Qaidu Khan and Khutulun lived in the interior of the continent and allied with a large number of Mongols and tribes opposed to the central rule of Khubilai Khan. After Khubilai Khan proclaimed the existence of a Chinese-style dynasty, the Yuan, in 1271, the disaffected family members in the interior increasingly portrayed themselves as the true Mongols. Their land around the Tianshan Mountains and adjacent steppes became known as Moghulistan, meaning “land of the Mongols,” although it was not in the original homeland on the Mongolian Plateau.
Qaidu Khan was described as a man of average height who held himself quite erectly. According to the Persian chronicle, he had only nine scattered hairs on his face. He was as strict in his habits as in his posture. Almost unheard of in the Mongol royal family, Qaidu Khan drank no alcohol, not even the beloved airag, fermented mare’s milk, and he ate no salt. He seemed equally as strict in his relations. When another of his daughters found her husband having an affair with her maid, Qaidu Khan executed him.
Charitably described as beautiful and much sought after by men, Khutulun had a large and powerful figure. She excelled in all the Mongol arts: riding horses, shooting arrows, and even wrestling. She became known as a champion wrestler whom no man could throw. Since Mongols frequently bet on wrestling matches and other competitions, she often won horses as a result of her wrestling victories. In time, she came to have a herd of more than ten thousand horses won in such a manner.
Her father gave her a gergee as a sign of her power and independence. Called a paiza by Marco Polo, the gergee was a large and heavy medallion of office, consisting of an engraved disk or rectangular plate worn on a chain around the neck. Made of silver or gold, it stated the power of the holder and that it was granted by the khan under the will of the Eternal Blue Sky. Since the earlier queens had used seals, or tamghas, to signify their status, Khutulun is the only woman mentioned as owning her own gergee, an authority usually reserved for men.
Although Khutulun had fourteen brothers, she outperformed them all. While his other children assisted him as best they could, Qaidu Khan relied highly on his daughter Khutulun for advice as well as for support. She was her father’s favorite child and helped him to administer the government and affairs of his kingdom. Rashid al-Din, definitely not a sympathetic chronicler, wrote that “she went around like a boy,” though he also said that she “often went on military campaigns, where she performed valiant deeds.” Despite the apparent unusualness of the relationship between Qaidu Khan and Khutulun, in some ways their cooperative work probably reflected that of Genghis Khan and his daughters.
Khutulun followed an unorthodox method of confronting the enemy. She rode to the battlefield at her father’s side, but when she perceived the right moment, in the words of Marco Polo, she would “make a dash at the host of the enemy, and seize some man thereout, as deftly as a hawk pounces on a bird, and carry him to her father; and this she did many a time.”
Qaidu Khan commanded an army of around forty thousand warriors. They fought all along the frontier with Khubilai Khan’s China and controlled much of the interior of the country along the oases of the Silk Route and the western mountains. In addition to numerous local spats with other members of the family, Qaidu Khan’s army reached toward the northeast as far as the traditional Mongol capital of Karakorum and had at least one campaign in the Khentii Mountains farther east.
Because of Genghis Khan’s law that every branch of the family had to approve the granting of the title, the opposition of Qaidu Khan and Khutulun together with other disgruntled members of the Borijin clan served as a constant reminder that Khubilai Khan lacked universal Mongol approval. On both sides, the campaigns often showed more propagandistic bravado than genuine military achievement. One of Khubilai’s allied cousins, a renowned archer named Toq-Temur, rode off to war on a gray horse. “People choose bays and horses of other colors so that blood may not show on them, and the enemy may not be encouraged,” he is quoted as saying. “As for me, I choose a gray horse, because just as red is the adornment of women, so the blood of a wound on a rider and his horse, which drips on to the man’s clothes and the horse’s limbs and can be seen from afar, is the adornment and decoration of men.”
Despite all the big words, the boundaries changed little. No army secured a decisive victory. The low-grade but persistent hostility continued with periodic violent flare-ups. Caravans sought out routes around the violence, but as the years passed, fewer managed to get through.
Marco Polo also became caught up in the propaganda. Having never seen the Mongols under Genghis Khan and being a young merchant rather than a seasoned soldier, he accepted and repeated many of the grandiose stories of military triumphalism heard around the Mongol court in Beijing. When Qaidu Khan fought Khubilai Khan’s army at the largely abandoned capital of Karakorum in Mongolia, Marco Polo mistakenly described it as one of the hardest fought in Mongol history. “Many a man fell there,” wrote Marco Polo. “Many a child was made an orphan there; many a lady widowed; many another woman plunged in grief and tears for the rest of her days.” Qaidu Khan eventually withdrew, and the battle settled nothing.
Khubilai Khan faced great difficulty in combating Qaidu Khan and the tribes of the interior because his largely infantry Chinese army could not travel far and was not trained in the appropriate kind of warfare needed against mounted tribesmen in the desert and mountains. Even worse, his Mongol and other tribal warriors could not be trusted to fight people who were their own relatives or with whom they had much more in common than they had with the distant and increasingly alien Mongol court in Beijing.
Unable to depend on the Chinese and unwilling to rely on the Mongols for his protection, Khubilai Khan made one of those temporarily convenient decisions that over time produces totally unexpected results with tremendous implications. Khubilai requested and received soldiers from the west via his relatives in the Golden Horde. Fifty years earlier, the Mongols had moved an army of Saxon miners to work in northern Asia, and now Khubilai brought in soldiers who would have no kinship or cultural ties to either the Mongols or the Chinese, presuming that they would therefore be totally dependent and loyal only to him.
Although from various western origins, the recruits came from two main groups: the European Ossetians of the Caucasus Mountains and the Turkic Kipchak tribes of the adjacent plains of southeastern Russia. The Ossetians came as guards to the Forbidden City in Beijing, and the Kipchak to fight Qaidu Khan, becoming an army of frontier occupation in western Mongolia and parts of Siberia. From these sites they repeatedly raided the forces of Qaidu Khan but never eliminated the threat from the independent tribes.
Although never commonplace, through the centuries, stories about women warriors appeared regularly enough in Asian and European steppe history not to be considered as novelty. Their deeds were usually explained as arising from unusually dire circumstances or in some cases from exceptional aptitude. The ability of women to fight successfully in steppe society when they failed to do so in most civilizations derived, however, from the unique confluence of the horse with the bow and arrow. In armies that relied on infantry and heavy weapons such as swords, lances, pikes, or clubs, men enjoyed major physical advantages over women.
Mounted on a horse and armed with a bow and arrows, a trained and experienced woman warrior could hold her own against men. Women fared better in combat based on firepower than in hand-to-hand combat. Although archery requires strength, muscular training and discipline prove to be more important than brute force. An archer, no matter how strong, can never substitute mere might for skill in shooting. By contrast, good swordsmanship requires training and practice, but a sufficiently strong person wielding a sword can inflict lethal damage without prior experience.