Princesses Behaving Badly Read Online Free PDF Page B

of Khutulun’s battlefield prowess were passed around contemporary chroniclers as lurid, tantalizing tales of war-mad Mongols. But among the tribes, it was Khutulun’s wrestling skills that made her a legend. She was unbeatable. Mongols frequently bet horses on wrestling matches, and she reportedly amassed more than 10,000 by winning all her bouts. And as Marco Polo noted, Khutulun, a veritable “giantess,” refused to marry unless her prospective groom could beat her in the ring.
M EET Y OUR M ATCH
    By 1280, enemies of Khutulun’s family were spreading rumors that the reason she refused to marry was because she was not only her father’s favorite, but his lover as well. Then along came that eligible young prince (and his wager of 1,000 horses) to try his luck. He was quite the catch, according to Marco Polo, “a noble young gallant, the son of a rich and puissant king, a man of prowess and valiance and great strength of body,” not to mention “handsome, fearless and strong in every way.” Seeing a way out of an uncomfortable predicament, Khutulun’s parents pressured her to throw the match.
    At first it looked like she would. Polo, history’s favorite tourist, witnessed the event and attests that “they grappled each other by the arms and wrestled this way and that, but for a long time, neither could get the better of the other.” But the match was over when Khutulun threw her opponent “right valiantly onto the palace pavement.… And when he found himself thus thrown, and her standing over him, great indeed was his shame and discomfiture.” Khutulun now had no prince, and another thousand horses to feed.
    Eventually, and probably to her parents’ great relief, Khutulun did marry. But it wasn’t to a man who beat her on the wrestling mat—it was, gossips claimed, true love. Little is known about the man who finally tamed her heart, other than that she chose him of her own volition. But not even marriage could bring this princess to the mat. She still foughtalongside her father, venturing ever deeper into Mongolia and China on punishing military campaigns. When Qaidu died of battle wounds in 1301, there was even talk of Khutulun suceeding him as khan.
    That didn’t fly with the rest of her family, especially all those brothers. “You should mind your scissors and needles!” one of them said, according to a contemporary Persian historian. What happened to her next is unclear—her detractors claim that she spent the years after her father’s death “stirring up sedition and strife” in support of her brother’s candidacy for the khan. By 1306 she was dead, either killed in battle or assassinated by a rival sibling.
    Khutulun’s death signaled a change in Mongolia and the empire that Genghis Khan had built. She was the last of the wild warrior-women leaders of the tribes. One theory posits that as women began to fall away from leadership, the ruling of the empire was left to increasingly indolent men. As a result, the Mongol empire stagnated and disintegrated. Maybe.
    Khutulun’s legend might have been forgotten if not for an exotic tale titled “Turandot,” published in a volume of fables by French scholar François Pétis de la Croix in 1710. Pétis de la Croix came across her story while researching his biography of Genghis Khan, and he transformed the brutish wrestling princess into the beautiful 19-year-old daughter of a fictional Chinese emperor who refused to marry unless her suitor could prove himself her intellectual equal. In 1761, the story became
Turandotte
, a play by Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi, featuring a “tigerish woman” whose pride is her undoing.
Turandotte
became Giacomo Puccini’s
Turandot
, the opera he was working on when he died in 1924 (it was completed by a colleague).
    In Mongolian culture, Khutulun is remembered by the sport in which she so excelled. These days when Mongolian men wrestle, they wear a sort of long-sleeved vest that is open in the front to prove