The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [57]
The purges subsided slightly when Sorkhokhtani became desperately ill. As a Christian, she feared that the illness might be related to the wretched evil she had unleashed. In an effort to attain forgiveness and prolong her life, she began to pardon the convicted. While technically sparing the life of the condemned, she and her family still sought to inflict the maximum punishment on them and to offer a lesson to anyone else who might oppose her family’s rule. The condemned’s “wives and children, his servants and cattle, all his animate and inanimate possessions, were seized and distributed.” As a secondary form of punishment for those whose lives were spared, she sent them into the most dangerous assignments of the military, “arguing that if he is fated to be killed he will be killed in the fighting.” In the case of others: “They send him on an embassy to foreign peoples who they are not entirely certain will send them back: or again they send him to hot countries whose climate is unhealthy such as Egypt and Syria.” Sorkhokhtani died in February or March of 1252, while the campaign of retribution still raged through the empire.
Although Mongke Khan continued to appoint some women as queens and gave them limited power to rule over subservient areas, he made certain that they had no independent power and prevented anyone else from giving power to women. Mongke Khan issued a decree that no woman could be made khatun by a shaman or one of Guyuk’s former officials. If any shaman or other official recognized a woman as khatun, Mongke Khan ordered the penalty of death, using the uniquely Mongol expression “They shall see what they shall see.”
What Genghis Khan had spent a lifetime creating was destroyed within another lifetime. The Mongol Empire lingered for another century—at first growing fatter and fatter through conquest, then slowly decaying into a twisted shadow of its once noble origin. It would never again be the empire of its founder, who imposed a strict code of laws and lived an unadorned life of austerity and hard work. The delicately balanced system of men and women sharing similar powers had proved too fragile to survive. Though occupying the largest empire, the Borijin family had become just one more bloated and decadent dynasty spilling out across the pages of world history.
Like a drunk who tears down his own ger in some unfathomable rage, the Borijin clan destroyed everything that had made it grand and powerful. They sank into a prolonged degeneracy surrounded by the broken pieces of their once glorious Mongol Empire.
The chronicler Abu-Umar-I-Usman reported that years earlier, in 1221, during Genghis Khan’s Central Asian campaign when his sons Jochi and Chaghatai conquered the capital city of Urgench, they seized the women they wanted to keep for themselves and then gathered all the remaining women outside the city walls on an open plain. They divided the women into two groups and ordered them to strip naked. According to this story, Genghis Khan’s sons then gave the order for one group to attack the other.
“The women of your city are good pugilists,” one of the sons was quoted as saying to the conquered city officials. “Therefore, the order is that both sides should set on each other with fists.” The women, thinking that the victorious side would be allowed to live, set to fighting each other with tremendous fury. The soldiers watched the spectacle, cheering some fighters on and jeering at others. Many women killed other women in the course of the day, but eventually the audience tired of the match. At the end of the game, the generals ordered the soldiers to kill all the surviving women.
Such stories, especially from anti-Mongol sources,