The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [61]
Her father gave her a gergee as a sign of her power and independence. Called a paiza by Marco Polo, the gergee was a large and heavy medallion of office, consisting of an engraved disk or rectangular plate worn on a chain around the neck. Made of silver or gold, it stated the power of the holder and that it was granted by the khan under the will of the Eternal Blue Sky. Since the earlier queens had used seals, or tamghas, to signify their status, Khutulun is the only woman mentioned as owning her own gergee, an authority usually reserved for men.
Although Khutulun had fourteen brothers, she outperformed them all. While his other children assisted him as best they could, Qaidu Khan relied highly on his daughter Khutulun for advice as well as for support. She was her father’s favorite child and helped him to administer the government and affairs of his kingdom. Rashid al-Din, definitely not a sympathetic chronicler, wrote that “she went around like a boy,” though he also said that she “often went on military campaigns, where she performed valiant deeds.” Despite the apparent unusualness of the relationship between Qaidu Khan and Khutulun, in some ways their cooperative work probably reflected that of Genghis Khan and his daughters.
Khutulun followed an unorthodox method of confronting the enemy. She rode to the battlefield at her father’s side, but when she perceived the right moment, in the words of Marco Polo, she would “make a dash at the host of the enemy, and seize some man thereout, as deftly as a hawk pounces on a bird, and carry him to her father; and this she did many a time.”
Qaidu Khan commanded an army of around forty thousand warriors. They fought all along the frontier with Khubilai Khan’s China and controlled much of the interior of the country along the oases of the Silk Route and the western mountains. In addition to numerous local spats with other members of the family, Qaidu Khan’s army reached toward the northeast as far as the traditional Mongol capital of Karakorum and had at least one campaign in the Khentii Mountains farther east.
Because of Genghis Khan’s law that every branch of the family had to approve the granting of the title, the opposition of Qaidu Khan and Khutulun together with other disgruntled members of the Borijin clan served as a constant reminder that Khubilai Khan lacked universal Mongol approval. On both sides, the campaigns often showed more propagandistic bravado than genuine military achievement. One of Khubilai’s allied cousins, a renowned archer named Toq-Temur, rode off to war on a gray horse. “People choose bays and horses of other colors so that blood may not show on them, and the enemy may not be encouraged,” he is quoted as saying. “As for me, I choose a gray horse, because just as red is the adornment of women, so the blood of a wound on a rider and his horse, which drips on to the man’s clothes and the horse’s limbs and can be seen from afar, is the adornment and decoration of men.”
Despite all the big words, the boundaries changed little. No army secured a decisive victory. The low-grade but persistent hostility continued with periodic violent flare-ups. Caravans sought out routes around the violence, but as the years passed, fewer managed to get through.
Marco Polo also became caught up in the propaganda. Having never seen the Mongols under Genghis Khan and being a young merchant rather than a seasoned soldier, he accepted and repeated many of the grandiose stories of military triumphalism heard around the Mongol court in Beijing. When Qaidu Khan fought Khubilai Khan’s army at the largely abandoned capital of Karakorum in Mongolia, Marco Polo mistakenly described it as one of the hardest fought in Mongol history. “Many a man fell there,” wrote Marco Polo. “Many a child was made an orphan there; many a lady widowed; many another woman plunged in grief and tears for the rest of her days.” Qaidu Khan eventually