The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [112]
Manduhai did not have the luxury or the problems of so many extra sons. She had but this one boy, and she was determined to make him into a leader in war and in peace.
She kept him constantly close to her and guarded and sheltered him without delegating that responsibility to anyone. In the words of the The Jewel Translucent, Manduhai “protected her jewel-like son.” She sought divine blessings for him, and “she truthfully and strongly prayed” to the Eternal Blue Sky: “Lord Tengri, you must watch out for sinful and evil-thinking people!” Constantly but “fearfully she watched over and kept safe her important son.” Through her actions she saved the lineage of Genghis Khan, or in the more ornate phrasing of the Buddhist chroniclers, she facilitated “the spreading of the wish-granting, jewel-like Borijin Golden Clan.” In this way, “by protecting the infallible Dayan Khan, she lit the Borijin hearth fire.”
Manduhai may have united the Mongols under Dayan Khan, but she had not lessened the threat from the enemies outside Mongolia. The Ming Dynasty in China, to the southeast of Mongolia, and the warlords of the Silk Route to the southwest each claimed the right to rule the Mongols, and each eagerly sought to exercise that right. Whoever controlled the Mongols had access to the richest supply of horses anywhere on Earth. For the merchants of the oases, such a treasure promised infinite riches in trade. For the Ming military, access to the horses would provide them with the basis for a larger and more powerful cavalry.
Manduhai’s western campaign captured the attention of both rivals. They welcomed the increased turbulence in the Mongol steppes, but the victory of Manduhai and her success at uniting the fractious eastern and western Mongols created a new source of concern for them. Both the warlords and the Chinese still smarted from the pains inflicted on them and the capture of their leaders when Esen nearly united the Mongols. Both wanted to avoid a repeat of those episodes.
While strengthening military control over the Mongols, Manduhai’s victories jeopardized existing commercial links. Mongolia had no need to be united if the result was to be left alone in isolation without trade and commerce. Unlike the first Mongols, who only needed a few trade goods such as metal, Mongols of the fifteenth century required commodities from cloth and incense to tea and medicines. The political turmoil and social upheaval since the fall of the Mongol Empire had done nothing to lessen Mongol appetites for the variety of goods they had learned about during the empire’s height.
The only thing that the Mongol steppe could produce in substantial excess was animals. The Mongols produced many times the number of animals that they needed for their own subsistence, but they had no one with whom they could trade except the Chinese. The civilizations of Central Asia and Europe lay much too far away, and this left only the Chinese trade as the way that the Mongols could convert their extensive animal production into any other type of goods.
In response to the new round of potentially threatening behavior from the tribes on the Mongolian Plateau, the Ming court in Beijing tried to cut off, or at least control strictly, trade with the Mongols. The lack of trade created a widespread and persistent scarcity of luxury goods for the Mongols, but for the Chinese it created a small but very specific problem. Chinese farmers devoted almost all arable land to the production of crops and to a few animals, such as pigs and chickens, that could live from the scraps of an agricultural society. In so doing, in order to irrigate and plant the fields, they destroyed the pasturelands where horses might graze.
Most Chinese did not care about