Conquered tribes sent girls for him and his sons: girls were treated as trophies, and rape was a vicious rite of Mongol conquest. Yet some of the women showed defiant agency in the face of male cruelty, and a few rose to become the most powerful women in the world – and to tell their own stories.
After breaking the Tatars, Genghis chose the chieftain’s daughter Yesugen as his concubine. As they were having sex, she suggested, ‘If it pleases the khan, he will take care of me, regarding me as a human being and a person worth keeping. But my elder sister, who is called Yesui, is superior to me: she is indeed fit for a ruler.’ Genghis kidnapped the other sister, and both girls became senior wives. Now that he was in love with Yesugen, she accompanied him on future expeditions. When he defeated the Merkits, he captured another girl, Khulan, who was kept by one of his generals for himself – a dangerous impertinence. As Genghis interrogated the officer, Khulan herself frankly challenged the khan to inspect her virginity and have sex with her himself. He gave Töregene, the wife of the Merkit khan, to Ögodei.
When Toghril’s two Keraite nieces were delivered to him, Genghis kept one for himself and gave the other, Sorqaqtani, to his youngest son Tolui. She would be the mother of two monarchs and, for thirty years, the most powerful woman in Eurasia.
Finally, Genghis captured his blood brother turned nemesis Jamuqa, who begged to be executed, saying, ‘The sun rose with my name and now sets with it.’ Genghis generously delivered a bloodless royal death: Jamuqa’s back was broken.
Like his great-grandfather Khabul, Genghis was ruler of the People Who Dwelt in Felt Tents – but it was unlikely that anyone outside the barbarian marches would ever hear of him.
The fall of Constantinople, Queen of Cities, seemed more important: the rot started when the Komnenoi, who had produced three outstanding emperors, delivered history’s most toxic playboy.
THE SEDUCER AND THE AVENGER: THE TEETH OF ANDRONIKOS AND THE EYES OF THE DOGE
Andronikos, grandson of Emperor Alexios and cousin of Manuel, was a vainglorious, incompetent and overpromoted buffoon whose rise to the top seemed an impossible joke – until the process of momentous inevitability made it imminent. His ambitions were vaulting, his seductions priapic, his succession catastrophic. After first marrying a sister of King Giorgi III of Georgia (Tamara’s aunt), he started by seducing his cousin Eudokia Komnene, then he bolted, pursued by her furious brothers, and settled in Antioch, where he had an affair with Empress Maria’s sister, the Hauteville princess Philippa. After bolting again, to Jerusalem, Andronikos (now fifty-six, antique in medieval times) seduced Queen Theodora Komnene, the beautiful widow of Baldwin III, who was three decades younger. Together they eloped to the court of the atabeg of Mosul and leader of the jihad against the Crusaders, Nur al-Din.
Andronikos had retired to the provinces as an international joke when a rare set of circumstances removed his rivals and closed alternative roads: Manuel the Great died of a fever; his widow Maria of Antioch, an unpopular Hauteville, became regent for a child, Alexios II, and a wave of xenophobia made Italians hated for their trading privileges. In 1183, Andronikos rode the wave, marched on Constantinople and massacred Pisans and Genoans. Then he had Maria drowned and the fourteen-year-old Alexios strangled, before marrying the boy’s fiancée Agnes of France. She was twelve, he sixty-five – though proudly flaunting his lustrous hair and all his teeth. As plots multiplied, Andronikos slaughtered his opponents, but both ancestral enemies launched incursions – Seljuks from the east, Hautevilles from the west. In Venice, Andronikos’ depredations provoked outrage. Enrico Dandalo, merchant nephew of the Venetian patriarch, blind since a blow to the head twenty years earlier, possibly in Constantinople, led a fleet that was struck by the plague and achieved nothing. But Andronikos, abandoned by everyone, was forced to negotiate with Dandalo, releasing Venetian prisoners and returning their quarter to them.
In 1185 a popular rebellion, led by the aristocrat Isaac Angelos, overthrew Andronikos, subjecting him to three days of torture. After he had been hung upside down in the hippodrome, his eyes were gouged out, his genitals amputated, his teeth extracted, his face burned, all designed to destroy the features with which this cruel peacock of contumacious narcissism had beguiled not just many women but also the people of Constantinople.
Then he was stabbed and quartered. Soon thereafter one of his sons was killed; another, brother-in-law of Tamara of Georgia, was blinded and sent to Tbilisi.
