The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [47]
The chronicles explain that the episode was punishment against the Oirat for not sending girls for Ogodei’s harem. Ogodei’s debauched appetites at this stage of his life, however, favored alcohol over girls, and while this excuse may have been proffered, the rape of the Oirat virgins was part of a much larger assault against the power of Genghis Khan’s daughters and their lineages. Depraved as the violence against the girls was, it did not spring from the mindless lust of a wicked old man. The atrocity grew from a calculating greed and the desire to expand Ogodei’s wealth and power. He used this ordeal to seize the lands of his sister Checheyigen, who most likely had recently died. This act brought the Oirat under Ogodei’s control.
Many of the girls raped that day had been born after the death of Genghis Khan in 1227. They lived in a much different Mongol Empire from the one he founded and left to his people, and the mass rapes, although only a decade later, showed how quickly the world was changing.
The rape of the Oirat girls was the opening move in a long political, diplomatic, and terror campaign against the women of Genghis Khan’s Borijin clan. Through the attack, Ogodei was taking away the powers left to his sister and imposing his own authority over her lands, her people, and her family. His crime was the beginning of the ruination of everything that his father had accomplished for his family and nation. Without the father’s restraining hand, the stronger of his children began to pick off the weaker ones.
Genghis Khan’s unusual system of political organization had placed Ogodei in the geographic center, surrounded by the territories of his brothers and sisters. The empire as a whole continued growing at the outer edges, but the central location of Ogodei’s personal holdings prevented him from expanding without moving into the territory of his siblings. He began encroaching on their lands almost as soon as he came to power. Since he outranked them as Great Khan, it was hard to resist him. The Oirat kingdom of Checheyigen disappeared first, but the lands of the other sisters would soon follow. The unprecedented violence Ogodei had committed against the family of one sister would now expand into a struggle against all of them.
Ogodei managed to find or invent a variety of excuses to expand his power at the expense of other members of the Borijin royal family. He moved into the territory of his father’s widows Yesui and Yesugen in the Khangai Mountains and along the Tuul River. As the youngest son, his brother Tolui, had inherited their mother’s land on the Kherlen, but Ogodei had tried to take it as well after Tolui died.
One day in 1232, the forty-three-year-old Tolui had stumbled out of his ger and in a drunken tirade collapsed and died. Some observers surmised that Ogodei had orchestrated the death with the help of shamans who drugged the alcoholic Tolui. No matter the cause, Ogodei immediately sought to benefit from his brother’s death by arranging a marriage for his son Guyuk with Tolui’s widow Sorkhokhtani. Knowing precisely what Ogodei was trying to do, she politely, but firmly, refused on the grounds of devoting her life to her four sons, but the refusal meant that she could never marry anyone else.
Having failed to gain the eastern lands through this marriage strategy, Ogodei sent Guyuk on a European campaign under the leadership of his cousin, Jochi’s son Batu, who was expanding his family’s holdings from Russia into Poland and Hungary up to the borders of the German states, and south into the Balkans. The plan, later denied by Ogodei after it failed, seemed to have been for Guyuk to take control of some of the new territories for himself, thereby giving Ogodei’s family a hold in Europe from which they could slowly absorb the lands of their relatives who controlled Russia. Batu firmly rejected Guyuk’s attempts to claim part of the conquests, and after a night of