The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [49]
In her position as empress, Toregene was by far the most powerful of all the women, but she provoked angry opposition within the Mongol court on two primary accounts. She sought to increase tax revenues from wherever she could, but in a seemingly contradictory policy, she also sought to diminish the powers of the central administration, or at least to reduce the authority and power of the ministers and officials who managed the imperial court and oversaw the bureaucracy. In 1240, a dispute arose over how to produce more tax revenue from northern China, and Ogodei moved in Mahmud Yalavach, one of his experienced Muslim administrators from Central Asia, to take over as supreme judge. Toregene, however, did not like him, and at the same time she had one of her favorites, Abd-ur-Rahman, appointed as chief tax collector. The resulting rivalry sustained enormous dissension for twenty years.
In 1241, Ogodei died, probably paralyzed from an alcoholic binge. Toregene assumed complete power over the Mongol Empire as yeke khatun. In pursuit of her own policies, she dismissed all her late husband’s ministers and replaced them with her own. Despite being the mother of five sons, she chose not to move them into high positions of critical importance in her new government. Instead, the highest position went to another foreign woman, who had been a servant in Toregene’s household. She was Fatima, a Shiite Muslim Tajik or Persian captive from the Middle Eastern campaign. The Persian chronicler Juvaini, who seemingly disapproved of women involved in politics, wrote that Fatima enjoyed constant access to Toregene’s tent, and she “became the sharer of intimate confidences and the depository of hidden secrets.” Fatima played a political role while the older “ministers were debarred from executing business, and she was free to issue commands and prohibitions.” So enormous was Fatima’s reputed power that the Persian chroniclers referred to her as a khatun, a “queen,” of the Mongols.
Toregene maintained her nomadic court in the vicinity of the capital city, Karakorum, built by her late husband in the fertile steppes near the Khangai Mountains and adjacent to the Orkhon River in central Mongolia. By Mongol standards, the area encompassed a beautiful, well-watered series of steppes, covered with green pastures in the summer and providing nearby mountains to shelter the herders and their animals in the harsh winter; for visitors, the area presented untold hardships. One of the educated Persian officials working with the Mongols wrote of Karakorum: “And the wind has pitched over our heads tents of snow without ropes or poles. Its arrows penetrate our clothes like an arrow shot by a person of great bulk.”
The newly erected capital of Karakorum consisted of a small cluster of buildings constructed in both Chinese and Muslim styles, but they were hardly more than a series of warehouses for the tribute sent from around the empire. The city also provided housing and work space for the numerous captured workmen producing goods for Ogodei’s followers, and it contained a large contingent of foreign clerks translating documents and helping to handle the poorly organized administration of the massive empire.
With the usual Mongol dread of solid walls of wood or stone, Ogodei always lived in his ger camp, which moved four times a year in a large