The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire
Jack Weatherford
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The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire
Jack Weatherford
The Mongol queens of the thirteenth century ruled the largest empire the world has ever known. Yet sometime near the end of the century, censors cut a section from The Secret History of the Mongols, leaving a single tantalizing quote from Genghis “Let us reward our female offspring.” Only this hint of a father’s legacy for his daughters remained of a much larger story. The queens of the Silk Route turned their father’s conquests into the world’s first truly international empire, fostering trade, education, and religion throughout their territories and creating an economic system that stretched from the Pacific to the Mediterranean. Outlandish stories of these powerful queens trickled out of the Empire, shocking the citizens of Europe and and the Islamic world. After Genghis Khan’s death in 1227, conflicts erupted between his daughters and his daughters-in-law; what began as a war between powerful women soon became a war against women in power as brother turned against sister, son against mother. At the end of this epic struggle, the dynasty of the Mongol queens had seemingly been extinguished forever, as even their names were erased from the historical record.. One of the most unusual and important warrior queens of history arose to avenge the wrongs, rescue the tattered shreds of the Mongol Empire, and restore order to a shattered world. Putting on her quiver and picking up her bow, Queen Mandhuhai led her soldiers through victory after victory. In her thirties she married a seventeen-year-old prince, and she bore eight children in the midst of a career spent fighting the Ming Dynasty of China on one side and a series of Muslim warlords on the other. Her unprecedented success on the battlefield provoked the Chinese into the most frantic and expensive phase of wall building in history. Charging into battle even while pregnant, she fought to reassemble the Mongol Nation of Genghis Khan and to preserve it for her own children to rule in peace. At the conclusion of his magnificently researched and ground-breaking narrative, Weatherford notes that, despite their mystery and the efforts to erase them from our collective memory, the deeds of these Mongol queens inspired great artists from Chaucer and Milton to Goethe and Puccini, and so their stories live on today. With The Secret History of the Mongol Queens , Jack Weatherford restores the queens’ missing chapter to the annals of history.
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0This is how you write historical non-fiction. This is definitely how you write about badass women in history.
I honestly feel kind of bad as a feminist for not knowing about Mongol women earlier. Not that the early Mongols were feminists, per se, but the treatment and history of women is so vastly different from almost any historical culture that I've read about--it should be a huge point in women's history. We all know about Genghis Khan (or at least we all should). But what of his wives, his daughters, his female descendants?
The book reads like a novel; and part of that is because Mongolian history is so fascinating. I'm not just saying that. There is a literal "Moses in the basket"-type story going on at one point except, oh, wait, it happened thousands of years later and is on historical record. Some of it reads like a fairy tale, though Weatherford is always up front about where the history is lacking and where he has to make assumptions.
The thing about this society is that it wasn't equal, but women were still remarkable political players. (And sexual politics were vastly different from those of their European counterparts. One happy marriage was between a woman who had basically raised her husband since he was seven, with the union being consummated when he was seventeen and she thirty-three. They went on to have eight children, including three sets of twins.) Genghis Khan fully expected his daughters to be his representatives in the courts he sent them off to, and they thus exhibited notable power.
Of course, men still ultimately became khans and Genghis happened to be a somewhat shitty dad. So inevitably, upon his death, his kingdom fell apart. And that's where the story gets really interesting. It stretches across centuries, with one fascinating woman after the next. (Like, dude. There are at least five historical fiction novels that could be made out of these stories.)
Just read it. You'll be happy you did.
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