After securing the election for her son, Sorkhokhtani personally presided over the trial of her defeated rival, the ousted queen Oghul Ghaimish. Guyuk had interpreted the law to allow torture of people who were not members of the Borijin clan, and this now applied to her. Even if Oghul Ghaimish had been the daughter of Checheyigen, and thus the granddaughter of Genghis Khan, by the rules of patrilineal descent she was not a member of the Borijin clan but of the clan of her father. Her husband and her children were all Borijin members and unquestionably Mongols, but she was neither.
In a show trial similar to the one endured by Fatima, Oghul Ghaimish had to face her accusers naked, her hands sewn together with strips of rawhide. The ordeal was more public torture and interrogation than a judicial proceeding, and other women of the Ogodei branch of the family also had to face similar torture and judgment. The outcome was always the same. The condemned woman was executed in some gruesome manner and thrown into the river.
Mongke conducted the trial of the men. He sat on a chair in front of a shrine to Genghis Khan and had each man brought in for questioning. Since it was still, at least for now, against the law of Genghis Khan to torture a member of the Borijin family, Mongke ordered that their retainers be brought in and beaten to make them confess the crimes of their former masters. As part of the spectacle, one of the ministers decided or was forced to commit suicide with his own sword during the proceedings. Tanggis, an Oirat son-in-law of the late Guyuk, was beaten until the flesh fell from his thighs; yet he was a lucky one, because he survived. In yet another sign of how far they had drifted from the laws of Genghis Khan, the new generation of Mongol rulers seems to have lost its abhorrence of public bloodletting.
After the main trials in the central Mongol court concluded, regional officials were ordered to hold similar trials of members of Ogodei’s lineage and their former administrators. The purge reached a climax in a literal hunt for dissenters who had escaped from the court to the countryside and found refuge from the first round of reprisals. In the traditional hunts, men formed a large circle, and by tightening it drove the prey toward the center for slaughter. In this enormous hunt, Mongke’s court ordered ten units of ten thousand men each to sweep through the land in a large military formation, searching for sympathizers of the deposed branch of the family. The hunt yielded some three hundred families who had fled from the authorities. They suffered the same fate as those before them. They were beaten with heated brands until they confessed. Then they were executed.
We know nothing of most of the victims or of their alleged crimes.
They survive in the historical record only because their deaths left a warning to future generations. One queen called Toqashi Khatun was tried and convicted, in the presence of her husband, by a former political rival serving as judge. The judge “ordered her limbs to be kicked to a pulp.” According to Rashid al-Din, the judge thereby “relieved his bosom filled with an ancient grudge.”
Sorkhokhtani had emerged victorious, but her sons then channeled their fury against the survivors, including women who had once been their allies and helped them attain power. The worst era for royal Mongol women followed the election of Mongke Khan. Once such a purge destroys its original target, the sponsors of the persecutions often find it difficult to stop the violence. Having destroyed their enemies, they turn their fury toward one another and thus make enemies of their former confederates. The killers began to kill one another. Soon women within the victorious side came under attack.
Rubruck reported that when a wife of Mongke Khan had two people executed, he became angry with her. Then “he forthwith sent to his wife and asked her where she had found out that a wife could pass a death sentence, leaving her husband in ignorance of what she had done.” As punishment he had her sealed up in solitary confinement for a week “with orders that no food be given her.”
As for the queen’s two retainers, a brother and sister who had carried out the executions, Mongke first killed the brother. Then he ordered the man’s head be removed and hung around his sister’s neck. Soldiers then chased her around the camp beating her with burning brands. When they finally tired of the torture, they killed her. Mongke also wanted to have his wife executed but did not. “And he would have had his own wife put to death had it not been for the children he had of her.”
Every successful purge needs a complicit judge or judiciary, and the family of Sorkhokhtani found him in Menggeser Noyan of the Jalayir clan, whom they appointed to be supreme judge of the Mongol Empire. Since he came from neither the ruling Borijin clan nor any of their marriage ally clans, he should have been fair and impartial in reviewing cases and imposing judgments, but according to the Persian chronicles, “He was pitiless in executing offenders.” Initially, Menggeser Noyan arrested the members of Guyuk’s family, oversaw the interrogation, passed judgment on them, and then executed them. In this way, he insulated Mongke Khan and his family from some of the personal blame, since it was still too grave a crime for one member of the Borijin clan to execute another.
The purge expanded and continued until 1252, and most of the arrests occurred far from the main court. Still, in such cases the accused had a theoretical right of appeal to the court, particularly for a capital crime. Menggeser Noyan decided not to review any of the appeals until after execution of sentence. It remains unknown, but also unlikely, that he found anyone innocent after execution.
In the terror and chaos created by the purge, Sorkhokhtani’s victorious faction confiscated the lands and property of the accused. Sorkhokhtani’s sons annexed the entire kingdom of Alaqai Beki, who had ruled the Onggud and all of northern China. She claimed these lands on the legal grounds that her daughter had been married to Alaqai’s son who had been killed in the southern campaign. Around 1253, Mongke Khan gave control of the Onggud and surrounding area toward the west to his younger brother. Thus, Khubilai Khan peacefully absorbed the Onggud kingdom of his aunt Alaqai Beki, but the other acquisitions for him and his brothers proved much more difficult and usually bloody.
Whereas the ruling family managed to take control of Alaqai Beki’s Onggud nation by politics, they found it much harder to seize the Uighur territory, ruled by the late khan Ogodei’s daughter Alajin Beki and her husband the Idiqut. Since the Idiqut was obviously loyal to the Ogodei faction, Menggeser Noyan ordered his arrest and personally oversaw the questioning of the Uighur leader.
He faced a brutal interrogation, but it probably was similar to many others presided over by the judge. They twisted the Idiqut’s hands until he passed out from pain. When he revived, they placed his head into some type of wooden press. Menggeser departed from the scene of the interrogation, but he left the Idiqut in the press with guards. During Menggeser’s absence, one of the guards took pity on the Idiqut and loosened the press. When Menggeser returned and saw what had happened, he had the guard seized and delivered “seventeen stout blows upon the posterior.”