For a time, the Idiqut persisted in denying any involvement in a vague plot and heresy, but in the end, he and his companions succumbed and admitted to anything required of them. One of Mongke Khan’s partisans summarized the interrogations very simply. “After sipping the unpalatable cup of the roughness of the Tatar rods,” the accused ones always “vomited forth and declared what was hidden in their breasts.” The Mongols sent the Idiqut and his men back to the Uighur territory with orders that on the Muslim holy day of Friday, the Idiqut’s brother cut off the unfortunate leader’s head and saw his two companions in half. To prove that his loyalty to Mongke Khan surpassed that to his own family, the new Idiqut complied.
Although he was Great Khan during this time, Mongke may have been less involved with the purge than his mother, Sorkhokhtani, and her allies. Persian chroniclers portray him as a merciful man who opposed the killing of Mongols by Mongols. In other aspects of his eight-year reign, Mongke Khan showed consistent and seemingly genuine respect for the Great Law left in place by his grandfather Genghis Khan. Of all the grandsons, he and his cousin Batu Khan of Russia seemed the most capable and the most dedicated to following the spirit of that law. The layers of officials may have shielded him from some of the worst atrocities, but he could not have been totally ignorant, no matter how preoccupied with other issues.
The purges subsided slightly when Sorkhokhtani became desperately ill. As a Christian, she feared that the illness might be related to the wretched evil she had unleashed. In an effort to attain forgiveness and prolong her life, she began to pardon the convicted. While technically sparing the life of the condemned, she and her family still sought to inflict the maximum punishment on them and to offer a lesson to anyone else who might oppose her family’s rule. The condemned’s “wives and children, his servants and cattle, all his animate and inanimate possessions, were seized and distributed.” As a secondary form of punishment for those whose lives were spared, she sent them into the most dangerous assignments of the military, “arguing that if he is fated to be killed he will be killed in the fighting.” In the case of others: “They send him on an embassy to foreign peoples who they are not entirely certain will send them back: or again they send him to hot countries whose climate is unhealthy such as Egypt and Syria.” Sorkhokhtani died in February or March of 1252, while the campaign of retribution still raged through the empire.
Although Mongke Khan continued to appoint some women as queens and gave them limited power to rule over subservient areas, he made certain that they had no independent power and prevented anyone else from giving power to women. Mongke Khan issued a decree that no woman could be made khatun by a shaman or one of Guyuk’s former officials. If any shaman or other official recognized a woman as khatun, Mongke Khan ordered the penalty of death, using the uniquely Mongol expression “They shall see what they shall see.”
What Genghis Khan had spent a lifetime creating was destroyed within another lifetime. The Mongol Empire lingered for another century—at first growing fatter and fatter through conquest, then slowly decaying into a twisted shadow of its once noble origin. It would never again be the empire of its founder, who imposed a strict code of laws and lived an unadorned life of austerity and hard work. The delicately balanced system of men and women sharing similar powers had proved too fragile to survive. Though occupying the largest empire, the Borijin family had become just one more bloated and decadent dynasty spilling out across the pages of world history.
Like a drunk who tears down his own ger in some unfathomable rage, the Borijin clan destroyed everything that had made it grand and powerful. They sank into a prolonged degeneracy surrounded by the broken pieces of their once glorious Mongol Empire.
The chronicler Abu-Umar-I-Usman reported that years earlier, in 1221, during Genghis Khan’s Central Asian campaign when his sons Jochi and Chaghatai conquered the capital city of Urgench, they seized the women they wanted to keep for themselves and then gathered all the remaining women outside the city walls on an open plain. They divided the women into two groups and ordered them to strip naked. According to this story, Genghis Khan’s sons then gave the order for one group to attack the other.
“The women of your city are good pugilists,” one of the sons was quoted as saying to the conquered city officials. “Therefore, the order is that both sides should set on each other with fists.” The women, thinking that the victorious side would be allowed to live, set to fighting each other with tremendous fury. The soldiers watched the spectacle, cheering some fighters on and jeering at others. Many women killed other women in the course of the day, but eventually the audience tired of the match. At the end of the game, the generals ordered the soldiers to kill all the surviving women.
Such stories, especially from anti-Mongol sources, can never simply be accepted as fact based on only a single account. Yet the report always teaches us something, even if it is nothing more than that the idea of such an event existed; it was conceivable, and thus someone might do such a thing. Sometimes even the most implausible stories from one decade or generation become the realities for the next one. In the generation after Genghis Khan, many of the powerful women of the empire expired fighting one another much like the women of this story. And, like them, the Mongol queens ended up killing one another, only in the end to be killed themselves.
The violence did not end with the overthrow of the queens; it continued to spread and became endemic to family politics. Sorkhokhtani had kept her four sons united and focused on rivals outside their family, but, with her gone, the sons turned on one another. Within eight years, in 1259, Mongke died during a campaign in China, and his two younger brothers, Khubilai, based in northern China, and Arik Boke, based in Mongolia, began a battle for power. Khubilai captured Arik Boke and sought to put him on trial for treason, but when other members of the Borijin clan refused to attend the trial, Arik Boke died mysteriously in captivity in 1266, almost certainly a victim of his brother’s quest for power.
The Mongol Empire was soon to reach its maximum territorial extent, but it could not long survive the family fighting that was destroying its ruling family. Khubilai commanded the greatest army, but it was more Chinese than Mongolian, and although he claimed the title of Great Khan in 1260, he had been elected in only a sham khuriltai held in China rather than Mongolia and without support from the Borijin clan or other Mongols.
While continuing to worship the spirit of their grandfather Genghis Khan and making him into a virtual god, his heirs destroyed everything he created. Yet the more they destroyed, the more ritually important they made him. Khubilai Khan created the office of jinong, meaning “Prince of Gold,” or “Golden Prince,” and assigned him “to guard the northern frontiers and to govern ‘the Four Great Ordos’ of the Founding Emperor, the military forces, the Mongols and the homeland.” With this responsibility, the jinong controlled the most sacred objects in the Mongol world: the black sulde, Genghis Khan’s horsehair banner in which a part of his earthly soul remained after he ascended into heaven, and the four gers of his four wives.
Mysteriously, however, over the coming years, what began as only four gers increased to eight. They were explained as being the shrines of his horse or his milk pail, but the structures housing them had once belonged to some woman since milk pails and saddles did not own gers. The most plausible explanation is that just as the ger of each of Genghis Khan’s four wives was brought to Avarga after she died, these were quite possibly the gers of his four deposed daughters. Since the felt contained part of the departed woman’s soul, none of the sons claiming her land wanted her soul left behind to haunt him. The solution was to collect them all together. Thereafter, they were known as the Eight Gers or Eight Ordos of Genghis Khan.