Gammala

Gammala never reigned, but he founded the line that produced an emperor and stood at the center of the first contested succession of the Yuan dynasty. Born in 1263, he was the eldest son of Zhenjin, the designated heir of Kublai Khan, and of Kökejin of the Khunggirad. When Zhenjin died in 1286, predeceasing his father, the question of which of his three sons would eventually succeed the aging Kublai remained open for nearly a decade.

Kublai employed Gammala in the empire's most sensitive theater. He was sent north to defend Mongolia against Kaidu, the Ögedeid ruler of Central Asia and the most persistent enemy of Kublai's house. In 1289 his forces were badly mauled by Kaidu's army in the Khangai region, and the prince narrowly escaped capture. Despite the defeat he retained his grandfather's confidence: in 1292 he was made prince of Jin, with authority over the Mongolian homeland, the old capital region of Karakorum, and the guardianship of the four great ordos, the palace-camps of Genghis Khan. The command carried immense symbolic weight, placing the dynasty's ancestral heartland in his keeping.

When Kublai died in 1294, the succession lay between Gammala and his youngest brother, Temür, who had commanded in the same northern theater and held their mother's favor. At the assembly held at Shangdu that spring, the senior statesman Bayan and the empress Kökejin supported Temür, and the gathering decided in his favor; a widely repeated account has the brothers tested on their recitation of the maxims of Genghis Khan, with Temür judged the better speaker. Gammala accepted the outcome, did obeisance to his brother, and returned to his northern command, where he continued to guard the frontier against Kaidu's incursions.

He died in 1302 in his late thirties. His son Yesün Temür inherited the princedom of Jin and the homeland command, and in 1323, after the assassination of Gegeen Khan at Nanpo, was raised to the throne, whereupon Gammala received the posthumous temple name Xianzong. The legitimacy of his line was contested after 1328, when the descendants of his brother's rivals destroyed Yesün Temür's heirs in the War of the Two Capitals, but Gammala's own career — loyal service, defeat, and renunciation — was remembered without reproach.