Review — "The Secret History of the Mongol Queens"

Genghis Khan is not remembered kindly in the West. Medieval chroniclers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were so terrified by his reputation that they never saw past the appalling idea of what would happen if they resisted him. They regarded him as a ruthless barbarian, a demon, an Asian Horseman of the Apocalypse, and their fearful image of him remains with us today. In Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World anthropology professor Jack Weatherford attempted to expand our understanding of the great Mongol conqueror, reminding us that not only did Genghis Khan create the largest empire in the history of the world, but he also provided reasonable government and, by placing the state above religion, offered religious tolerance at a time when that was extremely rare. Most important of all, he developed the Silk Road, turning an unreliable, often dangerous caravan route controlled by a string of unpredictable warlords into a commercial superhighway. The trickle of commerce turned into a torrent, with the flow of goods, people, and ideas cross-fertilizing and advancing the cultures of both East and West. Under the Mongols, according to Weatherford, the Silk Road laid the foundations for modernity and served as a prototype for modern communication systems. It was an achievement sought after but never realized by Alexander, the Romans, Muslims or Christians.

In The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire, Weatherford illuminates another surprising feature of the Mongol leader, how he gave the top roles in the Mongol Empire to women. This fact was obscured not only by European writers; some unknown person doctored the historical record. In the classic Mongol chronicle, The Secret History of the Mongols, written soon after the death of Genghis Khan, there is only one hint of what he did, a single revealing sentence. Preceding that sentence is a report of how Genghis Khan distributes titles, offices, and territories to various male members of his family. Then come the words, “Let us reward our female offspring.” At that point the document is mutilated, an unknown number of words being cut out. Nothing remains about his female offspring. Professor Weatherford, however, has managed to piece together what really happened by poring over non-Mongolian sources—Chinese, Korean, Persian, Tibetan, Russian, Italian, French. It makes a fascinating story.

The view that women can rule as well as men came easily to Genghis Khan. Both his mother, Hoelun, and his wife, Borte, came from steppe tribes in which women played influential roles. They raised his daughters to rule, and even as his daughters matured and strengthened under their imperial tutelage, Genghis recognized that his four sons were drunks and wastrels. In preparation for his first major military campaign beyond the Mongolian Plateau, he gave his most important appointment to his daughter Alaqai, to rule over the lands adjacent to China south of the Gobi desert, his springboard for a massive invasion. During her reign, which lasted 21 years, Alaqai began by making herself literate, then set up administrative and cultural organizations so effective that they became models for the entire Mongol Empire. Her capital was the model for Karakorum, the capital of Ogodie, Genghis Khan’s son, and for Beijing, the capital of Khublai Khan. Genghis put two other daughters in charge of kingdoms controlling the Silk Road, the gateway between China and the Muslim lands to the southwest—and an arrow pointing at Russia and Europe. A fourth ruled over the northern lands reaching into Siberia. The four sons administered the stable, nomadic Mongolian heartland. The daughters were given full power, not expected to be puppets of a central government. To ensure that no one would infringe on their freedom, Genghis was careful about how he installed them. Upon marrying a daughter to the leader of a vassal state, he designated her as queen and demoted her new husband to mere “prince consort.” The prince consort had to divorce all his existing wives. Then the hapless husband was conscripted into the Mongol army and sent to the front lines, where he usually died in battle within a few years. The daughters of Genghis Khan thus ruled without opposition or interference of any kind.

After the death of Genghis Khan and, later, his daughters, the empire began to unravel as members of the ruling clan fought for power. When the dust settled after the first round, the widows of Genghis Khan’s sons emerged victorious—another group of Mongol queens, who ruled from Korea to the Caucasus, and from the Arctic to the Indus, the largest empire ever ruled by women. Cleverest and most powerful was Sorkhokhtani, a Christian, who, by avoiding marriage to Genghis Khan’s son and successor, enabled her to advance her own sons, all four of whom took the title of Great Khan. So impressive was she that her fame spread far beyond the empire, a Syriac scholar writing, “If I were to see among the race of women another woman like this, I should say that the race of women was far superior to that of men.” Unfortunately, the daughters-in-law of Genghis Khan struggled ceaselessly against each other, as well as other ambitious relatives. After several generations of such infighting, the empire was torn to shreds. The great Mongol Empire was reduced once again to little more than a tribal power.

Even during this period of decline, remarkable Mongol women appeared. Khutulun, who lived in the fourteenth century, declared that she would never marry a man unless he could defeat her in wrestling. No man ever did, and it is said she won 10,000 horses from the men who tried. She went on military campaigns with her father, the Great Khan, and was a fearsome warrior who, according to Marco Polo, could ride into enemy ranks and snatch a captive as easily as a hawk snatches a chicken. In the late fifteenth century, almost three hundred years after Genghis Khan, Queen Manduhai the Wise arose virtually out of nowhere to unite the Mongols once again, if not in a great empire at least as a proud and independent nation. Hers is an amazing story. Taking in hand seven-year-old Dayan, Genghis Khan’s last, sickly male descendant, who had barely escaped assassination by several pretenders to the throne, she maneuvred so brilliantly from her small power base, winning battle after battle, that she was finally able to have him installed as Great Khan over all the Mongols. She married him when he grew up, and they ruled as a pair.

In a fascinating final chapter, Weatherford contends that it is impossible to suppress history forever. Everything that happens leaves traces of itself. Traces of the Mongol queens can be found, for example, in Chaucer’s “The Squire’s Tale,” in Milton, even in the Taj Mahal. Khutulun surfaced in an Italian play in the seventeenth century as a woman warrior named Turandot. The play was translated by Schiller, directed by Goethe in 1802, and turned into an opera by Puccini in 1924.


Jack Weatherford is an anthropology professor who spent his earlier career studying and writing on tribal peoples, beginning with indigenous North American cultures. His later research and writings on the Mongols led him to receiving the Order of the Polar Star, Mongolia’s highest national honor for foreigners. He has retired to live in Mongolia.