Commercial Queens: Mongolian Khatuns and the Silk Road 1 TIMOTHY MAY Abstract Three women dominated the politics and government of the Mongol Empire in the decade of the 1240s. T¨ oregene and Oghul-Qaimish ruled as regents and are credited with corruption and petty politics throughout their regencies, while Sorqoqtani Beki became a paragon of virtue throughout the world for her adherence to the yasa of Chinggis Khan. Curiously, very little attention has been paid to this period to verify the accuracy of the statements. This study examines the role of all three women, but also attempts to place their actions in context, examine their role in commerce and how that affected their activities and their legacies. It argues that while the overall depiction of T¨ oregene and Oghul-Qaimish may not be inaccurate, it overlooks some crucial elements and motives in their actions which also reveal that Sorqoqtani’s actions were not as virtuous as the sources state. It is widely accepted that the rise of the Mongol Empire greatly expanded trade and the circulation of goods. Another, and often underappreciated, result of the expansion of the Silk Road was that many formerly remote regions of the world became connected. Since the fall of the Uighur Empire, Mongolia was a region removed from the main trade routes. Thus the Mongols irrupted into the wider world as a relatively unknown society. As the Mongol Empire dominated Eurasia, envoys, merchants and travellers came to the court of the Mongols from all over Eurasia, both within and without the empire, and participated in the Chinggis Exchange, or the exchange of goods, ideas, technology and people precipitated by the Mongol conquests. 2 Once at the court, many travellers observed that the Mongolian Queens or khatuns were quite unlike anything seen before in the Confucian, Islamic or Christian worlds. During the apogee of the empire, three khatuns in particular played a prominent role in its politics and government: T¨ oregene (wife of ¨ Og¨ odei Khan and then regent after his death), Sorqoqtani (wife of Tolui, Chinggis Khan’s fourth son), and Oghul Qaimish (wife of G¨ uy¨ uk Khan and then regent after his death). While most narratives have focused on their political involvement, scholars have overlooked the khatuns’ involvement in commercial ventures and how these activities affected the politics of the empire. This paper will examine their 1 I would like to thank Scott Jacobs for his support of my research. 2 See Timothy May, The Mongol Conquests in World History (London, 2012), passim. JRAS, Series 3, 26, 1-2 (2016), pp. 89–106 C  The Royal Asiatic Society 2015 doi:10.1017/S1356186315000590 http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1356186315000590 Downloaded from http:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of North Georgia, on 22 Sep 2016 at 13:33:25, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at