Джек Уезерфорд - Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

of Khodoe Aral between the Kherlen and the Tsenker Rivers. In keeping with his prior practices, Genghis Khan immediately began to distribute the accumulated booty to his generals and officers, who in turn made the appropriate divisions among their own men. For the first time in his career, however, he simply had too much loot and material to distribute, and he needed to find ways to administer it and store it until needed. To solve this problem of affluence, Genghis Khan allowed the construction of some buildings. He situated them near the small Avarga Stream, somewhat to the side of the steppe where a spring bubbled up out of the ground. According to tradition, Borte treated her young son Ogodei with the water from this spring in order to cure a disease. Collectively, the buildings were named the Yellow Palace, and they served mostly as warehouses for the goods brought back from the campaigns. With rivers on both sides and a small clump of hills in the middle, the area was easily protected, and made a surprise attack virtually impossible.

After his long absence, Genghis Khan had many pending problems to solve, not only among his Mongol subjects, but also with the Siberian tribes of the north and the Uighur farmers of the south. Some of the Siberian tribes that had first submitted to Mongol rule during Jochi’s invasion of 1207 used Genghis Khan’s lengthy absence on the Jurched campaign to quit sending tributary furs, forest products, and young women. When a Mongol envoy arrived to investigate, however, he found that in keeping with the fame of their women, they now had a woman chief whom they called Botohui-tarhun, a name that meant roughly Big and Fierce. Rather than surrender thirty maidens to the Mongols as wives, she took the Mongol himself captive. When the messenger did not return, Genghis Khan eventually sent another negotiator, and she took him captive as well.

In 1219, the Year of the Hare, Genghis Khan sent a trusted general with a detachment of good soldiers to find out what had happened. Accustomed to campaigning on the open steppes and in the farmlands, the Mongols had little experience fighting or traveling in the dense forest. Usually, the Mongols crossed the steppe by spreading out and moving forward on a broad front. In the forest, however, they had to follow one another along the narrow trails. Botohui-tarhun’s forces heard them coming long before they arrived in her territory, and like any experienced forest hunter, she set a trap for them. She sent a contingent of her troops to seal off the trail behind the men to prevent their escape, then she ambushed them from the front. Botohui-tarhun’s forces triumphed—and in the battle, her warriors killed the Mongol general.

Such a loss was highly unusual, and it enraged Genghis Khan. At first, he threatened to lead the army himself in vengeance against the victorious queen. His advisers soon convinced him otherwise. They prepared a large expedition, and this time the Mongols were determined to win by whatever means necessary. A small detachment of Mongol warriors moved out as a decoy pretending to guard the frontier trail and passes between the Mongols and the queen’s territory. Meanwhile, the Mongol soldiers in the main force of the army secretly cut a new road through the forest from another direction. With axes, adzes, saws, chisels, and all the tools and weapons they could muster, the Mongols laboriously cleared a path by following the mountain trail of the “red bull,” probably the large reddish deer or elk. After completing the secret road, the Mongol soldiers swooped down on the queen’s headquarters so fast that in the words of the Secret History, it seemed as though they had descended “through the top of the smoke-holes of their tents.”

The victorious Mongols freed their envoys and brought back the tribe as prisoners to be divided up as servants and mates. Genghis Khan gave the queen Botohui-tarhun in marriage to the second of the envoys, whom she may have already taken as her husband since she had kept him as her prisoner and had not killed him.

The forest tribes provided only a brief distraction for Genghis Khan compared to the more serious issues among the Uighurs of the desert oases, who ranked among his most steadfast subjects. They supported him so strongly that other Muslim Uighurs, living further to the west in the foothills of the Tian Shan Mountains of what is modern-day Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, wished to overthrow their Buddhist rulers and join Genghis Khan as well. Envoys came to the Mongol country from the Muslim people of Kashgar, a trading city in what is now the province of Xinjiang, in western China. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, these people were ruled by another group of Khitan that originated in Manchuria; but they had been driven out of the east by the Jurched, and settled in the Tian Shan Mountains. To differentiate them from the Khitan who had stayed in the east, the Mongols called them Kara Khitan, the “Black Khitan,” since black both signified distant kin and was, in particular, the color that symbolized the west.

While many of the Uighurs had voluntarily joined the Mongols, others remained under the control of the Black Khitan, who were now ruled by Guchlug, the son of the Tayang Khan of the Naiman, Genghis Khan’s erstwhile enemy. After the defeat of his people, Guchlug fled to the south, where he married the daughter of the Black Khitan ruler and then usurped his power. Although Guchlug was originally a Christian and the Black Khitan were Buddhists, they shared a common mistrust of the Uighur subjects, who were Muslims. In his newly acquired position as ruler of the kingdom, Guchlug began to persecute his Muslim subjects by limiting the practice of their religion. He forbade the call to prayer and prohibited public worship or religious study. When Guchlug left the capital of Balasagun on