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By Root 834 0

khans gave away jewels and treasures with little evidence of covetousness, they locked their documents inside the treasury and kept them closely guarded. As Persian chronicler Rashid al-Din wrote in the thirteenth century: “From age to age, they have kept their true history in Mongolian expression and script, unorganized and disarranged, chapter by chapter, scattered in treasuries, hidden from the gaze of strangers and specialists, and no one was allowed access to learn of it.” Both the secrecy of the records and the apparent chaos in which they were kept served the purposes of the rulers. With such an unorganized history, the person who controlled the treasury of documents could pick and choose among the papers and hide or release parts as served some political agenda of the moment. If a leader needed to discredit a rival or find an excuse to punish someone, there was always some piece of incriminating evidence that could be pulled from the treasury. Following the example of Genghis Khan, the early Mongol rulers clearly recognized that knowledge constituted their most potent weapon, and controlling the flow of information served as their organizing principle.

Genghis Khan sired four self-indulgent sons who proved good at drinking, mediocre in fighting, and poor at everything else; yet their names live on despite the damage they did to their father’s empire. Although Genghis Khan recognized the superior leadership abilities of his daughters and left them strategically important parts of his empire, today we cannot even be certain how many daughters he had. In their lifetime they could not be ignored, but when they left the scene, history closed the door behind them and let the dust of centuries cover their tracks. Those Mongol queens were too unusual, too difficult to understand or explain. It seemed more convenient just to erase them.

Around the world, the influential dynasties of history exhibit a certain uniformity in their quest for power, and they distinguish themselves from one another primarily through personal foibles, dietary preferences, sexual proclivities, spiritual callings, and other strange twists of character. But none followed a destiny quite like that of the female heirs of Genghis Khan. As in every dynasty, some rank as heroes, others as villains, and most as some combination of the two.

Rashid al-Din wrote that “there are many stories about these daughters.” Yet those stories disappeared. We may never find definitive accounts for all seven or eight of Genghis Khan’s daughters, but we can reassemble the stories of most of them. Through the generations, his female heirs sometimes ruled, and sometimes they contested the rule of their brothers and male cousins. Never before or since have women exercised so much power over so many people and ruled so much territory for as long as these women did.

References to Genghis Khan’s daughters have come down to us in a jumble of names and titles with a stupefying array of spellings, according to how each sounded to the Chinese, Persians, Armenians, Russians, Turks, or Italians who wrote their stories. Each source differs on the number of daughters. The Secret History identifies eight sons-in-law for Genghis Khan and his wife Borte in the pivotal year 1206, and it further identifies each of them as a commander of a thousand troops. The list of sons-in-law is longer than the list of daughters, due in part to multiple marriages and also to the efforts of more distant relatives by marriage to raise their status and apparent closeness to Genghis Khan in the official record.

Through the generations, Mongol chroniclers and scholars dropped the names of Genghis Khan’s daughters one by one from their accounts. By the time of the Buddhist chroniclers of the seventeenth century, the number of remembered daughters had dwindled to only one, and then even she disappeared in the contorted chronicles that followed.

Four became ruling queens of their own countries and commanded large regiments of soldiers. At least one became literate, but several supported scholars, schools,