The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [80]
The warlords and their warriors included many of the former imperial guards, particularly the Kipchak, but also some of the Asud of Ossetia. Having lost their stronghold on the Mongolian Plateau during the campaigns of Samur’s husband, son, and grandson Esen, they fled south into the more remote areas of the Gobi and into the deserts of northern China. The warlords’ coalitions included large mixtures of a more mysterious group known alternately as Mekrit, Megrin, and Begrin, who appear only fleetingly but at important moments in the chronicles.
This new threat originated in the oases of Turfan and Hami. These two cities operated as trade centers for long-distance caravans along the thin line of oases connecting China with the Middle East and Europe, but in these days, only a trickle of the former trade flowed through. The cities now served as desert hideaways for rebels and bandits rather than crucial chains in a commercial network. Nevertheless, the oases supported a sufficient agricultural population to accommodate a small military force, and the desert around them offered protection from the Ming army or other enemies.
From a base in Turfan, a new warlord named Beg-Arslan sought to move into the vacuum of Mongol politics, replace Esen, and set up a puppet khan. He planned to make his daughter Yeke Qabar-tu into the khatun of the Mongols by finding a Borijin heir to make khan, and then marrying her to him. This move would effectively allow Beg-Arslan to run the country as the imperial father-in-law. One obstacle to that plan was Yeke Qabar-tu’s reputation as an unattractive woman. Her name meant “Big Nose,” and for the Mongols, who often referred to themselves with pride as the “No-Nose Mongols,” the prospect of siring a child with Big Nose lacked appeal. Mongols associated such noses with Westerners, mostly Europeans and Muslims, rather than with East Asians. If nothing else, her Mongol name clearly indicated that Yeke Qabar-tu’s origin, and that of her father, lay beyond the Mongol world.
The male descendants of Genghis Khan had dwindled to just a few, primarily ineffective old men, but also a few young boys whose mothers or other relatives claimed that they had been fathered by Borijin men who had subsequently died. From the contenders, Beg-Arslan selected a modest but tractable man named Manduul, made him Great Khan, and married him to Yeke Qabar-tu sometime between 1463 and 1465.
Despite the ability of warlords to make and unmake the khans and their marriages, they lacked the power to force consummation. The khan did not like Yeke Qabar-tu. He “stayed absent from” her and “did not co-habit with her.” Not surprisingly, Big Nose produced no children. Some chronicles mention that Manduul was sick in the time that he knew her and that was the reason he did not cohabit with her. Although she continued at court as queen, apparently she and the khan avoided each other as much as was practical.
Of seemingly far less importance, around the year 1464, Manduul married Manduhai, who was about sixteen, nearly twenty-five years his junior. There is nothing surprising about the match, since she came from a political family, but what mixture of political and personal preferences underlay the marriage is not clear. Perhaps she was beautiful and appealed to the khan; perhaps he simply wanted a wife who was not a foreigner.
Some chronicles refer to her by the title khatun, or “queen,” at this point, but others refer to her merely as a princess, indicating some possible contention or confusion on her initial status at court. Eventually there would be no question about her rank, but it remained ambiguous for her first several years as a wife. She entered quietly. Nothing is mentioned of how she came to be Manduul’s wife, and nothing about her seemed worthy of much attention at the moment. For almost a decade she would have no apparent role to play in political life, but when the moment came, she would