The Persian chroniclers recorded the full cruelty and sheer evil behind the crime inflicted on these innocent, “star-like maidens, each of whom affected men’s hearts in a different way.” Everyone knew that this barbarous act violated in spirit and in detail the long list of laws Genghis Khan had made regarding women. Girls could be married at a young age but could not engage in sex until sixteen, and then they initiated the encounter with their husbands. They could not be seized, raped, kidnapped, bartered, or sold. Ogodei violated every single one of those laws.
The chronicles explain that the episode was punishment against the Oirat for not sending girls for Ogodei’s harem. Ogodei’s debauched appetites at this stage of his life, however, favored alcohol over girls, and while this excuse may have been proffered, the rape of the Oirat virgins was part of a much larger assault against the power of Genghis Khan’s daughters and their lineages. Depraved as the violence against the girls was, it did not spring from the mindless lust of a wicked old man. The atrocity grew from a calculating greed and the desire to expand Ogodei’s wealth and power. He used this ordeal to seize the lands of his sister Checheyigen, who most likely had recently died. This act brought the Oirat under Ogodei’s control.
Many of the girls raped that day had been born after the death of Genghis Khan in 1227. They lived in a much different Mongol Empire from the one he founded and left to his people, and the mass rapes, although only a decade later, showed how quickly the world was changing.
The rape of the Oirat girls was the opening move in a long political, diplomatic, and terror campaign against the women of Genghis Khan’s Borijin clan. Through the attack, Ogodei was taking away the powers left to his sister and imposing his own authority over her lands, her people, and her family. His crime was the beginning of the ruination of everything that his father had accomplished for his family and nation. Without the father’s restraining hand, the stronger of his children began to pick off the weaker ones.
Genghis Khan’s unusual system of political organization had placed Ogodei in the geographic center, surrounded by the territories of his brothers and sisters. The empire as a whole continued growing at the outer edges, but the central location of Ogodei’s personal holdings prevented him from expanding without moving into the territory of his siblings. He began encroaching on their lands almost as soon as he came to power. Since he outranked them as Great Khan, it was hard to resist him. The Oirat kingdom of Checheyigen disappeared first, but the lands of the other sisters would soon follow. The unprecedented violence Ogodei had committed against the family of one sister would now expand into a struggle against all of them.
Ogodei managed to find or invent a variety of excuses to expand his power at the expense of other members of the Borijin royal family. He moved into the territory of his father’s widows Yesui and Yesugen in the Khangai Mountains and along the Tuul River. As the youngest son, his brother Tolui, had inherited their mother’s land on the Kherlen, but Ogodei had tried to take it as well after Tolui died.
One day in 1232, the forty-three-year-old Tolui had stumbled out of his ger and in a drunken tirade collapsed and died. Some observers surmised that Ogodei had orchestrated the death with the help of shamans who drugged the alcoholic Tolui. No matter the cause, Ogodei immediately sought to benefit from his brother’s death by arranging a marriage for his son Guyuk with Tolui’s widow Sorkhokhtani. Knowing precisely what Ogodei was trying to do, she politely, but firmly, refused on the grounds of devoting her life to her four sons, but the refusal meant that she could never marry anyone else.
Having failed to gain the eastern lands through this marriage strategy, Ogodei sent Guyuk on a European campaign under the leadership of his cousin, Jochi’s son Batu, who was expanding his family’s holdings from Russia into Poland and Hungary up to the borders of the German states, and south into the Balkans. The plan, later denied by Ogodei after it failed, seemed to have been for Guyuk to take control of some of the new territories for himself, thereby giving Ogodei’s family a hold in Europe from which they could slowly absorb the lands of their relatives who controlled Russia. Batu firmly rejected Guyuk’s attempts to claim part of the conquests, and after a night of raucous drinking, crude mocking, and angry arguing, Batu chased Guyuk away in fear for his life.
In addition to her central Mongolian territory along the Tuul River, Yesui had been granted the Tangut kingdom astride the crucial Gansu Corridor of China’s Silk Route. Ogodei sent his second son, Koten, to take those lands. Koten proved more successful than his brother Guyuk, occupying part of the Onggud lands that had once been controlled by his aunt Alaqai Beki and the Tangut lands ruled by Yesui Khatun. Koten used these lands as a base for the conquest of Tibet, and he became the first Mongol patron of Tibetan Buddhism.
Had Ogodei’s plan worked, his sons would have occupied Manchuria to the east and Tibet to the south, as well as Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine to the west, thereby encircling the Mongol Empire with his personal lands all around the edges.
As each of Genghis Khan’s wives died in the coming years, her territory was seized by one of Genghis Khan’s sons. Just as a man’s earthly spirit lived on in the hair of his horses, a woman’s spirit lived on in the wool that she pressed to make the felt walls of her ger. The sons seemed afraid to confiscate the actual ger that had been the queen’s ordo. The ger had been given to her by Genghis Khan, and it was there that he had lived and slept with his wives. As each queen died, she was sent to Burkhan Khaldun for burial there, and her ordo was sent to the former territory of Borte at Khodoe Aral, where the Avarga stream flows into the Kherlen River. Here the four structures were erected as permanent memorials to Genghis Khan and his empire. Known as the Four Great Ordos, they became a mere symbolic relic of the empire Genghis Khan had created.
Genghis Khan’s death left a power vacuum that his weak and quarrelsome sons exploited but failed to fill. Although Genghis Khan’s daughters and their families suffered greatly during the reign of Ogodei, a new set of women came into power; these were the wives of the khans, the daughters-in-law of Genghis Khan. Ogodei’s wife Toregene was the first to take command, while her husband sank deeper into his wine. Although not the first wife, she gradually assumed the title yeke khatun, “empress.” The oldest surviving use of that title is from an order that she issued under her name and her seal on April 10, 1240, while her husband was still alive. The text indicates that she controlled part of the civilian administration of the empire. She pursued her own activities of supporting religion, education, and construction projects on an imperial scale.
In a similar way, even before his death, the alcoholic Tolui had effectively abdicated power to his wife Sorkhokhtani because he “used to weep a great deal.” Recognizing his own inability, “he commanded that the affairs of the ulus [nation] and the control of the army should be entrusted to the counsel of his chief wife, Sorkhokhtani Beki.” After the death of Chaghatai, khan of Central Asia and the only one of Genghis Khan’s sons not to succumb to alcoholism, his widow Ebuskun assumed power.
Until their sudden arrival on the political scene, very little is known of these women; they had married into the family without, in most cases, anyone noticing them enough to mention who they were or where they came from. Mongol chronicles do not specify Toregene’s origin, but according to Chinese chroniclers, she had been born a Naiman. Before her marriage to Ogodei, she had been married to the son of the Merkid chief. The Merkid had been the first enemies of Genghis Khan, responsible for kidnapping his wife Borte, and through the decades he had found and defeated them several times, only to see them strike up the feud again. When Genghis Khan conquered the Merkid for the final time in 1205, the Year of the Ox, he decided to destroy the tribe—killing off the leading men and dividing up the rest. In the distribution of the remaining tribe, Genghis Khan gave the soon-to-be-widowed Toregene to Ogodei as a junior wife.