Women Who Ran Genghis Khan’s Empire

[ummonk]

Is Borte “largely forgotten”? After Subutai, she’s probably the most recognizable figure in Genghis Khan’s administration, save Genghis Khan himself.

[fasteddie31003]

IMO we should not look at Genghis Kahn's Empire fondly. After listening to Hardcore History's Wrath of the Khans, I think they have been the most evil group humanity has produced so far. Time seems to heal all wounds but Genghis Khan sure seemed to have made a lot of wounds.

[Glyptodon]

It's hard for me to see them as "more evil" than many other pre-modern groups. It's such an arbitrary framing.

[belfalas]

> After listening to Hardcore History's Wrath of the Khans, I think they have been the most evil group humanity has produced so far.

Never forget that history is written by the victors. The Mongol Empire was replaced by the Russian Empire.

[xbmcuser]

The worst Empire in that case is USA with how they obliterated the North American populations and wiped out many tribes.

[mrcheesebreeze]

I don't know if we can call them the most evil. There are plenty of contenders, even if the death rates don't match up.

If we go purely by deathrates then we should pick communist china or the soviet union.

If we go by barbarity the mongol empire, the timurids, and the japanese empire (talking the one from ww2) are all good contenders.

Imperial japan was so bad that the nazi ambassador to china in nanking did his best to save as many civilians as he could out of sheer disgust for their behavior.

imperial japanese soldiers used to bayonet babies and do beheading contests for fun.

literally, their newspapers had them even keeping score over who could do more beheadings.

they melted people, literally ate people on one occupied island, they did multiple genocides, they tested gasses.

Imperial japan is what I consider the worst by barbarity.

[s1artibartfast]

Who looks at the Mongol empire fondly?

[evv555]

Looking forward to the feel-good girl power articles about Nazi Germany.

[scythe]

The misery of the Mongols' wrath is made apparent by the decline of Iran and China, hitherto on par with if not ahead of the West, but some 800 years after the Empire we see the regions least affected (South India, Vietnam, Japan, Oman) still performing as regional standouts on a troubled continent. You could throw out Myanmar and Yemen as counterexamples but they've both seen nasty recent wars.

[kennxfl]

Often people forget that there isn't a dominant empire that existed for hundreds of years without insane brutality and cruelty against anyone considered to be an enemy. With the area Genghis Khan's Empire had under control, I don't doubt they pillaged every opposing enemy without mercy.

[cato_the_elder]

This part sounds very similar to the traditional role of women, and it is quite dishonest to frame it as "Running Genghis Khan’s Empire":

> Chinggis Khan’s senior wife, Börte, is responsible for a camp. She’s responsible for their home, the yurt or ger that they live in. She’s responsible for the kids. If merchants come through, she’s going to talk to them about economic activity. She is going to oversee or perform the typical daily herding activities. There’s food preparation. There’s clothing preparation. There are religious rituals. There’s entertainment. It’s often a woman’s job to be the hospitable partner, to bring in food and welcome guests.

[nixlim]

The thing to remember is that a "camp" comprised thousands of people, livestock and other moving parts. She was essentially project and logistics manager of a massive project, with no automation tools or modern mechanical equipment. The logistics of it would have been mind boggling. Not sure what you mean by "traditional role of women", as that would differ between cultures, but her job would be no mean feat, in my opinion.

[karaterobot]

I think part of the issue is that the title of the article is using the word "ran" in "ran Genghis Khan's Empire" to imply that Börte made strategic, judicial, or political decisions, and then the text in the article talks about more operational or logistical work. It's hyperbolic.

The reasons are obviously: precious, precious clicks.

A title like "The Women Who Kept Genghis Khan's Empire Running" would have been better.

[HeroOfAges]

Not sure why you're being downvoted for pointing this out. She was responsible for "their" home. Not the tens of thousands of households across the empire. There was also a sentence where the scholar being interviewed estimates that women made up to 20% of Mongolian armies of that era. That just seems flatout unbelievable.

[devindotcom]

Suddenly everyone is an expert on the logistics of running an empire! Is it so hard to believe that women were in positions of real power there, especially when men were overwhelmingly occupied with warfare? If you read the article you find she later ran the whole shop. It's not dishonest at all, quite the opposite, as the scholar in the article notes, it is dishonest to _downplay_ the role women had in running and expanding the empire. They just weren't riding to battle.

[Archelaos]

And what about "Töregene, who became regent of the entire Mongol Empire after the death of Chinggis Khan’s son Ögedei"?

[yorwba]

"The traditional role of women" and "running an empire" are not mutually exclusive. What did you expect the day-to-day business of keeping the Mongol empire running to look like?

[avgcorrection]

People might roll their eyes at Godwin’s Law but this poster has a point.

Here’s how these headlines work:

“The men who ran Genghis Khan’s empire”

This title either evokes the air of scholarly history or makes you think about the brutality of large Medieval empires.

“Women who ran Genghis Khan’s empire”

This title makes you think (or is supposed to make you think), oh, I guess the Mongolians were kind of progressive. Good on you, Mongolians.

[Victerius]

There's no point in grinding one's teeth and squeezing one's fist at an ancient construct that predates your birth by nearly a millenium. At some point you'll want to let the steam out of your ears, sit down, and hit the books. And the same will be true of the Third Reich in a couple centuries, when anyone even remotely associated to anyone else even remotely associated with the atrocities committed by Germany will be long since dead. And the 1933-1945 period in Germany will become more of a subject of historical curiosity than a source of outrage.

[akomtu]

I see they are trying to push a narrative here, but they picked a weak example. Wu Zetian started in a harem of some Chinese emperor, but climbed to the top, captured the throne and ruled for 15 years officially (and who knows how many years before that unofficially). She wasn't shy of killing her own newborn for a timely political move, and obviously wasn't constrained by morals in her climbing after that.

And Genghis Khan was just a powerful savage who wiped out entire chinese cities who dared to defend themselves. His take on chinese civilization was that it was occupying land that could be used to grow grass for his horses.

[markdown]

Hundreds of years later... the US, unconstrained by morals, was doing the same, overthrowing the Kingdom of Hawaii to control more land to grow grass (sugarcane).

[badrabbit]

Ahh, the modern take on war and nations, the desire for moral superiority and the silly game of pretending there are rules in war.

As hard as it maybe to wrap one's head around this, historically, war was a way to obtain resources, or rather resolve conflicts over resources. Genghis wanted a resource for his horses, he resolved it. If your city was wiped out by him, it was your fault for being weak. You should not expect peace between nations or compassion. Nations are built on stolen land, their borders drawn by blood. We live in a world where nuclear powers maintain balance and modern technology has resolved many of the world 's resource scarcity issues. Our countries are ruled by law, not people. People allowed themslves to be ruled by the most cruel and ruthless in the past because that meant obtaining the most resources for them, even if done on a wh im to satisfy their rulers. People sit back and judge empires from the romans to the british and criticize their morals. It is utterly absurd. I mean, even these days the US invades the middle east and Russia its neighbors for resources. And the terrible thing about democracy is that people think the whole world runs on some system of rules where people's wills and lives matter at a global scale. It sounds nice but that isn't reality. It can be that way in a country but between countries, when you have food shortage your government will not hesitate to wipe out cities and commit genocide on your behalf. My point is that such criticism should be based on reality not on how things should be in an ideal world. The primary directive of any government is not just to secure its borders but the nation itself, whatever that stands for. Be it the elected ruler's will or the monarch's whim.