Abtakul was captured and sentenced to be beheaded the mother intervened and begged to be executed in place of her son, but he stepped forward, and preferred to accept a death worthy of a Mongolian warrior rather than the sacrifice of his mother. According to a perhaps more fictional version, however, Khutulun married Abtakul, an elite soldier sent by Khubilai Khan to kill her father Kaidu. The historian Rashid al-Din says instead that Khutulun fell in love with Ghazan, the khan of the khanate of Persia. Some chronicles report that he was a handsome man of the Choros clan and one of her father’s loyalists. There are various hypotheses about the identity of the husband. To protect him from these bad rumors, she decided to get married. To push the princess to take the plunge probably influenced the rumors made circulate by her enemies, who claimed that she had an incestuous relationship with her father, hence the decision not to marry. According to Marco Polo, at the time of his encounter with Khutulun the girl already owned 10,000 horses and had not yet been defeated by any warrior, Mongolian or foreign.Īccording to the sources, Khutulun eventually got married… only the texts do not disclose the name of the groom. However, accepting this challenge, the candidates had to pledge 10 horses each (or 100, depending on the sources) which would become the property of the princess in case of their defeat. Only those who had defeated her in a competition, which involved first a hand-to-hand fight and then a horse race, could have married her.
However Khutulun was very reluctant to get married, indeed, full of confidence as she was in her fighting skills, she even went so far as to proclaim a public competition to win her hand. In addition to helping her father in his military campaigns, Khutulun was a highly listened advisor on military and political matters. Together, the two fought the armies of the Yuan dynasty and maintained their dominions over western Mongolia and China. Her physical strength and ability in archery, horse riding and battle therefore made her a fearsome warrior, perfect right shoulder of her father during military campaigns.
According to tradition, no man or woman ever managed to beat her in Mongolian free wrestling, a sport that was extremely violent at the time and which involved the use of punches, kicks and other direct hits. Khutulun proved to be in every discipline or profession in which she ventured, but the hand-to-hand fight was the activity that made her famous throughout Mongolia. horse riding, archery, raiding and wrestling, this led her to devote herself to to actvities usually reserved to men, such as sharpening swords, milking yaks, drinking blood and responding violently to any insult that was addressed to her. This is not surprising, in fact the princess was raised like all her other fourteen brothers, according to an education usually reserved for males, i.e. Khutulun was born around 1260, about twenty years before her father became the most powerful Mongol ruler (khan) in Central Asia, with domains extending from western Mongolia to the Amu Darya River, and from the Central Siberian plateau to India.Īccording to what Marco Polo reported, Khutulun had followed her father into battle countless times, especially since the diatribe between Kublai (more open to Chinese traditions) and Kaidu (a follower of ancient Mongolian customs) had become more intense. Her history reached the borders of Europe thanks to Marco Polo‘s Il Milione and the great Persian historian and doctor Rashid al-Din Hamadani, however it must be admitted, to date her life is still not very well known.Īfter dealing with the life of the famous Artemisia I of Caria, we delve into the life of this extraordinary Mongolian woman. Khutulun (“Moonlight” or “Shining Moon”), also known as Aigiarne, Aiyurug, Khotol Tsagaan or Ay Yaruq, was the great-granddaughter of Genghis Khan and the only daughter of Khan Kaidu, cousin of Kublai Khan. However, in this environment, strongly characterized by dominant men and forged by the fearsome Asian climate, a female figure little known in the West emerges, Khutulun, the princess known for her martial skills. Surely the Mongol Empire of the XIII century cannot be counted among the places most inclined to propose female emancipation or gender equality: strongly patriarchal structure, clear division of duties between men and women, life dedicated to nomadism and raids. Let’s discover together her history still little known today, taking a step back in time in the Mongolia of the thirteenth century. Genghis Khan‘s great granddaughter, Princess Khutulun was a worthy heir to her illustrious ancestor.