Manduhai introduced the boy to the spirit of the First Queen and to the assembled crowd as the grand-nephew of her late husband. “By coming to your tent,” she said very clearly to the spirit of the First Queen, “I wish to make your descendant Great Khan even though he is still a young boy.”
Even if he trembled in fear in his oversized boots, merely by standing before the shrine of the First Queen and the assembly of Mongol nomads, Batu Mongke showed both tremendous bravery and total reliance on Manduhai, who guided him. Twice before in the previous generation, boys of his age had been proclaimed Great Khan, only to be murdered by their rivals before they could reach full maturity. Other fully grown men who bore the title were also ignominiously struck down and killed by the Muslim warlords who tried to control them. Any one of the new boy khan’s rivals for power might descend upon the unorthodox inauguration to seize Manduhai, but now that she had publicly proclaimed him Great Khan, any usurper would have to kill the young boy to make his own claim supportable.
Batu Mongke stood at the Shrine of the First Queen before the people who were supposed to be his subjects, and was acclaimed by Manduhai as the new Great Khan, but his battered body still bore the signs of ill treatment. Fortunately for him, the heavy Mongol boots of manhood not only increased his stature, but the thick, stiff hide that came all the way up to the knee formed an inflexible brace that served to hold him erect even if his knees weakened and began to buckle during the long public ceremony.
In his short but miserable life, he had cultivated a keen ability to discern other people’s motives and an intuitive recognition of their strategies in what they sought from him. In this life of betrayal and suffering, he had one attachment to one ally and guide, to whom he showed unswerving trust. Batu Mongke’s willingness to stand bravely and tall before all these dangers showed an extraordinary confidence in the judgment and guidance of the one person who had orchestrated this event.
He had little choice about relying on Manduhai, but he soon learned that, in her, he had found not only a savior but also a guardian and mentor. She would be the one person who remained loyal to him and protective of his safety and his political interests until the day she died. Though no one else in the mounted throng may have had the confidence in her ability to protect him and to unite the nation, he showed no sign of doubt in her on that, or any other, day in his life.
She perceived something in him that escaped the notice of others, and he found in her something that no one else could see. They had an understanding and faith in each other that seemed to surpass the limited views of those around them. Over the next thirty years, the two of them, like Qaidu Khan and Khutulun two centuries earlier, formed an indivisible if unlikely team, united by a bond that transcended generation and gender and which allowed them to achieve together what neither could have done alone.
Manduhai and young Batu Mongke shared something important. They were both totally alone in the world. Both had been taken from their places of birth by circumstances beyond their control, and both had to live without the vast kinship network so important in tribal society. In Mongol society, a person depended almost totally on kin to provide all the supports needed in life. No religious, market, or fraternal organizations existed outside of the kinship network. The most dreaded misfortune in life was to be without family. The tragic figure in Mongol mythology was always the orphan. Many songs and poems bemoaned the sad fate and the empty future of such a person. The second most tragic figure was the widow whose husband left no male relative to marry her.
Queen Manduhai and Batu Mongke formed a strange dyad of precisely these two outcasts. They had no parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, or even cousins. Everyone had either died or disappeared to some unknown place and fate. In a sense, both had been abandoned by life. Yet, through some tortured sequence of events and unusual circumstances, they had found each other and made an odd emotional alliance and political union. The orphan and the widow could scarcely be expected to survive alone, but they were not alone. They had each other.
In officially making him Great Khan, Manduhai was also formally marrying the boy. While the office of Great Khan was conferred until death, the marriage would be considered a temporary formality until the boy was grown. At that time the two of them would negotiate whether to continue it or for him to take another wife. In the meantime, she was still the Mongol khatun and would rule alone in her own name as well as in his. For now, an inexperienced young queen who was barely more than a girl herself stood united with a crippled little boy of seven. Nothing about them appeared encouraging or inspiring. It scarcely seemed plausible that such an unlikely pair could survive the coming winter, much less conquer the quarrelsome Mongol tribes and take on foreign enemies.
Throughout their reign, as on this awkward inaugural day, they frequently benefited from the underestimation of their abilities by those who struggled against them. In the world where physical strength and mastery of the horse and bow seemed to be all that really mattered, no one seemed to anticipate the advantages of patient intelligence, careful planning, and consistency of action. Neither Manduhai nor Batu Mongke possessed the physical strength of even a lowly soldier in their army, and yet they had some form of charisma that must have come as a direct gift from the sky.
Henceforth the chronicles no longer referred to Manduhai as Manduhai Gunj or Lady Manduhai; instead she was clearly the queen, Manduhai Khatun.
She proclaimed this unlikely candidate as the Great Khan of the Yeke Monghol Ulus, the twenty-seventh successor to Genghis Khan, and the ruler of all the lands and peoples within the world ocean. In keeping with Mongol imperial tradition, she had already picked out an auspicious title that resonated with meaning on many symbolic levels. She bestowed upon Batu Mongke the title Dayan Khan. Believing in the power that sounds have to make ideas and wishes into reality, she had chosen a name with deep meanings for both the Mongols and the Chinese. When heard with the Mongolian ear, the name meant the “Whole Khan,” or the “Khan of the Whole,” a title that stressed unity, the most elusive yet necessary of goals for survival of the steppe tribes. Her choice of title clearly asserted her goal to overcome the divisions by clan and locality. She would unite them, and he would be the khan of all Mongols. In particular, the title showed her rejection of the taishi’s claim to rule over the Oirat of western Mongolia. Dayan Khan would rule the north and the south, the east and the west. He was the Whole Khan.
As if the Mongol claim was not sufficiently presumptuous or excessively ambitious, the same sounds of the Dayan Khan title carried a more ominous meaning when heard with a Chinese ear. To them it meant the “Great Yuan,” reasserting loudly and clearly the Mongol claim to be recognized as the rightful rulers of China and the loyal heirs of the old Yuan Dynasty.
His new title could easily provoke the highly sensitive and insecure Ming court to send out an army to avenge the affront to its honor and inflict some horrifying form of public execution. For a less serious offense, the earlier Jin Dynasty had seized one of Dayan Khan’s ancestors in the twelfth century and nailed him onto a wooden contraption in order to force his submission, a goal that he denied them throughout the agonizing crucifixion. If the Chinese captured the new young khan, they could easily do far worse to force him to give up his title, resign his office, and surrender all control of his dynasty to the Ming emperor.