The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [55]
In a show trial similar to the one endured by Fatima, Oghul Ghaimish had to face her accusers naked, her hands sewn together with strips of rawhide. The ordeal was more public torture and interrogation than a judicial proceeding, and other women of the Ogodei branch of the family also had to face similar torture and judgment. The outcome was always the same. The condemned woman was executed in some gruesome manner and thrown into the river.
Mongke conducted the trial of the men. He sat on a chair in front of a shrine to Genghis Khan and had each man brought in for questioning. Since it was still, at least for now, against the law of Genghis Khan to torture a member of the Borijin family, Mongke ordered that their retainers be brought in and beaten to make them confess the crimes of their former masters. As part of the spectacle, one of the ministers decided or was forced to commit suicide with his own sword during the proceedings. Tanggis, an Oirat son-in-law of the late Guyuk, was beaten until the flesh fell from his thighs; yet he was a lucky one, because he survived. In yet another sign of how far they had drifted from the laws of Genghis Khan, the new generation of Mongol rulers seems to have lost its abhorrence of public bloodletting.
After the main trials in the central Mongol court concluded, regional officials were ordered to hold similar trials of members of Ogodei’s lineage and their former administrators. The purge reached a climax in a literal hunt for dissenters who had escaped from the court to the countryside and found refuge from the first round of reprisals. In the traditional hunts, men formed a large circle, and by tightening it drove the prey toward the center for slaughter. In this enormous hunt, Mongke’s court ordered ten units of ten thousand men each to sweep through the land in a large military formation, searching for sympathizers of the deposed branch of the family. The hunt yielded some three hundred families who had fled from the authorities. They suffered the same fate as those before them. They were beaten with heated brands until they confessed. Then they were executed.
We know nothing of most of the victims or of their alleged crimes.
They survive in the historical record only because their deaths left a warning to future generations. One queen called Toqashi Khatun was tried and convicted, in the presence of her husband, by a former political rival serving as judge. The judge “ordered her limbs to be kicked to a pulp.” According to Rashid al-Din, the judge thereby “relieved his bosom filled with an ancient grudge.”
Sorkhokhtani had emerged victorious, but her sons then channeled their fury against the survivors, including women who had once been their allies and helped them attain power. The worst era for royal Mongol women followed the election of Mongke Khan. Once such a purge destroys its original target, the sponsors of the persecutions often find it difficult to stop the violence. Having destroyed their enemies, they turn their fury toward one another and thus make enemies of their former confederates. The killers began to kill one another. Soon women within the victorious side came under attack.
Rubruck reported that when a wife of Mongke Khan had two people executed, he became angry with her. Then “he forthwith sent to his wife and asked her where she had found out that a wife could pass a death sentence, leaving her husband in ignorance of what she had done.” As punishment he had her sealed up in solitary confinement for a week “with orders that no food be given her.”
As for the queen’s two retainers, a brother and sister who had carried out the executions, Mongke first killed the brother. Then he ordered the man’s head be removed and hung around his sister’s neck. Soldiers then chased her around the camp beating her with burning brands. When they