The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [44]
His principal wife, Borte, had too many responsibilities and too large a family to go with him, but on each campaign he chose one of his other three wives to accompany him. For this campaign he chose Yesui Khatun, the Tatar queen and younger sister of the second-ranking queen, Yesugen. The fourth wife, Khulan, had become the emotional favorite of his old age, but he chose Yesui because of her superior intellect and better education. It turned out to be a prescient choice.
Soon after beginning the campaign, Genghis Khan fell ill, and, unable to lead the campaign but unwilling to leave the front, he relied on Yesui to administer the government without either his enemies or his soldiers knowing of his debilitating condition.
In his final public words before his death, Genghis Khan addressed his nation as “My people of the Five Colors and Four Foreign Lands.” The five colors referred to the Mongol territories he left to the five men of his family—his four sons and one surviving brother. The four foreign lands were the kingdoms of his four daughters.
At the end of his final talk, one of his retainers was quoted as making a dark prophecy. “The jade crystal that is your realm will shatter,” he said. “Your many people brought together and collected together, will be scattered in all directions. Your lofty rule will be abased.”
Upon hearing these words, Genghis Khan asked his people to help his children whom he was leaving behind, to offer them “water in the desert” and “a road through the mountains.” He ended with the plea of his people and his descendants to “guard the good rule of the future.”
“I leave you the greatest empire in the world,” he said to his children. “You are the peaceable possessors of it.” He begged his children to preserve his empire by remaining united: “Be then as but one tongue and one soul.”
Genghis Khan greatly disliked cities, and usually just before a city surrendered, even after the hardest-fought campaigns, he departed from the scene to begin the next campaign while his officers finished the last one. Thus it was, in August 1227, just prior to the fall of the Tangut capital and the surrender of their khan, that the spirit of Genghis Khan abandoned his body. Genghis Khan’s followers took his body back to the sacred mountain in Mongolia for burial in a hidden place, but they erected his sulde, the “spirit banners” made from the manes of his horses, to blow eternally in the wind.
His four wives had their territories occupying most of Central Mongolia. His son Ogodei acquired western Mongolia; Chaghatai received Central Asia. Tolui, the youngest son, received the ancestral homeland of eastern Mongolia. Jochi, the eldest son and the one whose brothers doubted that he was their father’s son, had already died, but his heirs received Russia, the most distant part of the empire, in the hope of keeping them far removed from the rest of the family who did not recognize their father’s legitimacy.
The daughters also had their lands: Checheyigen ruled the Oirat territory of Siberia. Alaqai ruled northern China. Al-Altun ruled the Uighur. Presumably Tolai was still alive with the Karluk, but too little is known about her fate. Yesui Khatun ruled the Tangut in addition to her original ordo along the Tuul River of Mongolia.
Genghis Khan left his Mongol nation rich and well protected.
Genghis Khan used sequences of spiritually meaningful numbers to organize his empire. Each number had a particular use: a social and cultural role in addition to its numerical value. Practical matters were organized in even numbers: two shafts of the cart or ten men to a military unit. Odd numbers held much greater supernatural power. Seven was to be avoided whenever possible, but nine and thirteen were the two most important numbers for him.
Genghis Khan’s father was named Yesugei, which meant “With Nines,” a name thought to bestow good fortune because its bearer would always be at the center of the eight directions and thus never be lost.
Mongols are often called