Töregene Khatun

For five years between the death of one great khan and the election of the next, the Mongol Empire — then the largest state on earth — was governed by a woman. Töregene Khatun (c. 1185-1246) served as regent from 1241 to 1246, between the death of her husband Ögedei and the enthronement of her son Güyük, and exercised an authority that few women in the medieval world matched.

Her origins lay outside the Mongol ruling clan. According to the chronicles she was first married to a leader of the Merkit people, and after the Merkits' defeat she was given in marriage to Ögedei, Genghis Khan's third son and eventual successor. Though not his most senior wife by rank, she became the most influential, as the mother of his eldest son Güyük. When Ögedei died in December 1241, his designated heir — a grandson, Shiremün — was a child, and Töregene secured recognition as regent with the consent of the assembled princes.

Her regency was energetic and contentious. She dismissed several of Ögedei's senior ministers, among them the long-serving adviser Yelü Chucai, who died soon after losing influence, and the Central Asian administrator Mahmud Yalavach, who fled to the protection of other princes. In their place she elevated her own confidants, most notably a Persian captive named Fatima and the tax farmer Abd al-Rahman, whose aggressive revenue collection drew lasting criticism from chroniclers. At the same time she managed relations with subject rulers across Eurasia, receiving envoys and confirming appointments from Iran to north China, while the empire's princely branches — the Jochids under Batu in the west, the Chagataids in Central Asia, and the Toluids in Mongolia — maneuvered around the succession.

Her central purpose never wavered: the election of Güyük rather than Shiremün. By patient distribution of favors she assembled support, and in 1246 a kurultai proclaimed her son great khan. The triumph was brief. Mother and son soon clashed over her appointees, and Güyük had Fatima tried and executed. Töregene died in 1246, within months of the enthronement she had engineered. Her regency nonetheless shaped the empire's trajectory, for the resentments it stirred among the Jochid and Toluid branches helped propel the transfer of the great khanate to Tolui's descendants in 1251 — the line from which the Yuan dynasty and the Ilkhanate would spring.