The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [45]
His personal guard originally consisted of eight hundred by day and eight hundred by night. After 1206 he adopted the older Turkic decimal system of organizing the lower military ranks into units of ten, building to the largest units of ten thousand. At this time he also increased his guard to ten thousand, but he arranged the army into eight units; the guard around him became the ninth.
In his arrangement of family government, he divided power and responsibility among eight of his children—four sons and four daughters. He had other sons and daughters, but he placed the future of the empire in the hands of these eight. Four sons held the steppes of the nomads, four daughters held the sedentary kingdoms, and Genghis Khan, the ninth in the system, ruled over them all. The system was simple, practical, and elegant. With the placement of four of his daughters as queens and four of his sons as khans, Genghis Khan had fulfilled the destiny bestowed upon him by his father’s name.
Genghis Khan, however, sought to surpass his father, and for this the number thirteen had a special, but largely secret, importance for him. In the formation of his nation in 1206, he organized the khuriltai, and thereby the empire, into thirteen camps, and he sometimes referred to his nation as the Thirteen Ordos, or Thirteen Hordes. His four dowager queens controlled the territory surrounding the mountain in the first circle, and then in the outer circle lay the territories of his four daughters and four sons. Thus in death, precisely as at the moment of creating his empire, Genghis Khan was in the center, the thirteenth position.
In the summer of 1229, two years after Genghis Khan’s death, all his offspring and the other officials of the Mongol Empire gathered to ratify Ogodei, the third son, as the Great Khan. The area of the 1206 khuriltai now lay a little too close to Genghis Khan’s burial site on Mount Burkhan Khaldun, but the family still wanted to be near to the area. Ogodei chose an open steppe on the Kherlen River, a little to the south of the original khuriltai, near a spring where, according to oral tradition, his mother had nursed him, and possibly where he was born.
All the officials, generals, and Borijin clan members came. The daughters and the sons of Genghis Khan affirmed Ogodei, since their father had told them to do so. He had been chosen not because he was the smartest or the bravest, but because he was the most congenial to the largest number of people in the family, a situation created, at least in part, by his apparently being the heaviest drinker of all the heavy-drinking sons.
During the summer, as the family and officials gathered at Khodoe Aral, the supreme judge, the Tatar orphan raised by Mother Hoelun, began to write down the history of the Mongols. He gathered the stories and legends of the past, compiled the accounts of witnesses to the life of Genghis Khan, and wrote down his own memories. If he gave the record a title, it was lost, but it became known eventually as The Secret History of the Mongols.
At the end of the summer, Ogodei took his position at the geographic center of Mongolia, from where he would preside as the Great Khan over the eight kingdoms that constituted the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan. Despite the mediocrity of Ogodei’s leadership, the generals of Genghis Khan still commanded the army. With them in charge of the military