The Secret History of the Mongol Queens By Jack Weatherford

The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

By Jack Weatherford

“Let us reward our female offspring” Genghis Khan, the Secret History of the Mongols

Dr. Weatherford was born in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s the eldest of seven children and his father was an Army Sergeant so moves were common his childhood. He returned to South Carolina to attend the University of South Carolina, and graduated in 1967 with a B.A in political science. In 1970 he married his high school sweetheart Walker Pierce, and they stayed married until her passing in 2013 (RIP). She was not only survived by Dr. Weatherford but their two children and a wealth of grandchildren. He continued at the University of South Carolina receiving two master's degrees, one in 1972 for sociology and another in 1973 for anthropology. He then attended the University of California and received a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1977. In addition to this, he earned a post doctrinal degree from Duke University in policy studies. He became a professor of anthropology for Macalester College in Minnesota and proceeded to get to work. He specialized in tribal societies, which is kind of a traditional place for anthropologists to specialize in. The discipline started with Europeans trying to study and understand tribal societies (Poorly. It is worth noting that today’s anthropologists consider the methods they used, even in the 1970s… often unethical. {I should note that modern Anthropology is much better at this}), sometimes with the worst of motives (In support of colonial endeavors) and sometimes with rose-tinted glasses (This is where the myth of the Noble Savage™ came from). Most of us even today are pretty firm in the idea that tribal societies are the natural social units of humanity, so his specialization isn’t shocking. Dr. Weatherford wasn't content to study and teach however; he started publishing books. His first book published in 1988 “Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World” made a case that the social, political, and culinary traditions of the Indians had a massive effect on American and European society. His most widely known book “The History of Money” was published in 1997. The books that might have the longest-lasting effect, however, are his three most recent, all of them focused on Mongolia and the history of the Mongols. Most specifically, the impact of Mongolian's most well-known son Temujin or as most people know him, Genghis Khan. Dr. Weatherford was and still is greatly celebrated in Mongolia for his work, receiving the Polar Star, the highest award Mongolia can give to a foreigner in 2007. In 2010 they awarded him a Friendship Medal. In 2012 Mongolia created a foundation in his name and named a medal after him to be given in recognition of the best work of scholarship on Mongolian history or culture written in Mongolian. If that wasn't enough to celebrate the 850th anniversary of Genghis Khan's birth, the government mandated that audio recordings of “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World” and “The Secret History of the Mongol Queens” be played at every sacred spot in Mongolia. These days Dr. Weatherford spends most of his time in Mongolia and who can blame him? (... Holy Fucknuggets. Okay, yeah.)

The Secret History of the Mongol Queens was the second of his three works about the Mongols and was published in 2010 by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group which is a division of the far-reaching Random House (Okay, we need to hire Nicolas Cage to steal Teddy Roosevelt’s Trust Buster). However the seed of this book is much older, first planted on a trip to Mongolia in 1998 when an old woman hesitantly declared her belief that Genghis Khan had been born again, as Queen Manduhai. I should note this was not a popular opinion and Dr. Weatherford was inclined to shrug Queen Manduhai off, but as anyone who reads this book can tell you, no one can just shrug off Queen Manduhai. No matter where Dr. Weatherford went, there her memory was. When Dr. Weatherford began to grapple with the fact that the Secret History of the Mongols, a Mongolian text that was written by first-hand observers to the Khan's court, had been censored, the seed began to grow. A section had been clumsily removed, with the section after the line “Let us reward our female offspring” completely gone. (Oh man. This is gonna be the best kind of revisionist history. The good kind where the record is corrected because something was deliberately deleted.)The section before had been where Genghis rewarded his sons and other male kinsmen, so to declare that he would award his daughters and then stop... Seems strange. So Dr. Weatherford set off on the hunt to find out what happened by sifting through the evidence of Mongolian histories, Persian and Chinese records, and even Buddhist temple records. He assembled the history of Mongol noblewomen wielding power and the effect they would have for good and for ill on the Mongol Empire and even how it would be that a young woman - finding herself the last surviving queen of a dead puppet Khan - breathed new life into the shattered and sundered tribes of Mongolia for not just a unified nation but one more Empire.

The book starts by discussing just how Genghis Khan rewarded his daughters. Simply put he made them Queens. To go into detail, Genghis attempted to reorder how marriage worked on the steppe, banning the forcing of Mongol women into marriage or selling them into marriage (Good on Genghis. It seems that in this the Mongols once again became an exception to the generalizations that can be made of pre-modern peoples.). Before this, male kinsmen had the right to trade their sisters and daughters for livestock, although it was considered a low-class way of doing ways. A more honored tradition was the groom in question coming to live with his future wife's family and working for them (usually as a herder) and getting to know everyone. Genghis deeply preferred this way, even before uniting the tribes of the steppes, having offered violence to man for daring to suggest that he trade his sister for horses. This is in line with Genghis attempting to reorder his whole society and while he wasn't entirely successful, he did wipe away the old ways and organization for generations after his death. The daughters of the Khan were strategically married to the ruling families of highly placed vassal peoples and their husbands inducted into special military units that served the Great Khan directly. This made his daughters the de facto rulers of these people and they took to it well. If we're going to be honest, they often did a better job then his sons did (Shocking! Wait. No. The same is often true in Medieval europe. A Distant Mirror paints a pretty good picture of medieval male nobility and holy shit they were bloodthirsty manchildren. I cannot imagine it was much better in on the Steppes of Asia). Genghis unfortunately for his empire didn't spend as much time as he maybe should have training the next generation. Worse, most of his sons were raging alcoholics. To be fair to the boys, this was an epidemic in Mongol elite classes (You just mean elite classes, right?) after Genghis made his conquests. This has its roots in the fact that the native booze of Mongolia was made with fermented mare's milk and had a really low alcohol content. So when wine and other “civilized” liquors were introduced on a large scale to the now incredibly wealthy Mongol elite? It was like introducing Everclear to people who had only drunk Bud Light their entire lives. (To be fair, wine actually has a flavor that doesn’t make you want to commit ritual suicide, so that might play into it as well.)

This meant that in the generations after Genghis much of the maneuvering was done by the wives and daughters of powerful men. While strong male leaders like Kublai Khan would emerge as often as not they would be succeeded by weaker men, but there always seemed to be a cadre of women willing to do the dirty work of politics. As well as commit savagery on each other if they couldn’t find a man to do it for them. This wasn't without costs. For example, the daughters of Genghis Khan didn't have their kingdoms destroyed by outsiders but by their brothers and nephews looking to concentrate power (See? Bloodthirsty manchildren.{Considering what the daughter in laws and other female relations did to each other, the ladies weren’t any better}). Dr. Weatherford leads us through the savage infighting as the Mongol Empire began to fracture at the seams and beyond into the court of the Yaun dynasty and it's fall. However, a number of Mongols would remain in the steppes and resist all comers. It's here that a number of Mongol Princesses emerge like Princess Khutulun who served as her father's right hand in the fight to keep the Mongols united and independent from the emerging powers of Muslim warlords and Mongols who they felt had abandoned their culture to become degenerate aristocrats (The terms degenerate and aristocrat are redundant.). Princess Khutulun was famed for her strength, skill, and beauty; and declared that she would only marry a man who could defeat her in wrestling. Furthermore, anyone who wrestled her would have to bet 10 horses before she would even consider it. Her herd was over a 1000 horses when she finally did marry according to legend. However despite the heroic efforts of such women and men, the Mongol dynasties did fall one by one and the Khans found themselves prisoners and puppets to foreigners, ranging from Ming Emperors to Turkish warlords all of them trying to use the Mongols for their own ends and keep them weak and divided. This is where the star of the book enters the stage.

Manduhai was born to a clan that considered itself Mongol and possessed some military power but wasn't strong enough to be a player in their own right in the post-imperial anarchy that gripped the steppes. A new Muslim warlord named Beg-Arslan had emerged and found himself a tractable puppet Khan who could trace his lineage to Genghis Khan and married his daughter to the Khan. Manduhai was married (Was married? Passive voice? Fuck {At this point the reforms of Genghis had been tossed aside} Ugh.) to him at a young age but the marriage didn't seem to amount to much. Now there was excitement but it wasn't around her, it was around a young man, one of the last survivors of Genghis' direct line. Manduhai's husband adopted the boy as his heir and placed his hopes on him to reunite the Mongols and free them from foreign oppression. The young man proved foolish however and a falling out lead to his death with Manduhai's husband passing away shortly after. At this point, many young noble ladies (and men) would have met a disastrous and forgettable end but Manduhai was made of sterner stuff. She knew that her husband's heir had a son and she hunted down the young boy and found him. She then enthroned him as Dayan Khan and gathered her followers and proceeded to fight a decade's long campaign to not only reunite the Mongols but chase away every foreigner trying to rule them (Oh to be a fly on that wall. “You there, do you know who your father was?” “No, maybe vaguely, why?” “Don’t worry. We do! He was an idiot who got himself killed. You are a descendent of Genghis Khan, and thus the Khan now. Come, we have much to discuss and a resurgent Khanate to build!” “Um... Okay?!” {The boy was like 7} Even better.). She was so successful that the Ming restarted building parts of the Great Wall to keep her out. She went on to marry Dayan Khan after raising him to manhood (this was traditional for Mongols, in that marrying your older brothers or uncles wives was considered normal and even expected, you can also see this in the Old Testament on the other side of Asia). She would provide Dayan Khan 8 children and he would be loyal to her as long as she lived. Manduhai would come to be celebrated as a national heroine of the Mongols, rescuing them from disappearing into the ash-heap of history. While neither she or Dayan ever refounded the Mongol Empire, they were able to build a unified and strong state capable of facing off the Ming and Muslim states of Central Asia. It wasn't until the Manchus emerged in Manchuria that the nation Manduhai built would fall but her descendants would continue to exercise power until the 1940s when various factions purged them out of existence. However, her legacy and that of her protege husband Dayan continues, and Mongols revere them as the greatest Mongol monarchs with the sole exception of Genghis Khan. Let's be honest though, being second place to Genghis Khan is nothing to sneeze at.

Dr. Weatherford takes us carefully through an until now hidden part of history and does so with energy and gusto. Now, it's not uncommon for powerful women to be hidden from history by their successors. All manner of civilizations from the time of ancient Egypt have done so, but to peel back the censorship and try to bring forward the truth is an ongoing struggle. Something Dr. Weatherford should be and is commended for. To people who have even a passing interest in history, or reading about successful and powerful women or even people who just want to take a look at a good story that happens to be true, this is the book for you. Myself, I am always happy to find a new part of history I know nothing about and that it's a great story on top of that is an amazing bonus. The Secret History of Mongol Queens by Dr. Jack Weatherford gets an A.

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

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