the records and altered the texts, and no matter how much foreigners might scoff at their history, the people remembered. In their songs and poems, in their art, and in the names they gave their children and the stories that they told sitting around the fire at night, the Mongols preserved the memory of Queen Manduhai the Wise.

EPILOGUE

The Secrets of History

IN THE SUMMER OF 1492, CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS SAILED out of Europe across the Atlantic Ocean carrying a letter from the Spanish monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand intended for the khan of the Mongols, but not knowing the name of the Asian ruler, the Spanish clerk left a blank space to be filled in upon arrival. Columbus never reached Asia to deliver the letter, and history never filled in the missing name.In four epic voyages, Columbus searched for the Mongol khan in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Honduras, and small islands across the Caribbean. None of the natives could tell him the name of the Great Khan, and when Columbus died in 1506, he still had come no closer to finding the court of the Mongols or even the names of the rulers. Throughout all the years of Columbus’s search, it was Manduhai Khatun and Dayan Khan for whom he was searching.Columbus showed how seriously he and others of his time took the history of the Mongols, whom they recognized as one of the great forces of history, but one about which they knew very little. He was not the first to go in search of the Mongols. A hundred years earlier, in the fourteenth century, as Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, the first book in the English language, he also launched a literary search for the elusive Genghis Khan and his daughter. Chaucer had traveled widely on diplomatic missions through Europe and had learned of Genghis Khan, whom he called Cambuyskan. In “The Squire’s Tale,” Genghis Khan’s daughter, the fictional Canace, acquired magical power over humans and animals; she communicated with birds and knew the use of every plant. Chaucer never finished “The Squire’s Tale.” The story, as much as was written, seemed much more of a European romance than anything to do with the Mongols; yet we will never know where it was going to end.The Tatar tale was the only story Chaucer left unfinished in his book, and other writers through the centuries have occasionally sought to complete it. English poet John Milton described Chaucer’s fragmentary tale as a “sage and solemn” story “where more is meant than meets the ear.” In his poem “Il Penseroso,” Milton called upon Orpheus, the Greek hero of music and poetry, to help him complete Chaucer’s tale of contests, trophies, and enchantments in the life of bold Genghis Khan and his gifted daughter who communed with animals.Even when learned poets such as Chaucer and Milton could not complete the accounts of these unique Mongol women, their poems constantly remind us of what is missing in our history. The poets preserved what the censors destroyed.The memory of the Mongol queens lived on in marble as well as in literature. In 1631, after Mumtaz Mahal died during the birth of her fourteenth child, her husband, the Moghul emperor Shah Jahan, began the building of a magnificent tomb for her. The most gifted Muslim and Hindu artisans of the era brought a variety of cultural styles and motifs, and yet beneath it all the building took the simple domed shape of a Mongol ger. The emperor was a distant heir of Genghis Khan and Borte. His ancestors had been guregen, married to the women of the Borijin clan, and he was descended from those women though the line of Chaghatai. As though guided by an ancient Mongol memory, he placed the entrance to the Taj Mahal facing south like every Mongol ger, toward the sun. Built to honor one Moghul queen, the Taj Mahal, the most beautiful building ever erected, embodies the spirit of all the Mongol women.In 1710, while writing the first biography of Genghis Khan, the French scholar François Pétis de La Croix published a book of tales and fables combining Persian, Turkish, Mongol, and Arabic themes. One of his longest and best stories derived from the history of Khutulun, who rode into battle with her father and refused to marry any man who could not defeat her in wrestling. In his version, she became Turandot, meaning “Turkish Daughter,” the nineteen-year-old daughter of Altoun Khan, emperor of China, but the story mostly focused on Calaf, son of Timurtasch (Timur Taishi), who was also nineteen and determined to woo her. Instead of challenging her suitors in wrestling, Pétis de La Croix had her confront them with three riddles. Instead of wagering mere horses, the suitor had to forfeit his life if he failed to answer correctly.Pétis de La Croix wrote of Turandot: “She united with her ravishing beauty such a cultivated mind that she not only knows everything which it is customary to teach persons of her rank, but even the sciences which are only learned by men, she knows how to write the different characters of several languages, she knows arithmetic, geography, philosophy, mathematics, and above all, theology.”Fifty years later, the popular Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi saw the dramatic potential of the story for the stage, and in 1761 he premiered his play Turandotte in Venice, the hometown of Marco Polo. It offered the tale of a “tigerish woman” whose “greatest sin is her unrelenting pride.” In a combined effort by two of the greatest literary talents of the era, Friedrich von Schiller translated the play into German as Turandot, Prinzessin von China, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe directed it on the stage in Weimar in 1802.The Italian composer Giacomo Puccini was working on his opera Turandot when he died in 1924, and a colleague completed it. “It’s useless shouting in Sanskrit, in Chinese, or Mongolian!” Puccini wrote of his heroine who refused to marry. She challenged men because of the wrongs done to one of her female ancestors “who ruled in silence and pure joy, defying the abhorred tyranny of man with constancy and firmness.” The earlier queen’s reign had ended abruptly “when the King of the Tartars unfurled his seven standards,” and “in that cruel night when her young voice was stifled!” The opera of the Mongol ice queen never attained the popularity of Puccini’s other Asian heroine, Madame Butterfly, who lives and then must die for the love of a man.The public memories of unusual people live on in sometimes unexpected but significant ways. Today, when Mongolian men wrestle, they wear a particular vest with long sleeves, a small back, but no shoulder covering and a completely open front. According to lore, they wear this in honor and in fear of Khutulun. To prevent being defeated by another woman, the open vest allows each wrestler to inspect his opponent’s chest before wrestling and make sure that he is genuinely male.At the end of each match, the winner stretches out his arms to display his chest again to his opponent and to the spectators, and he slowly waves his arms in the air like a bird, turning for all to see. For the winner it is a victory dance, but it is still a lingering tribute to the time when Mongolia had one princess wrestler whom no man ever defeated.Such folk stories may or may not be accurate, but they carry a cultural truth that transcends the torn, lost, and censored documents of the past. History may have turned its back on the queens of the Mongols, but the people have never forgotten their heroines.

I first heard the name of Manduhai in 1998 while staying on the Mongolian steppe at Avarga, the place where Genghis Khan created the Mongol nation, where he installed his daughter Alaqai over the Onggud and Al-Altun over the Uighur, where the Secret History was written, where Borte maintained her court, and where Manduhai and Dayan Khan returned after their conquests of the south. I was there researching the Mongol Empire when, as so often happened in my work, a group gathered to give me advice, ask questions, or just enjoy their new freedom of being able to speak openly about history, religion, sex, or any other topic.“I am only a herder,” an older woman said, as though apologizing for not being a scholar. Her worn and creased face contrasted starkly with the smooth, bright blue deel she wore for the visit. “You should know that Genghis Khan was reincarnated as a woman….” She hesitated as though unsure how her listeners might respond, then proceeded firmly in saying what she believed: “It was our Queen Manduhai.”Somewhat embarrassed, other people assured me that Genghis Khan had not been reincarnated, and it certainly would not be right for him to be a woman. The subject was closed, and we all returned to our respective gers.Later that night, amid enthusiastic singing and prolonged drinking from a large porcelain bowl of fermented horse milk, people regaled me with several versions of the story of Manduhai. Much of what they said seemed too romantic or too trivial to have any use in my research. I quickly tired of the drinking, singing, and stories.In my rush to judgment, Manduhai seemed little more than another of those mystical figures that populate the nationalist lore of every country and exercise a magical hold on the imagination of locals, but offer little attraction for foreigners. When the celebrants began singing emotional songs about Manduhai’s service to the nation and her sacrifice for them, I was moved by the intensity of their feelings, but I still dismissed her. She obviously meant much to them, but little to me. I was now on the hunt for more important historical prey; I was searching for the life of Genghis Khan, not his fanciful reincarnation.Through the years I continued to trip over Manduhai in my Mongolian travels and research, and I persisted in finding my way around her by ignoring her as a lesser character in the majestic tales of Asian history. My opinion of Manduhai did not change until I began struggling with the censored sections of the Secret History regarding Genghis Khan’s daughters. Gradually I saw the link emerging between the omitted names of the Secret History and the missing name in the letter carried by Columbus. I realized that her story grew out of theirs; yet they remain unknown. Thinking that these accounts might be interesting footnotes in Mongolian history, I wanted to fill in some small pieces of these stories, but the more I discovered, the more I found missing. The holes kept growing.As soon as I felt close, I found another cut document, garbled name, sliced page, mutilated text, changed date, or missing title. Religious clerics, political ideologues, and government bureaucrats do not have the right to change history. The truth may be hard to find, but it is out there—somewhere. If we do not continue the work, the truth remains hidden. If we stop the search, then the censor has defeated us.Had I, at that early moment in my work, found a book that explained the role of these Mongol queens, or even had I found this book that I have now written, I doubt that I would have believed much of it. Only grudgingly and piecemeal did the story of the daughters of Genghis Khan and of Queen Manduhai the Wise arise from the dust around me, and only hesitantly and somewhat unwillingly did I acknowledge that individuals whom I had never studied in school or read about in any book could, in fact, be figures of tremendous historic importance.What does it matter that one barbarian khan, whether male or female, replaced another as leader of the horde on some forsaken spot with an unpronounceable name in the bowels of Asia? They helped shape our world in ways that we do not see. Their influence continues on the modern map of national boundaries, in the Buddhism of the modern day, and in the legacy of the Silk Route that became the prototype for the modern world system. The story of these Mongol queens forms a secret history of the origins of the modern world; it is an unrecognized, but important part of our own story. Ultimately, the goal of rediscovering their story is to assess the unacknowledged influence they have had on our lives and the relevance they still have today.The great queens of Mongolia protected their families throughout their lifetimes. Genghis Khan created the nation and inspired it, but the queens gave it life. Like their father, these dedicated queens did not waste time, effort, and emotion building monuments; they built a nation. Like the lingering footprints and fossils of past ages, the evidence of their lives remain, if only we are willing to search for it, willing to see it when we find it.The censors who sliced the pages did not destroy the history; they only hampered our ability to see it. In some ways the evidence is still all around us, scarcely even hidden, merely unrecognized. There are architectural tributes to the lives and importance of these women in enduring structures as varied as the Taj Mahal of India and the Great Wall of China. The music of Puccini, the plays of Schiller, the poetry of Chaucer, and even the dances of Mongolian wrestlers keep the stories alive.It is quite understandable that Columbus did not know the name of the Mongol monarch for whom he was searching when he sailed to America; he lived in an era of limited knowledge of an unknown world. Today we have the opportunity to know what he did not, to fill in the story that eluded Chaucer.Amid the carefully censored documents, the conveniently lost manuscripts, and the frustratingly unfinished poems, the answers to a gripping mystery still wait to be slowly dug out again. Like the archaeologist collecting fragments from an ancient, broken mosaic, we may recover only a portion of the original portrait, but even in the faded colors of the chipped pieces we ascertain a glorious image of our history that tells us more about who we are today by seeing who they were then. We may never find the undelivered letter that Columbus carried on his momentous voyage, but it is never too late in history to fill in a missing name.Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Year of the Ox, 2009

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A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY MONGOLIAN HISTORY HAS BEEN ONE of the most confusing times for scholars because of the difficulty of establishing a clear timeline. The chronicles using the animal cycle of years are often difficult to correlate with one another or with the modern calendar. The best chronology available has been published in Mongolian in three comprehensive volumes by Professor B. Baljinnyam, and whenever possible I rely upon his dates.English-speaking scholars use many different ways of transliterating classical and modern Mongolian names and words. The correct title for the founder of Mongolia is Chinggis Khan, pronounced CHIN-gis, but by tradition it is rendered in English as Genghis Khan. Generally, I use the spelling that is easiest for the reader rather than adhering to only one system. For example in the name Qaidu Khan, the Q and Kh represent the same guttural sound. I use the Qaidu spelling solely because the reader can find more additional information on him under that spelling; yet, for his daughter Khutulun, more can be found using the Kh spelling. For the same sound I use only an h as in the common spelling Manduhai (rather than Mandukhai or Manduqai), because it better approximates the pronunciation of Man-du-HI.Similarly, I use classical and modern spellings, depending on the need, and avoid alternate spelling for the different Turkic and Mongolian dialects of different eras. Thus for simplification, khan is used for khaghan, khan, and khagan or the modern khaan; similarly, beki is used for bek, beg, beghi, bägi, and begi. Scholars will recognize the underlying form, but for most readers, using only a single form will be easier.Modern Mongolian names are usually written with an initial preceding the name. In the twentieth century, the use of clan names was forbidden, and since Mongolians generally have only one name, they added the initial of the father’s, or sometimes the mother’s, name to distinguish them from others with the same name.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

“Let us reward our female offspring” Igor de Rachewiltz, trans., The Secret History of the Mongols (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2004), §§ 214–15. The sentence is repeated in both sections, but in order to make sense of the text, many translators and editors have omitted the duplication or filled in this section with words cut from other parts of the document.

“From age to age” Rashid al-Din, Rashiduddin Fazullah’s Jami’u’t-Tawarikh: Compendium of Chronicles, translated by W. M. Thackson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 1998).

“Genghis Khan loved this one” Ibid.

“a great luster” François Pétis de la Croix, The History of Gengizcan the Great (Calcutta, 1816).

PART I

“There is a khan’s daughter” Nicholas Poppe, trans., Tsongol Folklore: The Language and Collective Farm Poetry of the Buriat Mongols of the Selenga River (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1978).

CHAPTER 1

A renegade Tatar Igor de Rachewiltz, trans., The Secret History of the Mongols (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2004), § 214. His name was Qargil Sira or Khargil Shira; an alternate version of the story is found in Rashid al-Din, Rashiduddin Fazullah’s Jami’u’t-Tawarikh: Compendium of Chronicles, translated by W. M. Thackson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 1998).