The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [26]
“You are going to pitch a tent there,” he told her, “but do not be a stranger in your mother-in-law’s family!” The omission of the name, or any mention of her husband or his father’s lineage, further indicated that not only would the new son-in-law surrender power over the Oirat, but he would not even be living among them in his homeland. He would be removed to follow Genghis Khan and fight with the Mongol army, leaving Checheyigen there among her husband’s female relatives.
As usual in the nuptial edicts, Genghis Khan added some more personal advice. “Be sincere always,” he was quoted as saying. “Maintain your soul as one in the night and the day.” And with fatherly concern he added, “Get up early and go to bed late.”
Checheyigen’s position over the Oirat gave the Mongols control of the northern trade routes all the way into the Arctic. Even with this new source of trade goods, Genghis Khan still needed access into the Silk Route.
The “Silk Route” or “Silk Road” referred to the network of trade connections between the three main civilizations of China, India, and the Mediterranean, with the Muslim countries dominating the center of this intercontinental triangle. The core consisted of some five thousand miles, but the inclusion of alternative, secondary, and connecting routes doubled or tripled the size. In the east, the route began with the ancient Chinese city of Xian, but in the west, where the route fingered out into dozens of streams, almost any major Mediterranean or Indian city could be called the termination point.
Trade routes usually follow the path of least geographic resistance. They move around mountains and deserts when possible. Travelers on the Silk Route had to cross two difficult barriers in western China: the Tianshan Mountains and the treacherous Taklamakan Desert. Farther to the east, they faced two more equally formidable obstacles in the Tibetan Plateau and the Mongolian Plateau, but fortunately for the traders, a narrow strip of lowland called the Gansu Corridor runs between the two, and virtually all trade funneled through this area like water through a canyon. The only place that the Silk Route is actually a single route is the easternmost area of the roughly one thousand miles from Dunhuang into the heartland of China via Xian.
Whoever commanded this passageway held a stranglehold on the entire Silk Route. Through millennia, the three main contenders had been the Chinese on one side and the Turkic and Tibetan tribes on the other. At the time of Genghis Khan’s rise to power in Mongolia, the Tangut occupied the corridor and doggedly defended their control of the lucrative trade routes.
The Tangut, who referred to themselves as the Great White Nation, were essentially a Tibetan people who had come down off their high plateau in the tenth century, giving up nomadic herding to exploit the trade corridor. In contrast to the earlier Central Asian traders such as the Sogdians, the Tangut acquired a heavy overlay of Chinese civilization, as exemplified in their use of their own language written with Chinese characters. They were dedicated Buddhists resisting the press of Islam along the Silk Route, but within Buddhism, they encouraged a wide diversity of theological schools and institutions.
The Tangut recognized that Genghis Khan was not a merchant, but a conqueror seeking to control the trade. As soon as he united the steppe, he dispatched forces south to attack the Tangut cities closest to the Mongol nation.