Women and the Making of the Mongol Empire By Anne F. Broadbridge

Anne Broadbridge is not the first writer to comment on the significant role that royal women played in Mongol dynastic and political affairs. The earliest European travellers to the Mongol court in the 1240s and 1250s noted the conspicuous activity of women as queens and as regents. At the same time, a peculiar historical coincidence between the conversion of certain tribes to Nestorianism and exogamous marriage patterns on the steppe meant that several Mongol rulers were married to Christian women, sparking a flurry of optimism in Latin Christian societies that were growing increasingly desperate in their effort to recapture Jerusalem from its Muslim lords. The wives of Mongol khans have long been of interest, but for too long they remained a significant and curious aspect of an imperial history that has remained stubbornly focused on the male descendants of Chinggis Khan. While others in recent years have begun to plumb the story of Mongol queens at greater depth, Broadbridge offers a long-needed conceptual framework for understanding the lives of royal Mongol women. The result does much more than shed light on the stories of individual women: it offers an entirely new way to understand many of the choices and actions of the Mongol imperial period through the personal and familial motivations that drove members of the royal family. This book is important for understanding women in the Mongol world. It is also, however, important just for understanding the Mongol world

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