The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [52]
Fatima’s fate was far worse. Guyuk hated her and wanted a public confession that she had bewitched his mother. He brought her to his court, naked and bound. Although Genghis Khan had forbidden the use of torture as part of a trial or as a punishment, Guyuk found a simple way around that law on the grounds that Fatima was not a Mongol, much less a member of the royal clan. He made her torture into a public spectacle as interrogators beat and burned her in ways designed to inflict the greatest pain without shedding her blood, which might pollute the court. For days and nights the ordeal continued, with brief periods of rest so that she might regain enough strength to suffer yet another round.
Other women may have been arrested at this point and brought to trial as well. “And then they sent also for their ladies,” wrote the French envoy Rubruck in order that “they might all be whipped with burning brands to make them confess. And when they had confessed, they were put to death.” Who they were or to what they confessed remains unknown.
In the end Fatima also confessed to every sin and crime that her torturers demanded, but then rather than letting her just die from her wounds or executing her quickly, Guyuk subjected her to one final ordeal. He ordered the torturers to sew up every orifice of her body to ensure the most agonizing death possible. Wrapping her carefully in felt to prevent blood escaping from the stitches, the executioners then threw Fatima into the river.
Fortunately for Mongolia and the world, Guyuk died a little more than a year later. The circumstances were not clear, but he had accumulated too many enemies to speculate on which one may have brought his life to a close. In the continuing political struggles at the center of the empire, the fringes began to unravel. With his limitless love of colorful metaphors, Juvaini wrote: “The affairs of the world had been diverted from the path of rectitude and the reins of commerce and fair dealing turned aside from the highway of righteousness.” He described the land as being in darkness, “and the cup of the world was filled to the brim with the drink of iniquity.” The Mongol people and their subjects, “dragged now this way, now that, were at their wits’ end, for they had neither the endurance to stay nor did they know of a place to which they might flee.”
Ogodei’s incompetent reign had ended with the cruel rape of the Oirat girls; Guyuk’s sadistic reign began with the death of his mother and the public torture of Fatima. Rather than satisfying some mysterious need for revenge, these two episodes had unleashed the wicked forces of total moral corruption. The lines of authority and power shifted rapidly and are difficult to discern with precision yet certain patterns seem clear. While many men faced execution or highly suspicious deaths, once powerful women increasingly bore the brunt of the violence. Rashid al-Din recorded, with seeming approval, that when one of Chaghatai’s queens disagreed with a minister in her husband’s court, the minister publicly chastised and humiliated her. “You are a woman,” he told her, and therefore “have no say in this matter.”
No one defended the queen, and the minister continued his campaign to limit the power of the women in the court. After rebuking the queen, the minister executed one of Chaghatai’s daughters-in-law for adultery without any legal proceeding or requesting permission from anyone. Genghis Khan had left a law that no member of the family, the Altan Urug, could be executed without the agreement of a representative from each branch of the family. The minister made clear that this law did not apply to daughters-in-law. The execution of the daughter-in-law