"Have Her Stripped and Washed and Brought To My Tent"

Here’s a cute irony for your holiday enjoyment. The subject is Genghis Khan, man of the millennium, ruler over all the tribes, coordinator of the Mongols and the Tatars, and heavy hitter in the DNA leagues, with an estimated 17 million living descendants (link).

It seems that Genghis, for all his transplanetary rutting, was in his own way something of a family man, with his faithful wife, Börte, and their four recognized sons who fought alongside their father but eyed each other warily as time approached for the inevitable succession. Genghis died in in 1227; in the event he outlived the eldest of the four sons, Jochi, who died earlier the same year. Effective power passed to his number three son, ögödeI. This ögödei died in 1241 leaving a whole raft of potential succession claimants. One was Batu, son of the deceased Jochi. Another was Möngke, son of Tolui, himself the fourth son of Genghis.

An uneasy kind of stasis ensued, as each of the claimants positioned himself and assayed the strength of his adversaries. Batu had perhaps a better claim to succession was his cousin. But Batu was off in Europe at that point. Whatever his appetite for power, a reasonable evaluation suggested that he wouldn’t be able to control both his European holdings and the steppe empire from a single center.

And so Batu made a far-sighted offer: he agreed to yield the steppe empire to Möngke, in exchange for independence in the west.

And that is how it came to passs. Möngke became the Great Khan. Batu became the progenitor of what history knows at “the Golden Horde,” the dominating force for generations in Russia, the person who imposed what Russians still talk of as “the Mongol-Tatar yoke.”

So, where is the irony? Just here. Over Batu, son of Jochi, there lay a disabling shadow: evidently Börte, wife of Genghis, mother of Jochi, had been kidnapped just nine months before his birth. Mongol sources pass in silence over this episode in the history of the ruling family. But Jochis’ very name means “visitor,” or “guest.”

Translated: of all the 17 million descendants of Genghis, one who may never have qualified is the Khan of the Golden Horde, the old man’s eldest son.

Credit: irony spotted by Mrs. B, during a Christmas-Eve chat in the hot tub. Family history from Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier (Blackwell Paperback 1992) and Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan (2004).