Murder Most Foul

After the death of Yesugei (the father of Temujin, who was eventually to become Genghis Khan / Chinggis Qan), the young Temujin  and his mother and brothers were abandoned by everyone except a few loyal retainers. Yesugei had been a contender for Mongol leadership, and his Tayyichi'ut allies (or followers) intended to make their own claim for leadership. For them, Yesugei's heirs could only be an impediment to their plans, and while custom did not allow them to kill Temujin while he was still a child, they planned to return and finish the job later when he had become a man.

As the story goes, this tiny  family was able to survive only by the heroic efforts of their mother, Ho'elün. At that time Temujin had one full brother, Qasar, and two half brothers, Bekter and Belgutei. Bekter and Belgutei bullied Temujin and Qasar, and after Ho'elün had proved unwilling or unable to settle the dispute, Temujin and Qasar stalked and killed Bekter.  Here is their mother Ho'elun's rection, as reported in the Secret History, #78:

This is only the most vivid of a number of passages showing Temujin ruthlessly destroying his own kin, and some have speculated that the compiler of the Secret History belonged to an anti-Temujin faction of the Mongol nation.  However, I think that this story is ambiguous in meaning, and marks  an internal tension in the Secret History and within Mongol society itself.

Family solidarity is a major theme in the Secret History.  Early in the book we hear the story of Mother Alan and her sons -- complete with the nearly-universal metaphor the unbreakable bundle of arrows which can each be broken singly.  (Mother Ho'elün tells this story herself earlier in the passage I am citing.)  Family solidarity was indeed important in Mongol society, and most of the  the Mongol groups seen in this story are defined, at least in principle, primarily by kinship. 

However, the Secret History is primarily the story of Temujin's rise to power, and Temujin did not respect family solidarity during this rise. Bekter is only the first of his many victims -- of the patrilineal kin contemporary with Temujin named in the Secret History, at least half die at his hand, on his orders, or fighting against him in battle. Furthermore, much the same is true of his main rival Ong Qan, who killed at least two of his brothers and also came into violent conflict with one of his uncles.

Among the Mongols succession was decided by a special form of election called “tanistry”[i]. All the adult males of the tribe, without regard for seniority or closeness of relationship to the deceased, were eligible to succeed him. Candidates for leadership put forward their claims, and the other members of the tribe chose sides. In some cases a consensus could quickly be reached. More often there would be two or more contenders, and the supporters of the contenders would fight until one of then was victorious and the others were dead. Most of the followers of the loser (except his own closest kin) would simply be incorporated into the winner’s forces. (Much the same would be done when a tribe was defeated by a different tribe: the tribal leadership would be killed, and the commoners, women, and childen would be absorbed into the other tribe).

Temujin’s killing of Bekter was just the first in a series of tanistry fights by which he gained control of an increasingly large number of kin. By killing his brother Bekter, Temujin became the leader of his father Yesugei’s descendants and their dependants and subordinates._[ii] Later he gained control of his grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s descendants by killing his uncle Daritai and a number of cousins. In his further career kinship became nominal at best, but a frequent  practice was to destroy the leadership of the defeated tribe and distribute its commoner members throughout his following.  Chinggis Qan’s ulus was ultimately a rationally-organized political-military machine subject entirely to the Qan’s will, within which kinship groups were relatively unimportant and weak.

The Mongols really had two models of social order. One was the familiar kinship madel of the segmentary or conical clan, and this one was explicitly expressed by Ho'elün in her lament (as well as in the legend of Mother Alan earlier in the book). The other was the model of the strong military leader who brought unity to the Mongols by terrible means, welding them into a powerful unit which was able to plunder and dominate the neighboring sedentary, urbanized peoples. Chinggis Qan's career follows the second pattern.

From this point of view, in the context of the book as a whole Ho'elün's lament can be given a different interpretation. Rather than simply condemning Temujin for killing his brother, she can be seen to be prophesying that her son, resembling as he does all the savage beasts she evokes, could never accept defeat or subordination and would become an irresistable force which would eventually dominate the world. This interpretation has the advantage of being consistent with the rest of the story, which glorifies Chinggis Qan, and also with the facts of history.

(Sometime later I will develop the idea that tanistry is only an extreme case of state-formation, one characteristic of nomadic societies without fortifications, real property, or permanent institutions,  within which the late ruler really has nothing concrete to hand down to his heir except the family charisma, so that the heir has to re-found the state by his own actions. Historically, the transition from clan organization to state organization is usually engineered by bloody tyrants who murdered their own kin -- something which was recognized by Plutarch in his biographies of Aeneas and Romulus, and which was also at work in the Greek myth of Jupiter and Saturn and the Athenian stories about Drakon and Solon. According to this analysis, the problem with Macbeth was not that he was murderous, but that he was chicken.

Once tanistry is recognized as a sometimes-normal succession practice, many of the horrible family murders and bloody succession struggles in civilized history can be reclassified as a latent secondary forms, rather than as monstruous and unthinkable abominations.) Dracon Solon

All original material copyright John J. Emerson 

Return to Idiocentrism