Temujin’s early life was punctuated by four defining incidents: the murder of his father and the family’s subsequent fall into near destitution; his murder of Bekhter, his half-brother; his kidnapping by the Tayichi’ut; and the abduction of his bride, Borte Fujin.
Though not born into the nobility, Temujin’s early circumstances were respectable, and his father, Yesugei, the son of Bartan-Baghatur, is generally recognized as a minor chieftain though not as a khan. His grandfather, Qabul Khan, was recognized as a khagan, or chieftain, by the Chins. Qabul Khan was a grandson of Qaidu Khan, who is credited with being the first leader to attempt to unify the Mongol tribes.
Temujin’s mother, Ho’elun, was from the Olkhunut forest tribe; she had been abducted by Yesugei and his brothers from her newlywed husband of the Merkit tribe as she and her husband were traveling back to the Merkit camp. Yesugei then made Ho’elun his chief wife, who would bear his heirs. Though abduction was a common and traditional form of marriage, the custom continued to cause resentment and anger, and it was a common cause of hostility and intertribal warfare.
Temujin’s mother, Ho’elun, bore Yesugei Bahadur6 three more sons, Khasar, Khajiun, and Temuge, and lastly one daughter, Temulin, born when her oldest was nine. There were also two other brothers, Bekhter and Belgutei, from a second wife. The family had their base by the River Onon, where the children learned riding and archery from an early age. During these years Temujin formed a close friendship with Jamuka, a son from a neighboring family, with whom he formed a blood-brothership (anda) by exchanging knucklebones and arrows. The relationship between andas was often considered stronger than that between blood brothers and could not be lightly set aside. It was also during this time that Temujin’s father arranged his nine-year-old son’s marriage to Borte Fujin, a daughter of Dei-sechen, from the Boskur tribe, a subgroup of a leading Mongol tribe, the Onggirad. Upon departing from the bride’s father’s camp, leaving his son with his new in-laws, Yesugei Bahadur passed by a group of Tatars who had struck camp to eat. He availed himself of the ancient nomadic custom of hospitality and was invited to share their meal. However, the Tatars recognized him as an enemy who had previously robbed them—“Yesugei the Kiyan has come”7—and so poisoned his food. He died upon reaching home and entrusted the loyal Monglik with ensuring his eldest son’s safe return.
After his father’s murder, Temujin’s family fortunes declined abruptly, and as eldest son, on whom the responsibility of breadwinner fell, Temujin was summoned home to provide for his family. His mother famously
Hoisted her skirts up. . . running upstream on the banks of the Onon, gathering wild pear, fruits of the region, nourishing the bellies and throats of her children. . . digging up roots to nourish her children, she fed them with onions, fed them with garlic, saw how the sons of her belly could flourish. . . . Thus on a diet of seeds they were nourished.8
This was a harsh and bitterly learned lesson that left a profound impression on his character. The family’s predicament worsened when their relatives decided that continued loyalty to a departed leader was strategically prejudicial, politically inopportune, and economically detrimental. Dismissing the nine-year-old Temujin as too young to lead the clan, Yesugei Bahadur’s Tayichi’ut followers, his nokhod, deserted the camp, declaring, “The deep water has dried up; the shining stone is worn away. It is over.”9
It was not only the nokhod, whose expectations of plunder and martial adventure had now been dashed, who deserted Yesugei’s stricken family, but also less explicably the family’s close relatives. According to steppe tradition, a widow should be taken in marriage and given protection by the youngest brother, in this case, Da’aritai-otchigin. Ho’elun declined, asserting her wish to raise her family alone. However, as Rashid al-Din records that in fact the bereaved family did receive considerable support from family members including Yesugei’s elder brother, Kuchar, this might well be the Secret History overdramatizing Temujin’s plight to portray the mounting adversities from which the future world conqueror was so determinedly and remarkably able to extricate himself. What is clear is that times became considerably harder for Ho’elun and her young family, and such filial occupations as horse-rustling became necessities rather than pastimes.
The murder, when he was 13 or 14, of his half-brother, Bekhter, is perhaps the most controversial of the four defining incidents from Temujin’s early life. It is an incident that figures prominently in the Secret History but appears to have been ignored in the Altan Debter, an official history. Ostensibly the reason behind the murder was the theft of a fish and a lark from Temujin and his brother, Jochi-Kasar, by the two half-brothers, Bekhter and Belgutei, which highlighted a certain rivalry simmering between the two branches of the family. The official history, the Altan Debter, avoids reference to the incident, which undoubtedly besmirches the reputation of Chinggis Khan, whereas the Secret History does not hide Ho’elun’s grief, shock, and anger at her sons, whom she brands murderers and destroyers.
In response to Bekhter’s theft of a fish, an incident that followed accusations of the half-brothers’ failure to share their hunting spoils (the division of spoils being a practice sanctified by Mongol custom and tradition), Temujin and Kasar confronted the older brother, who, apparently accepting his fate, asked only that his younger brother, Belgutei, be spared. Bekhter was dispatched with horn-tipped arrows, and Belgutei was spared to eventually find honor and recognition serving his brother’s murderer. Chinggis Khan was later to speak of both brothers, “It is to Belgutei’s strength and Kasar’s prowess as an archer that I owe the conquest of the World Empire.”10
It seems likely that more was at stake than ownership of a fish to have caused this fratricide. The age of the half-brothers is not explicitly stated in the sources, and there is evidence suggesting that Bekhter might have been older than Temujin, in which case he could have been perceived as a threat to Temujin’s leadership of the family. Had Temujin been the oldest of the boys, such breaches of tradition as the theft and refusal to share hunting spoils could not have occurred, because his status could not have been questioned. Belgutei is reported by Rashid al-Din to have voted in the election of Mongke Qa’an in 1251 before dying in 1255 at the age of 110. While assuming the figure of 110 to be exaggerated but indicative of unusual longevity, it could be that even the younger of the half-brothers was older than Temujin. However, as the first son of the first wife, Temujin would have regarded Bekhter’s behavior as an infringement upon his privileges, almost as insurrection, and would have felt full justification in meting out appropriate punishment. Bekhter’s apparent lack of resistance and his brother’s failure to seek revenge suggests that they also understood Temujin’s response.
In the Secret History, Temujin’s kidnapping and imprisonment by the Tayichi’ut follow immediately after the account of the murder, though no suggestion is made that the two events were linked other than portraying Temujin’s treatment as that befitting a common criminal. Whether his capture was retribution for the killing or because Tarkutai-Kiriltuk, a leading noble of the Tayichi’ut, considered him a potential rival, or both, is never clarified, and Rashid al-Din suggests that throughout his youth Temujin suffered continually at the hands of not only relatives from the Tayichi’ut but also rivals from the Merkits, the Tatars, and other tribes. Such tribulations were hardly uncommon for the young Turco-Mongols, and kidnappings for ransom, for servants, or even for forced fighters were not uncommon, as the many examples mentioned in the Secret History testify.
The Secret History recounts how Temujin cleverly planned and calmly executed his escape. He chose to flee on the night of a feast, when he knew his guards would be distracted. Still wearing the wooden cangue his captors had put him in (a sort of collar immobilizing the head and both arms), he plunged into a river. By using the cangue as a flotation device, he was able to lie on the bed of the river and keep his head above water. In this manner he bided his time. He was discovered by Sorqan-shira, of the small Suldus tribe, who rather than betraying him assisted the fugitive in his escape. Sorqan-shira, like others who were to follow him, said of Temujin, “There is a fire in his eyes and a light in his face.”11 Rejecting the advice of his savior to head straight for his family’s camp, Temujin sought out the camp of Sorqan himself, where he knew Sorqan’s children were sympathetic toward him. While the Secret History might well have embellished this anecdote somewhat, the essential elements of Temujin’s character remain evident. The careful planning, the selfcontrol, the understanding of people, the awareness of his powers over others and young people in particular, the lack of impulsiveness—these were all qualities that he was to develop over the next decades. The lessons he learned from this encounter with the Tayichi’ut were never to be forgotten.
The fourth defining incident in Temujin’s early life resulted in a gradual turn in his fortunes and the beginning of his rise to unifier of the Turco-Mongol tribes. This incident was the kidnapping of his bride, Borte Fujin, by the Merkits, and the repercussions were to echo far into the future political history of the Mongol Empire.
Not long after his escape from the Tayichi’ut and having reached the age of 15, the Mongol age of majority, Temujin returned to reclaim his bride Borte Fujin from her father, Dei-sechen. He also sought to consolidate himself as head of his small tribe and gather supporters and outside protection that he might never again to fall victim to the dictates and bullying of neighboring tribes. To this end, he summoned his friend and fellow horse-rustler, Bo’orchu; collected his brothers, Kasar with his bow and Belgutei with his axe; packed his wife’s wedding gift, a sable cloak, as a very persuasive and valuable offering; and set off in search of a powerful protector.
Parallels between Temujin and the leader he chose as his protector are possible. Toghrul, the leader of the powerful Keraits, had been abducted by the Merkits when he was a boy and, for a while, forced into hard labor. Later, at 13, he and his mother were carried off by the Tatars, and the young Toghrul was made to tend their camels. After the death of his father, the young Toghrul also murdered his brother and as a result became head of his family. This role was short-lived: as a consequence of the murder of his brother, his uncle forced him into exile. It was Temujin’s father who assisted the exiled Toghrul, the two becoming anda, and together they attacked Toghrul’s uncle, the gur-khan (leader of the tribe). Thus Toghrul became the powerful leader of the Kerait, with the title of ong-khan or wang-khan, and at the time when Temujin made his appearance to remind the Kerait ruler of his debt to Yesugei Bahadur, Toghrul’s authority had spread from the River Onon over the Mongol homelands to the lands of the Chin emperor, to whom he paid tribute and from whom he received recognition in return.
When Toghrul accepted the sable cloak and with it Temujin, as an adopted son, he gained a much-needed ally against the intrigues of his own family and in return bestowed some much-needed status and security on Temujin. In recognition of this new status, Temujin was presented with a “son” as a personal servant. This was Jelme, the future Mongol divisional commander. The value and advantages of this new alliance were to be made clear within a very short time.
The details of the abduction of Borte Fujin by the Merkit differ in the Secret History and in Rashid al-Din’s Altan Debter-based account. Both agree, however, that a force of Merkits attacked Temujin’s camp and seized Borte Fujin and also Belgutei’s mother while the men and Ho’elun with her daughter Temulun on her lap escaped. Both accounts also agree that Temujin sought immediate assistance from his adopted father, Toghrul, who was only too pleased to wreak revenge on his enemies of old, the Merkits. The Merkits were in fact exacting revenge themselves for the original abduction of Ho’elun from them by Temujin’s father, Yesugei.
The discrepancy in the accounts surrounding this episode is not difficult to explain. Temujin’s first son, Jochi, was born approximately nine months after Borte Fujin’s abduction, and the uncertainty of his paternity reverberated down through his line, sons who became rulers of the Golden Horde, the ulus (the lands and people designated to be under a Mongol prince’s command) that held sway over Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Pontic (Qipchaq) steppes. Women abducted from other tribes were awarded to members of the capturing tribe as a matter of course. Belgutei’s mother was filled with shame after her release, not so much because she had been given to a Merkit as a wife but because the Merkit to whom she had been given was a mere commoner, while her sons were khans. Rashid al-Din’s account has Borte Fujin treated with the greatest respect by her abductors due to her pregnancy and claims that the Merkits happily turned her over to their sworn enemy the Kerait leader, Toghrul. Toghrul refused to take her as a wife because he considered her his daughter-in-law, returning her to Temujin. This account is obviously contrived and implausible and served the political aim of avoiding embarrassing a neighboring Mongol dynasty and tarnishing the name of Borte Khiitfin (Lady). Rashid al-Din adds that Toghrul sought to “preserve her from the gaze of strangers and non-intimates,”12 an obvious inaccuracy because the Keraits were not Muslim and would never have entertained such sentiments, unlike Rashid al-Din himself and others in the Muslim Mongol court where he served.
Though not explicit, the Secret History, written for insiders who would have been well acquainted with the facts of this incident, does not weave any falsehoods around the events, while at the same time it romanticizes the eventual reunion of Temujin and his “beloved” Borte Fujin, a depiction worthy of Hollywood.
Then Lady Borte, who was fleeing for her life, heard Temujin’s voice and recognized it. She leaped from the still moving cart and came running to him. . . . By the light of the moon he saw her, and, as he jumped from his horse, he took her in his arms.13
Such romantic love and moonlight tenderness sits strangely with the fact that Temujin had abandoned his beloved apparently without a second thought when the Merkits launched their attack. However, this might be explained by the fact that whereas Temujin and the other men in the party and possibly even Ho’elun, who was also there, would have faced almost certain death had they been captured, young women were too valuable a commodity to wantonly dispose of, and though paternity of any children could be important, women were considered transferable among men in Mongol society. This attitude is clearly evident in the inheritance laws that stipulate that the wives and concubines of deceased Mongols were inherited by their nearest relatives, with sons inheriting their father’s wives. Temujin would therefore have realized that it was imperative that he escape rather than confront a stronger enemy and that he would later be in a position to impose his revenge and reclaim his bride.
Temujin called on his adopted father, Toghrul, his anda, Jamuka, his brothers Kasar and Belgutei, his boon-companion {nokor), Bo’orchu, and his servant and nokor, Jelme, to assist him in rescuing his bride and his stepmother from the Merkits. Toghrul had not forgotten his pledge:
Didn’t I tell you last time that you could depend on me? Your father and
I were sworn brothers, and when you brought me the sable jacket you
Asked me to be a father to you. . . .
In return for this sable I shall trample the Merkit;
Lady Borte shall be saved.
In return for this sable I shall trample the Merkit;
Lady Borte shall be rescued.14
The victory was total. However, having retrieved his bride and scattered his enemies, Temujin called a halt to the assault and though he took some youngsters as slaves and women as concubines, he spared many of the Merkit men. In future encounters also this was often the case, and the defeated enemy were usually encouraged to join the growing Mongol forces and become incorporated into Chinggis’s army, a welcome option for most, as it offered the likely prospect of plentiful booty and future reward. Temujin had begun his rise to power.
World History
