Temujin still had a struggle ahead of him against Jamuka for control of the Mongols. The wealth looted from the Tatars attracted more followers; he now began to increase his power over other Mongol lineages and to expand into their territories. He could not expand into the area of the great tribes, but he could push out the smaller ones such as the Jurkin, a small Mongol lineage located immediately to the south of Temujin’s group along the Kherlen River.
When Temujin had agreed to fight the Tatars, he had enlisted the help of his Jurkin relatives, who had initially agreed to join him. But when Temujin was prepared to leave for the campaign, he waited for six days for the Jurkin to arrive, and they never did. Just as with a khuriltai, where showing up counted as a vote of support, not showing up to organize raids constituted a vote of no confidence in the raid’s leader—in this case Temujin. Relations between the Jurkin and Temujin’s followers had been strained before. Like almost everyone around them, the Jurkin lineage outranked Temujin’s lineage, and they often treated Temujin and his followers with scorn. One colorful story told in the Secret History reveals the animosity that had developed between the groups.
Temujin had invited the Jurkin to a feast, shortly before the Tatar campaign was to begin, but a chaotic brawl erupted when Temujin’s half brother was assaulted in an especially demeaning way. Belgutei was the appointed guardian of the horses for Temujin’s band, and he stood watch over them as the feast got under way. When a man, apparently from the Jurkin group, attempted to steal one of the horses, Belgutei chased him, but was stopped by another Jurkin known as Buri the Wrestler. As a sign that he stood ready to fight Buri, Belgutei pulled the top of his clothing down, leaving most of his upper body exposed. Rather than wrestle Belgutei, as would have been the custom in a disagreement among equals, Buri treated Belgutei with contempt as a lesser by unsheathing his sword and slicing Belgutei across the shoulder with it. To draw blood in this manner, even with just a small cut, constituted a grave insult. Learning of what had taken place outside by the horses, the drunken guests began fighting among themselves. As was customary, they had entered the feast without their weapons; so the guests began throwing the dishes of food at one another, and clubbing each other with the paddles used to stir the fermented mare’s milk that had been consumed in great quantity.
Not only had the Jurkin failed to join Temujin’s force in the fight against the Tatars, they now took advantage of Temujin’s absence by raiding his base camp, killing ten of his followers and stripping the remainder of their clothes and other possessions. So when Temujin sought to expand his territory of rule in the wake of victory against the Tatars, the Jurkin were the first he struck out against. He launched his campaign against them in 1197, and in a testament to his now well-honed skills as a warrior and commander, he easily defeated them. At this point, Temujin instituted the second radical change in ruling style—the first being the appointment of loyal allies as opposed to family members to key positions in his entourage—that would mark his rise to power.
In the long history of steppe warfare, a defeated tribe was looted, some members taken prisoner, and the rest left again to their own devices. Defeated groups regularly reorganized and counterattacked, or broke away and joined rival tribes. In his defeat of the Jurkin, however, Temujin followed a radical new policy that revealed his ambition to fundamentally alter the cycle of attack and counterattack and of making and breaking alliances. He summoned a khuriltai of his followers to conduct a public trial of the Jurkin’s aristocratic leaders for having failed to fulfill their promise to join him in war and for having, instead, raided his camp in his absence. Finding them guilty, he had them executed as a lesson about the value of loyalty to allies, but also as a clear warning to the aristocrats of all lineages that they would no longer be entitled to special treatment. He then took the unprecedented step of occupying the Jurkin lands and redistributing the remaining members of their group among the households of his own clan. Though some among both clans apparently interpreted this as the Jurkin being taken as slaves, as would have been more in keeping with steppe custom, according to the account in the Secret History, Temujin took them into his tribe not as slaves but as members of the tribe in good standing. He symbolized this by adopting an orphan boy from the Jurkin camp and presenting him to Hoelun to raise in her ger not as a slave but as her son. By having his mother adopt the Jurkin boy, as he had her previously adopt one each from the defeated Merkid, Tayichiud, and Tatars, Temujin was accepting the boys as his younger brothers. Whether these adoptions began for sentimental reasons or for political ones, Temujin displayed a keen appreciation of the symbolic significance and practical benefit of such acts in uniting his followers through this usage of fictive kinship. In the same way that he took these children into his own family, he accepted the conquered people into his tribe with the possibility that they would share fairly in the future conquests and prosperity of his army.
In a final display of his new power, Temujin ended the Jurkin episode with a feast for both the victorious Mongols and their newly adopted relatives. For the feast, he summoned Buri the Wrestler, who had cut Belgutei at the feast the year before, and ordered a wrestling match between the two men. No one had ever defeated Buri, but in his fear of Temujin’s wrath, he allowed Belgutei to throw him. Normally, at this point the match would have been finished, but Temujin and Belgutei apparently worked out a different plan. Belgutei seized Buri’s shoulders and mounted his rump like a horse, and upon receiving a signal from Temujin, he plunged his knee into Buri’s back and snapped his spinal cord. Belgutei then dragged Buri’s paralyzed body outside the camp, leaving him to die alone.
Temujin had rid himself of all the leaders of the Jurkin. The messages were clear to all their related clans on the steppe. To those who followed Temujin faithfully, there would be rewards and good treatment. To those who chose to attack him, he would show no mercy.
After defeating the Jurkin, he moved his followers downstream on the Kherlen into their territory. Temujin made his new base camp near the confluence of the smaller Tsenker River with the Kherlen. Eventually, this became his capital known as Avarga, but at this time, it was only a remote camp. The land between two rivers was called aral, “island,” in Mongolian. Because the island between the Tsenker and Kherlen Rivers offered a wide open pasture, they called it the Khodoe Aral, which in modern Mongolian means “Country Island” but in classical Mongolian carried the meaning “Barren Island,” and that name is an apt description for this isolated place in the midst of a large, open, and treeless prairie.
Barren as Avarga may have been, it constitutes on a grand scale the steppe herder’s ideal home territory. Herders desire a ger that faces south in order to admit the light and warmth of the southern sun through the entryway as well as to prevent the cold northern winds from entering. They want to face water, but not be too close. A thirty-minute walk from the river seems to be the right distance to avoid polluting it with too much human waste. That distance also provides protection from the summer insects and flash floods that sometimes rage along the river plains. In addition to these advantages, Avarga was still close to the place of Temujin’s birth and to the sacred mountain Burkhan Khaldun, which rose about 130 miles upstream at the headwaters of the Kherlen River. Avarga offered all of this, and from 1197 to the end of his life, it served as Temujin’s operations base.
Although Temujin’s followers prospered for four years in their new home as the size of his tribe continued to grow, Jamuka refused to recognize his leadership, and increasingly became the rallying figure for the aristocratic clans who did not like the changes Temujin was bringing to their traditional way of life. In 1201, the Year of the Cock, Jamuka made a play, with their support, for the position of ruler of all the Mongol people. In a challenge to both Temujin and Ong Khan, Jamuka summoned a khuriltai that conferred upon him the ancient and honored title of Gur-ka or Gur-khan, which meant chief of all chiefs or khan of all khans. His people swore a new oath of loyalty to him, and to sanctify the oath, they cut up one stallion and one mare in sacrifice.