For the aggrieved queen, however, the punishment of only one of the two men who had wronged her failed to quell her anger at the murder of her first husband. In the words of the chronicles, “She lay on her bed without satisfaction.” But when her husband approached her with the man’s skin dangling from his wounded hand, she reached out and took the khan’s wounded hand. She brought it up to her lips to kiss it, and she lovingly licked the blood from the stump of his missing finger. At the same time, she gently took the gift of the freshly flayed skin of her husband’s dead friend and also brought it to her lips.
The khan now saw what his obsession for a woman as beautiful as the red blood on white snow had brought him—only now it was red human blood, his own blood, dripping onto the snow white fat of his former friend. She gently licked the skin in the same way that she had licked her husband’s bleeding finger, and then she swallowed the grease of the skin together with the blood of her husband.
“Although I am a woman,” she proclaimed to her husband. “I have avenged the vengeance of my husband. When I die, there will be no regret.”
Only now did the khan fully comprehend the evil of his own deeds, and on account of his evil sins, his family would pay dearly. The queen had avenged the crime against her, but that act proved to be no more than the opening of the rabbit’s curse on the royal family and the Mongol nation. They would now fight among themselves, one Mongol tribe against another, clan against clan, sister against brother, mother against son, husband against wife, and daughter against father.
The sordid tale of Elbeg Khan summarizes, as well as any other explanation, the degenerate state of the Borijin clan. Their Mongol nation seemed to be gasping through a protracted death. The Mongol power appeared to have at last entered its final phase. On the fertile steppe where millions of animals once roamed, now hunger stalked the few surviving animals and threatened the nomads who depended on them. The clans and tribes moved in scattered groups across a once beautiful landscape now ravaged by war and overgrazing and through forests decimated by the returning royal court. Animals starved amid the environmental degradation, and roving gangs of thugs seized the animals that survived. The returning invaders abided by neither Mongol custom nor law. It was not yet the end of time, but surely the end could not be far away. A constant stream of Mongols made their way across the Gobi to surrender to the Ming Dynasty and seek jobs as soldiers or border administrators.
Gangs of former foreign guards and their Mongol allies of the moment seized rival Borijin boys to proclaim them khan or to mock them and degrade them as objects of derision, exploitation, and torture. They tossed the title of Great Khan back and forth from one member of the Borijin clan to another the way that horsemen tossed around the carcass of a goat in a game of tribal polo. Men who once would have laid down their lives for their Borijin leader now made and replaced the Great Khans on any whim.
The daughters of queens who once set out from Mongolia to rule the world now served as nothing more than tools of amusement and instruments of competition among the basest of men. Like looters of the treasury playing with jewels as though they were dice, the powerful men of the moment seized Borijin girls to trade among one another as little more than sexual toys. After all, if the Great Khan was not above raping his son’s wife, then why should any man refrain from whatever lust might strike his heart?
The Mongol nation and the once glorious Golden Family sank so low and suffered so much abuse that it would possibly have been a blessing for the whole family to have died and the name of the nation to have disappeared into the wind like the cold ashes of an abandoned camp. So many nomadic nations had risen, fallen, and disappeared in the thousands of years since humans first learned to herd animals and turn the sea of grass into sustenance. The torn and neglected banner of the nation was tattered and scattered like clumps of wool stuck in the brown grass. Even the horses seemed too exhausted to raise a cloud of dust. In the pages of history, the passing of yet one more such nation, even one once as powerful and important as the Mongols, hardly would have seemed surprising.
Yet amid all the depravity and defeat, one woman held her ground, kept her focus, and looked forward to a day when the nation might be reassembled, the flags raised again, and dignity restored to the royal clan. Like a small thread on which the fate of the Mongol nation fluttered, she alone sustained its spirit. She was Samur, the daughter of Elbeg Khan by birth, but the true daughter of Genghis Khan in spirit, strength, and sheer stubbornness.
She was born in the 1380s, in the first Borijin generation to be reared back in Mongolia after the expulsion from China. Samur carried the Chinese-derived title gunj, which the Mongols had adopted during their stay in China and substituted for the older Mongolian title of beki previously used for princesses. Samur Gunj began life as a victim of all the corruption and chaos engulfing the Mongol nation and her Golden Family. Her debut into world history came in the midst of the sordid affair of her father with his daughter-in-law.
After her father, Elbeg Khan, killed his ally and councillor Dayuu, he realized what a tactical error it had been, even though he believed it was morally justified. In a desperate effort to maintain his office of khan and avoid being killed in revenge for what he had done, Elbeg gave his young daughter Samur to the dead man’s son as a peace offering and compensation for the killing. By receiving Princess Samur as a wife, Dayuu’s son also received his dead father’s title and command of the Oirat in western Mongolia.
Elbeg Khan’s most dangerous enemy, however, was not among outside rivals and former allies; it was within his own family. Samur’s mother was Elbeg’s senior wife, Kobeguntai. She had become deeply resentful when her husband took his new young wife, and now he took her daughter from her to pay off the political debts incurred by his sins. She found a supporter of her own, killed Elbeg Khan, married her co-conspirator, and left the nation adrift without a khan. The turmoil resulting from the Great Khan’s terrible deeds would last for nearly a century.
At no moment in this long ordeal of the coming decades would Samur hold supreme power anywhere; yet throughout it, she held the survival of the nation in her hands. Her actions determined its fate as she faced crisis after crisis. For more than half a century, Samur fought unsuccessfully to reunite the Mongol nation and to free her male relatives in the Borijin clan from their captivity by their own guards, who perpetually fought among themselves for the meager riches left in the country. Her husband held the office of taishi of the Oirat, and when he died in the struggle to liberate the Mongols, her son stepped forward to take the title and resume the battle.
From roughly 1400 until 1450, while the so-called Great Khans were held prisoner of various strongmen, she formed a powerful force based in the Oirat tribes in western Mongolia and constantly, if vainly, attempted to resuscitate the Mongol royal family and liberate them from their captivity. She encouraged her husband to mount repeated campaigns to rescue the nominal Great Khan from his captors, and when her husband was killed in this effort, she encouraged her son in the same pursuit until he too was killed.
The Golden Clan established by Genghis Khan had completely lost control of the reins of state, and they were held captive by an unusual assortment of men. Their captors had Mongolian names, spoke the Mongol language, wore Mongol clothes, sometimes had Mongol wives, and in general, had become an intimate part of Mongol society. Yet they remained quite different from the Mongols. These men derived from an odd mixture of captives whom the Mongols had brought back from Ossetia, Russia, Ukraine, and other parts of Europe to be their imperial guards, but who, over time, had taken control of the royal family.