The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [111]
Victory was often marked by imposition of some relatively unimportant but symbolically meaningful laws on the defeated. The Yellow Chronicle of the Oirat (Shira Tughuji) listed several such punitive laws issued by Manduhai after her victory. She limited the crest on the Oirat helmets to a length of two fingers. They could not call any ger in their land an ordon, the Mongol word for palace; and when in the presence of khans, they had to sit on their knees.
The text also mentions a law that the Oirat could no longer eat with a knife but instead had to gnaw their meat. Such a law probably never existed, but Manduhai may have confiscated their knives as a security measure, thereby temporarily depriving them of knives for eating meat until they were again allowed to acquire them.
Manduhai had reunited the Mongols, and she now controlled the strategic area of Zavkhan, necessary to assert her power over the west. Without that control, she would face the dangers posed by a rebel tribe, foreign warlords, or even the possibility of wealthy merchants luring her followers away. Une-Bolod gave her control of the east, and now she had added control of the west.
In addition to its strategic importance, the western campaign against the Oirat was a notable propaganda victory, demonstrating that Manduhai had the blessing of the Shrine of the First Queen and the Eternal Blue Sky. Manduhai showed that she was in control of her country. The khan may have been a small boy in a box, but her strength and determination inspired confidence. For the first time in more than a century, a united and strong central government had control of Mongolia. Manduhai had succeeded in uniting western and eastern Mongolia under the Borijin clan for the first time since Elbeg Khan’s fateful encounter with the rabbit in 1399, nearly a century earlier.
Going to war in a basket box may have been an odd way for the young Dayan Khan to grow up, but after the trauma of his earliest years, Manduhai provided the boy with a stable and secure, albeit unusual, childhood. For much of the prior centuries, the domineering warlords had kept a sequence of boy khans as prisoners, whom they exploited, abused, and humiliated. The warlords certainly showed no interest in educating or preparing these boys for leadership because they would never lead. No one expected any of the boys to live to become a fully functioning adult, much less the ruling khan. At most, a boy might be required to reproduce a male heir before being dispatched, or some other male relatives could be substituted as khan or as progenitor.
From the start, Manduhai’s actions made clear that she planned for Dayan Khan to rule. He would be a fully functioning and ruling khan, not a figurehead. Manduhai could easily have left him under the charge of nurses or have built a small, isolated camp for him in one of the many canyons of the Gobi or the Altai Mountains. She could have sent him to live in the remote steppe where she had lived with her first husband, Manduul. Instead, they bore the campaign hardships together. Although we have no quotes from him at this time in his life, he well might have said the same words that Genghis Khan said to one of his most loyal followers: “When it was wet, we bore the wet together, when it was cold, we bore the cold together.”
Manduhai seemed determined not to repeat the painful mistake of Genghis Khan, who had been a genius in war, politics, and governing but