Ögedei Khan

Ögedei (窩闊台, 1186–1241) was the third son of Genghis Khan and his successor as Great Khan, ruling from 1229 until his death in 1241. He reigned before the Yuan dynasty was proclaimed, but Kublai later gave him the temple name Taizong (太宗), and he stands in the line of Great Khans that leads to the Yuan dynasty.

Genghis Khan valued his son's generous and courteous character, and the choice of Ögedei as heir helped to hold the family together after the founder's death. During his reign the Mongols destroyed the Jin dynasty of northern China, began the long war against the Song, and sent armies across Russia into Poland and Hungary. At home he gave the empire its first capital, at Karakorum, and the beginnings of a settled administration.

Early Life and Campaigns

When Genghis Khan was proclaimed Great Khan in 1206, he divided the clans among his sons as endowments. Ögedei received lands along the Emil and Hobok rivers, in the west of the Mongol homeland, and his father placed him under the guidance of the Jalayir commander Ilugei.

Ögedei fought with his brothers in the war against the Jin that began in 1211, attacking south through Hebei and then north through Shanxi. His forces drove the Jin garrisons out of the Ordos before he moved on to the region where the Jin, Xi Xia and Song domains met.

In the campaign against the Khwarazmian empire he and his brother Chagatai besieged Otrar for five months in 1219 and 1220, and killed its people when it fell. At Urganch the commanders quarrelled over strategy, and Genghis Khan placed Ögedei in overall command; the city fell in 1221. When rebellion spread through south-eastern Persia and Afghanistan, Ögedei took and pacified Ghazni.

Heir and Great Khan

Before the invasion of the Khwarazmian empire, Genghis Khan's wife Yesui urged him to name an heir. His two eldest sons, Jochi and Chagatai, quarrelled bitterly over the question, and Ögedei was chosen as a compromise acceptable to both. Jochi died shortly before his father, and when Genghis Khan died in 1227 his youngest son, Tolui, acted as regent.

In 1229 a kurultai, the assembly of princes and commanders that decided successions and planned campaigns, met to confirm the choice. Since Genghis Khan's wishes were clear, the outcome was never in doubt. After ritually refusing three times, Ögedei was enthroned as Great Khan in September 1229. Like his father, he conducted his wars through generals in the field, who acted on their own judgement but answered to him, and his orders travelled by a relay system that reached almost every part of Asia.

Karakorum

An empire of this size needed a fixed centre where revenue could be gathered and stored and where a central government could work. In 1235 Ögedei had a walled capital built at Karakorum, in the Orkhon Valley of central Mongolia, west of modern Ulaanbaatar. It was not a large city, but it was the first Mongol capital; Kublai's later capitals, Shangdu (Xanadu) and Dadu, replaced it.

Ögedei kept a palace at Karakorum and visited it, but spent much of the year moving between seasonal camps in the traditional way. The city depended on food brought in from outside, yet it became the empire's main storehouse and supply centre. Its position on the Silk Roads drew merchants, who were also attracted by the generous prices Ögedei paid for their goods, and Buddhists, Daoists, Muslims and Christians all built places of worship there. The famous silver fountain of Karakorum, which served different drinks from spouts in the form of lions and snakes, was made later, for Möngke Khan.

Roads, Relay Stations and Wells

Ögedei extended the Yam, the Mongol relay system, across the whole empire, with stations at regular intervals that supplied horses, food and lodging. Messengers carried a tablet of authority, a kind of passport, that set out what each station had to provide. He also had wells dug across the dry steppe so that merchants and troops had a regular supply of water on their journeys.

Taxation and Government

The conquest of northern China raised the question of what to do with a vast farming population. Ögedei's Khitan adviser Yelü Chucai argued that it would yield far more as a source of regular taxes than as plunder or pasture, and a census of north China was carried out between 1234 and 1236. The census and its distribution of households were handled by officials called jarguchi, who had begun as judges overseeing the division of the spoils of war and became administrators in the new government.

Members of the imperial bodyguard and court ministers were sent out as regional governors to supervise the local officials who collected taxes, supported by branch offices that combined officials with heads of the imperial clan. The system worked, though in time it led to abuses. With revenue secured and the administration in order, Ögedei turned to new conquests.

Conquests in China, Asia and Europe

In 1234 the Mongols completed the conquest of the Jurchen Jin dynasty with the fall of its last refuge, Caizhou. The following year, on Ögedei's orders, they opened war against the Song. That war outlived him by almost forty years and ended only in 1279, when Kublai completed the conquest of China.

Elsewhere, Mongol armies invaded Korea from 1231, and in the same year another army destroyed the last Khwarazmian resistance in Persia. In 1236 a great western campaign set out under Batu, grandson of Genghis Khan, with the veteran general Subutai. It overran the Russian principalities, except Novgorod, which submitted as a vassal, and in 1241 invaded Poland and Hungary. Ögedei's son Kadan took part in the attacks on Poland and Transylvania.

In the winter of 1241 to 1242 Mongol forces were raiding towards Austria. In 1242 the armies turned back, and the news of Ögedei's death is the traditional explanation for their withdrawal. In Asia, the stability that followed the conquests helped to revive the Silk Road, the main trading route between East and West.

Death and Legacy

Ögedei died in December 1241, at the age of fifty-five. He had long been a heavy drinker, and his death may have followed a stroke or organ failure, though there were rumours that he had been poisoned. He left behind an empire with a capital, a relay network, a tax system and a working administration, the foundations on which his successors governed much of Asia.

His chosen successor had been his son Köchü, and when Köchü died young, Ögedei named Köchü's son Shiremün instead. The Mongol leaders ignored his wishes. His widow, Töregene, ruled as regent until her own son Güyük was elected Great Khan in 1246, and Güyük reigned for only two years.

For Collectors

No porcelain can be connected with Ögedei or his court. His reign matters to ceramics in a broader way: after 1234 the northern kilns that had served the Jin, such as those making Cizhou and Jun wares, came under Mongol rule, while Jingdezhen and Longquan remained in Song territory until the 1270s. The blue and white for which the Yuan is known belongs to the following century. Our Yuan dynasty porcelain collection shows what the Mongol dynasty's kilns went on to make.