In choosing for the first time to install the Great Khan in the shrine dedicated to a female, Manduhai was not merely seeking to restore the dynasty of Genghis Khan. She also sought to restore the male and female spiritual balance that had been so important to the success of Genghis Khan, but so persistently ignored by his heirs. While the Eternal Blue Sky offered inspiration, only the Mother Earth could offer success and fulfillment of the endeavor. Manduhai already had the inspiration of the Eternal Blue Sky; now she needed the support of the Earth Mother to bring her plan to reality.
Before a small crowd of her apprehensive supporters, in the fall of 1470, still the Year of the Tiger, Manduhai dismounted from her horse at a respectful distance away from the shrine. Some of her retainers gathered behind her in support, others remained on their horses and watched from a distance, clearly as spectators rather than participants. She approached the final distance toward the shrine on foot as a humble petitioner approaching a sacred cave. When she came close to the front of the cart, she stopped and performed the tsatsal ritual, tossing fermented mare’s milk into the air as an offering to the spirits.
Although her words would be addressed to the shrine and she would face away from the crowd, there could be no question that, in addition to being the spiritual outcry of a pilgrim, these words constituted a desperate plea of a queen to her people. This would be the most important political speech of her life. She had to make it clear to her people not only which choice she wished to make, but why she wanted them to follow it and accept her.
Everyone knew the danger, both supernatural and bodily, that hung over these appearances of a national leader before a sacred shrine. Only a few decades earlier, the son of Samur Gunj had appeared at one of the shrines dedicated to Genghis Khan as a supplicant to take the office of Great Khan, but he had been killed. Whether one believed the popular explanation that the arrow had been fired supernaturally by the spirit, or one accepted a more mundane source for the killing, by the end of the ceremony, the supplicant lay dead on the ground in front of the tent.
Despite the ritual precision of the ceremony and the real dangers lurking within it, Manduhai called out at the door of the tent. She began her emotional plea with a statement of deep personal desperation and confusion. In language reminiscent of religious hymns and sacred scriptures, she described her own life as wandering senselessly in a place “where black cannot be distinguished from white.” Her world was so dark, she lamented, that she could not distinguish the different colors on a multicolored horse.
She addressed the spirit of the First Queen as the source from which emanated light and wisdom. Manduhai pleaded for wisdom to pass out from the divine gates of the First Queen’s world into the visible world of humans. Still standing in the open air outside the tent after this emotionally strained and somewhat frightened plea for help, Manduhai began to present her case in a formal, legalistic manner, calling upon the dynastic and cultural traditions of the Mongol state. She was laying out her case before the people, and she obviously had already made a choice of husband that she wished them all to accept.
First, she stated the problem confronting the Mongol nation because the royal family had no men to serve as Great Khan. “The Borijin clan is under the threat of extinction,” she explained. The Mongols were living in a time of discord and violence. As articulated clearly by one of her descendants, “there was suffering,” and the state of the world was not stable. The Mongols did not resolutely distinguish between “khans and commoners” nor between “good and evil.” As the chronicler summarized the situation, “At that time the Borijin Golden Clan deteriorated.”
After expounding on the dire condition of the Mongol people, Manduhai presented her own personal predicament. As though pleading for mercy before a judge, she lodged her complaint that she was being forced into marriage by another man and by the public support that he had.
Speaking about Une-Bolod, the favored candidate to take her in marriage and become Great Khan, she acknowledged his power and popularity. “Because he is big and powerful,” she explained, he “wants to take me for his wife.” She made clear her unwillingness to marry the popular candidate, and to make her rejection of him unambiguous and irrevocable, she closed the door on him forever with a special oath and request of the First Queen. If she should ever yield to him, she placed a curse upon herself: “If I do it, I beg you First Queen, punish me harshly.”
For the people gathered at the shrine, it must have been disappointing and perplexing as they sought to understand what the queen wanted. If she ruled out so steadfastly the most popular of the Mongol generals, then would she choose one of the Muslim warlords or an already arranged deal through the Ming court? Was their queen about to deliver her nation into the hands of foreigners? Was she about to betray them and the office she had served?
Knowing the suspicious questions and fear in the minds of those around her, and possibly remembering the killing of the previous royal pilgrim, Manduhai quickly dispelled all these options and reasserted her loyalty. “If I desert you and your descendants,” she proclaimed to the First Queen and to the Mongol people in the simple imagery that every herder would immediately comprehend, “then take your long horse snare and lasso me.”
She continued, in the strongest and most vivid form of oath that a Mongol could make, asking that if she brought any harm to her people or failed to protect them, “then may you break and rip apart my body.” For the Mongols, execution through mutilation constituted the least noble and most feared way of dying because it allowed all the soul-bearing liquids, especially the blood, to flow out onto the earth. Such a death not only kills the body but destroys the soul and pollutes the earth. Manduhai made it clear to everyone that if she failed in her duty and promises, she was requesting precisely such an ignominious death for herself. She added the wish that in killing her, the First Queen or the Mongol people should separate “my shoulders from my thighs.” In tearing apart the body, the oath breaker would surrender all connection to everyone, since the dismemberment would break the bones symbolizing the father and rip apart the flesh symbolizing the mother.
The graphic oath made reference to one often employed by men going to war and swearing loyalty to one another in the face of all enemies; it was an explicitly male form of oath taking. Traditionally as part of the oath, the men killed three male animals—a stallion, a ram, and a dog—by cutting them in half. They separated the halves of the three animals and, standing between them, they made their vow: “O God! O Sky! O Earth! Hear that we swear such an oath. Here are the males of these animals. If we do not keep our oath and break our word, let us be as these animals are.” For Mongols, this vow before the Sky and the Earth constituted the highest oath possible. A lesser version of the oath was to hold out an arrow, break it into two pieces, and then hold the two pieces stretched far apart to show that the oath taker expected to be broken and pulled equally far apart for breaking the vow.
After thus vowing never to desert her people, Manduhai invoked the protection of the First Queen. “I act as a daughter-in-law,” she said to the First Queen, emphasizing her loyalty to the Borijin clan. Manduhai’s plea made it clear that in rejecting Une-Bolod, she rejected all the options presented and had not considered the Muslim or the Ming alliances. Instead of the three options, Manduhai was seeking a new path unknown and unexpected. She would surrender her power to no man.
With a sense of public drama and experience in how to build popular support, Manduhai called forth her choice to present to the First Queen and to her subjects. The figure who stepped forward from the crowd was not even a real man at all, but an awkward child only six or seven years old, dressed in big boots. Despite the extra height provided by the triple-soled boots that he wore for the occasion, he could scarcely control his own body, much less guide a nation. At an age when he had barely learned to command a horse, how could he command the armies needed to protect his office and his people?