Mongols: Men Conquer, Women Rule

If you come from a nomadic background, by definition, you don’t have much experience of building stuff. Or ruling anything bigger than a tribe. So when the Mongols stormed the world, how did Genghis Khan solve this problem?

 

Jack Weatherford’s The Secret History of the Mongol Queens gets into that part. Genghis divided up all the conquered lands and assigned rulers to them. Nothing special about that, except when you realize all the assigned rulers were women (his wives), not his sons or generals! His sons, he could see, were hardly promising material, while his generals were needed to expand the empire even further. But before that, Genghis needed to ensure peace in the already conquered areas. How did he do that?

“Through a thick network of marriage alliances.”

But he didn’t take on more wives. Instead, he made alliances for his children. The conquered tribe thus gained prestige and material benefits. Even more cleverly:

“The husband (of his daughter) would go to war (as part of Genghis’ army), and the wife would be left in charge of running the home and, by extension, almost every aspect of civilian life.”

And since war is deadly business:

“For these men (sons-in-law of Genghis), it became a brief, but usually lethal, career… He served virtually as a sacrificial victim in exchange for the tribe’s prosperity.”

 

So you see how the seeds were sowed for the title of his book (it’s about Mongol Queens). Was this then the age of girl power? Not entirely. The model of his daughters (and daughters-in-law) ruling didn’t scale up. While it worked in the areas closer to Mongolia, it faced a lot more resistance the farther away the Mongols went:

“The Chinese scorned the behavior of Mongol women as contrary to sophisticated etiquette, but the Muslims condemned them as immoral affronts to religion.”

 

Regardless of their feelings, they didn’t dare contest Genghis. By then, after all, the Silk Road that connected northern China to Central Asia to the Middle East and right to the edge of Europe, was practically, well, a Mongol highway. Never before in history had a single power controlled the entire Silk Road:

“The daughters of Genghis Khan did not create the interlocking network of trade routes, but they made it work much faster (thanks to Mongol protection and the construction of intercontinental rest and relay stations)… The daughters operated a world financial organization that benefited almost everyone it touched.”

 

White-man history calls Alexander is called “Great”, when he did nothing but conquer and his empire disintegrated within minutes of his death. And the Mongols are called savages. Just goes to show how biased most of history is, and we swallow it without thinking or looking for alternative versions.

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