The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [64]
Qaidu Khan decided to try a ruse that had once worked for Genghis Khan in a battle against the Naiman not far from this area. On the fourth night, “he ordered all his warriors to light fires in several places.” When the Mongol generals leading the Chinese army “saw the flames of so many fires, they thought that assistance had reached Qaidu Khan from some source.” Instead of staying to fight, however, Qaidu Khan left the fires burning while his men “decamped and withdrew.” The enemy suspected a deception, but they were not sure what kind. “Imagining that Qaidu Khan was trying to trick them into drawing closer” and would then ambush them, Khubilai Khan’s forces fled despite having been on the threshold of victory over Qaidu Khan’s army. As they fled, they set fire to the grass on the steppe behind them to prevent Qaidu Khan’s army from pursuing them and to deny their animals pasture if they did.
Following his complete but unexpected victory, Qaidu Khan’s wounds worsened. “After this victory Qaidu Khan fell ill with dyspepsia,” according to Khwandamir. “Some of the ignorant” attendants “who called themselves physicians gave him twenty-five pills, and the pills turned the illness into dysentery.” After a month of treatment, Qaidu Khan died in February 1301. He was buried between the Ili River and the Chu River in a place called Shongkorlog, and Khutulun looked after his tomb for the rest of her life.
According to some accounts, her father respected her so much that before his death he attempted to name her to be the next khan, despite the lack of support within the family for this succession. However, she apparently preferred to continue as head of the military more than to become khan. She made clear that she was “desirous of leading the military and running affairs.” Toward this end, “she wanted her brother Orus to take her father’s place” as khan and leave her in charge of the army.
The Persian chronicler, who condescendingly disapproved of her involvement in politics, reported with approval that the other contenders for the office objected strenuously and insultingly. “You should mind your scissors and needles!” one of them yelled in angry derision. “What have you to do with kingship and chieftainship?” demanded the other.
Her words were not recorded, but her actions showed what she thought of their objections. She continued in her struggle, “stirring up sedition and strife,” in the words of her critics. Yet she maintained the support of her brother Orus. The record is sketchy about her precise actions after her father’s death, but in 1306 she followed him into death. Some reports claim that she died fighting in battle, others that she was assassinated. These speculations only heighten the mystery of this unusual woman.
Khutulun, the All White Princess, returned into the fog of history. If today only Marco Polo’s account of her had survived, we might well imagine that she was merely a mythical figure, a product of travelers’ tales and the fervid imagination. In addition to the works of Marco Polo and the Persian chroniclers, however, part of the story of Khutulun appears in the account of the fourteenth-century Arab traveler Ibn Battuta. Similarly some elements of Khutulun’s life appeared in a Ming Dynasty novel published in the fifteenth century. Yet both the European traveler and the Persian chroniclers recorded stories about her with different details, in different languages, and from different perspectives without contradiction.
With the death of Khutulun in 1306, the Borijin men had won. The queens had been defeated, their lands had been appropriated