The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [58]
The violence did not end with the overthrow of the queens; it continued to spread and became endemic to family politics. Sorkhokhtani had kept her four sons united and focused on rivals outside their family, but, with her gone, the sons turned on one another. Within eight years, in 1259, Mongke died during a campaign in China, and his two younger brothers, Khubilai, based in northern China, and Arik Boke, based in Mongolia, began a battle for power. Khubilai captured Arik Boke and sought to put him on trial for treason, but when other members of the Borijin clan refused to attend the trial, Arik Boke died mysteriously in captivity in 1266, almost certainly a victim of his brother’s quest for power.
The Mongol Empire was soon to reach its maximum territorial extent, but it could not long survive the family fighting that was destroying its ruling family. Khubilai commanded the greatest army, but it was more Chinese than Mongolian, and although he claimed the title of Great Khan in 1260, he had been elected in only a sham khuriltai held in China rather than Mongolia and without support from the Borijin clan or other Mongols.
While continuing to worship the spirit of their grandfather Genghis Khan and making him into a virtual god, his heirs destroyed everything he created. Yet the more they destroyed, the more ritually important they made him. Khubilai Khan created the office of jinong, meaning “Prince of Gold,” or “Golden Prince,” and assigned him “to guard the northern frontiers and to govern ‘the Four Great Ordos’ of the Founding Emperor, the military forces, the Mongols and the homeland.” With this responsibility, the jinong controlled the most sacred objects in the Mongol world: the black sulde, Genghis Khan’s horsehair banner in which a part of his earthly soul remained after he ascended into heaven, and the four gers of his four wives.
Mysteriously, however, over the coming years, what began as only four gers increased to eight. They were explained as being the shrines of his horse or his milk pail, but the structures housing them had once belonged to some woman since milk pails and saddles did not own gers. The most plausible explanation is that just as the ger of each of Genghis Khan’s four wives was brought to Avarga after she died, these were quite possibly the gers of his four deposed daughters. Since the felt contained part of the departed woman’s soul, none of the sons claiming her land wanted her soul left behind to haunt him. The solution was to collect them all together. Thereafter, they were known as the Eight Gers or Eight Ordos of Genghis Khan.
6
Granddaughters of Resistance
AT THE HEIGHT OF THE MONGOL EMPIRE, AROUND 1271, young Marco Polo set out from Venice to the Mongol capital at Beijing with his father and uncle, who had just completed the same round-trip. The era of conquests begun by Genghis Khan had concluded, and although its shape differed radically from what he had intended, the Silk Route still bustled with caravans, merchants, and exotic wares. Marco Polo easily made his way overland from the Mediterranean to the Mongol court of Khubilai Khan, making almost the entire trip within the Mongol Empire and under the protection of Mongol soldiers.
Yet, by the time he left Beijing to return home around 1291, the middle part of the empire had collapsed; and because he could not cross the continent, he had to sail from China around South Asia to the Persian port of Hormuz. Within the time