The Secret History of the Mongol Queens by Jack Weatherford

We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). Weatherford amply demonstrates how subsequent male relations waged a backlash against these women rulers until the remarkable rise of Manduhai and her ability to reunite the squabbling Mongol tribes. As part of his strategy to tighten his hold along the Silk Route, Genghis married his daughters to leaders in recently vanquished foreign lands to rule in his stead. Girls were raised to ride and shoot like boys, and they were expected to rule a territory as rigorously as they ruled the home.

This document sets forth the patriarch’s intentions for his family and nation, but it is curiously missing the part of the text that completes this intriguing sentence: “Let us reward our female offspring.” Weatherford argues that Genghis maintained a staunch adherence to a male-female sharing of power.

In the first part of the book, Weatherford traces the life of Genghis Khan and his relationship with his children, probably four sons and seven or eight daughters, as later recorded in The Secret History of the Mongols in the 13th century. Their husbands and in-laws, in turn, savagely wrested power from the women, excised their existence from official accounts and left the empire in alarming decline over centuries-until the reign of the last great Mongol queen Manduhai the Wise, who restored Mongol power in the 15th century and drove back the incursions by the Chinese. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, 2004, etc.) asserts that the founder of the Mongol Empire learned from harsh experience not to trust the men within the warring steppe clans, and eventually left his extended empire in the hands of his more capable daughters. Weatherford (Anthropology/Macalester Coll. Genghis Khan as the first feminist patriarch.

The Secret History of the Mongol Queens by Jack Weatherford