Merkit

There were still several tribes that had yet to submit to the will of the Great Khan, and that would not do.

There were still remnants of the Naimans and Merkits to briefly occupy his military, but foremost on Genghis' docket was to secure the submission of those tribes of the taiga forests in Southern Siberia, the small bands of hunters and trappers that lived so much like Temüjin once had as a boy.

To these tribes, Temüjin would dispatch his own eldest son, Jochi, and his personal tümen force, bearing a message that would, in substance if not precise wording, become the calling card of the Mongol Empire for the next two centuries.

Essentially, "Hello, nice to meet you.

So now he lives in the northern mountains, hunting mice to survive.

One night, his camp is raided by the Merkit tribe who take his wife.

He doesn't have an army, so he asks a local prince for help.

Moved by his tears and a sable jacket brought as a gift, the prince provides him with thousands of soldiers.

As Temüjin and his borrowed army catch up with the Merkit, they try to flee.

Amid the chaos, his wife hears his voice crying out for her and runs to him.

She's safe, but Temüjin won't rest until every enemy who wronged him is gone.

to the ends of the earth.

The steppe before Genghis Khan was just a vast web of incredibly fragile nomadic alliances.

You had distinct, proud tribes, the Naimans, the Merkits, the Tatars, the Keraites.

And they didn't really get along.

No.

So he has to dismantle the old world completely.

And his approach to dismantling that world was breathtakingly systematic.

When he defeated a rival tribe like, say, the Tatars or the Merkits, he didn't follow the traditional steppe playbook.

What was the old way?

Maybe things are going to be okay after all these difficulties.

And then, because of a feud his father had done, killing a lot of people in his earlier life, one of these rival groups, the Merkits, come riding down from their areas around Lake Baikal and capture her.

And some of the Serbian women and some, and, yes, you guys, first wife, Sukagu.

And this is, again, described in the secret history of the mongols in in a way that looks bad on chingus because it's saying he runs away that he does not have the resources to defend his his community here and he's he gets on a horse and runs but there's no horse left over for his wife and she has to hide in the back of a wagon which is what i did in this depiction here um actually hang on stop sharing because i think i shared the yeah let's do this um so she's the the the axle on the wagon breaks the wagon stops on the road and the market raiders come up open up the back of it and they find her in there and she is taken captive along with some of these other women And Temujin's distraught.

Now, interesting though, in our other accounts from the Mongol Empire, written by the lines of, written from courts ruled by the descendants of Jochi's brothers.

There, they also mentioned this episode, but there, they are much more coming down on the side that there was no doubt.

And here they say Borte was rescued immediately, or she was captured, and then the Merkits hand her over to Toro, and there is no dishonor on her.

Because it seems, and this is part of the secret aspect of the secret history of the Mongols, even if you don't want Jochi to be Khan, you can't say anything about this episode, because then you're impugning on the honor of Borte in Temujin.