Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World - Jack Weatherford [27]
The Tayichiud band had several households of subordinate lineages, as well as war captives, living with them as their servants, and it was to these servant families that Temujin was turned over as a prisoner. Unlike the Tayichiud, who treated him with disdain, he found sympathy and comfort among these families when they took him into their gers at night. Protected from the view of the Tayichiud leaders, they not only shared food with him, but in one episode highlighted in the Secret History, an old woman gently tended the raw wounds cut into his neck by the cangue. The children of the family also persuaded their father to violate his orders by removing the cangue at night, to let Temujin rest more peacefully.
The story of Temujin’s escape from this impossible situation is further testament to his character, which would shape his rise to power. One day while the Tayichiud men got drunk and Temujin had been assigned to the care of a simpleminded and physically weak boy, the captive suddenly swung the cangue around violently, struck the boy’s head with it, and knocked him out. Rather than face almost certain death by fleeing on foot across the steppe wearing the cangue, he hid in a clump of weeds in a nearby river. Shortly after a search began, he was quickly spotted by the father of the family that had treated him kindly. Rather than sounding an alarm, the old man told him to flee when darkness fell. After dark, Temujin left the river, but did not flee. He slowly made his way to the old man’s ger and entered it, much to the horror, and danger, of the family. But despite the great risk to their own lives, the reluctant hosts removed the cangue and burned it. They hid Temujin in a pile of wool during the next day when the Tayichiud resumed their hunt for him. That night, they sent him on his way, and despite their poverty, cooked a lamb for him and gave him a horse with which he managed to elude his trackers for the long flight back to his mother’s distant and isolated camp.
For a poor family to risk their lives to help him and to give him such valuable resources, Temujin must have had some special attraction or ability. Meanwhile, this humble family impressed him as well. The Tayichiud, with whom he shared a close kinship tie, had once put his family out to die and now appeared eager to kill him. This other family, which had no kinship tie to him, proved willing to risk their lives to help him. This episode seems to have instilled in him not only a distrust of higher-ranking people, but also the conviction that some people, even those outside his clan, could indeed be trusted as if they were family. In later life, he would judge others primarily by their actions toward him and not according to their kinship bonds, a revolutionary concept in steppe society.
Mongol traditions and sources acknowledge only this one brief period of capture and enslavement of Temujin, but a contemporary Chinese chronicler wrote that Temujin endured more than ten years in slavery. He may have been repeatedly enslaved, or this episode may have lasted much longer than the Secret History suggests. Some scholars suspect that such a long period of enslavement accounts for the glaring absence of detailed information on his childhood. In later years, the time of enslavement would have been an episode of shame for Genghis Khan, but even more importantly would have been a tremendous danger