The Secret History of the Mongols

The work opens with the Mongols' own account of their descent: a blue-grey wolf whose fate was ordained by Heaven and his mate, a fallow doe, cross a great water, settle at the head of the Onon by Burkhan Khaldun, and there a son, Batachiqan, is born to them.

No date; Tenggis is unlocated (translator suggests a great lake, possibly Baikal). Told as tradition, not event; no link yet to any historical person.

A bare male line, father to son, running seven generations from Batachiqan down to Qarchu. Nothing is said of any of these men beyond their names.

Pure name-chain: no dates, places, events or wives. The text does not say how many years these generations cover.

The line continues with household detail rather than names alone: Borjigidai Mergen and his wife, then Toroqoljin Bayan with his wife, a serving lad and two named geldings. Toroqoljin's two sons are Du'a Soqor and Dobun Mergen.

First time the line is described as a household. The gelding names mean roughly 'dusky' and 'grey' (translator). The Borjigin name-element surfaces here without comment. Undated.

One sentence of wonder: Du'a Soqor is said to have had a single eye in the middle of his forehead, and with it he could see a distance of three camp-moves.

The text asserts the eye and offers no explanation, no reaction and no date. A 'stage' is the distance between two nomad camps (translator), so the unit of the marvel is itself nomadic.

Du'a Soqor climbs Burkhan Khaldun with his younger brother and from the summit sees, far off, a band of people on the move coming downstream along the Tünggelik.

Undated. The section breaks off mid-episode and is completed in §6.

From the height Du'a Soqor picks out a fine girl riding in the front seat of a black felt-covered cart, says that if she has not been given to anyone he will ask for her on his brother's behalf, and sends Dobun Mergen down to look.

Almost entirely his direct speech. The text does not say how he could see her at that distance and makes no reference back to the single eye of §4.

Dobun Mergen reaches the moving camp and finds the girl is as described - beautiful, of good repute, and not yet given to any man. Her name is Alan Qo'a.

Alan Qo'a is named here for the first time, with no hint of the legend that will attach to her. Undated.

A step back to explain who the travellers are. Alan Qo'a's mother was the daughter of a lord of the Köl Barqujin lowland, given in marriage to a chief of the Qori Tumat; Alan Qo'a herself was born in Qori Tumat country at Ariq Usun.

An inserted background note, not a scene: it establishes that the ancestress of the Borjigin came from forest peoples to the north-east. Ariq Usun means 'clear water' (translator). No date.

Quarrels over closed sable, squirrel and game grounds split the Qori Tumat; Alan Qo'a's father breaks away, takes the clan name Qorilar, and moves toward Burkhan Khaldun because the hunting is good there. On that road Dobun Mergen asks for Alan Qo'a and takes her to wife.

A clan founded by secession over hunting rights, not by descent. The translator flags the Uriangqai 'lords of Burkhan Khaldun' as an uncertain reading, and 'Burqan Bosqaqsan' as possibly a designation of Chinchi Bayan rather than a second man. No date.

After Alan Qo'a comes to Dobun Mergen she bears him two sons, Bügünütei and Belgünütei.

A single line whose function is to establish that these two sons had an undisputed father - which is what makes the suspicion of §18 possible. Undated.

Du'a Soqor dies leaving four sons, who then stop counting their uncle Dobun Mergen as one of the family, look down on him, and move away. From them come the Dörben.

First of several splits in which people are cut out of a family and become a separate clan - the pattern that later strikes Bodonchar and Je'üredei. No reason for the contempt is given, and no date.

Out hunting on the Toqochaq heights, Dobun Mergen comes on a man of the Uriangqai in the forest who has killed a three-year-old deer and is roasting its ribs and entrails.

The section is cut mid-sentence in the text and runs straight into §13. Undated.

Dobun Mergen asks the hunter to share the kill; the man agrees at once, keeps for himself the skin and the portion containing the lungs, and hands over all the rest of the deer's meat.

The part kept back is head, windpipe, lungs and heart (translator) - the hunter's customary share. The gift is free, in contrast with the bargain of §§15-16.

Riding on with the deer loaded on his horse, he meets a poor man on foot leading his son by the hand.

A single sentence bridging into the exchange of §§15-16. Undated.

Asked what clan he belongs to, the man names himself a Ma'aliq Baya'ut in desperate straits, and offers his own child in exchange for some of the meat.

The sale of a child for food is recorded with no comment or judgement, and neither man nor boy is named. This nameless Baya'ut servant becomes the pivot of the suspicion in §§18 and 21.

Dobun Mergen cuts off one thigh of the deer, gives it to the man, and takes the boy home to serve in his house.

One thigh is the whole price. The text never gives the boy's name or says what became of the father.

Dobun Mergen dies; and - so the Mongols told of their own beginnings - the widowed Alan Qo'a nonetheless bore three more sons, the youngest nicknamed Bodonchar the Simpleton.

Opening of the Alan Qo'a origin legend (§§17-22), summarised as tradition rather than event. The by-name means 'the fool/simpleton' (translator). The fatherless births are stated flatly, undated and unexplained.

The two elder sons say to each other behind their mother's back that with no husband and no male kin in the tent but the Ma'aliq Baya'ut servant, the three new boys must be his. Alan Qo'a knows what they have been saying.

Part of the legend; the suspicion is voiced by the sons, never asserted by the narrator, and the text never confirms or denies the servant's paternity in its own voice. They do not confront her - she simply knows.

One spring day, while cooking dried lamb, Alan Qo'a seats her five sons in a row and hands each a single arrow-shaft to break, which they snap at once and throw away. Then she binds five shafts together and passes the bundle round; not one of them can break it.

Part of the Alan Qo'a cycle; the demonstration is staged before she speaks and the lesson is withheld until §22. Season given ('one day in spring'), no year.

Alan Qo'a brings the whispering into the open: she repeats back to her two elder sons the question they had asked each other about whose sons the three younger boys are, and grants that they were right to wonder.

Her speech is split across §§20-21; this half only names the accusation and concedes it was reasonable. She does not deny it - the answer in §21 is of a different order.

In the story the Mongols told about their own descent, Alan Qo'a explains the three boys: every night a shining yellow man came in by the smoke-hole or over the door, rubbed her belly, and his radiance passed into her womb, and he left along a moonbeam or sunbeam in the shape of a yellow dog. A short verse closes the speech - do not measure these boys against ordinary black-headed men, for they are Heaven's sons and will one day rule, and then the common people will understand.

Told strictly as tradition, never as event; the closing verse is described, not reproduced. No date, no place, and no reaction from the sons is recorded.

She draws the lesson of the arrows for her five sons: born of one womb, if each keeps to himself he will break as easily as a single shaft, but held together and of one mind they cannot be handled. Some time afterwards she dies.

Closes the Alan Qo'a cycle; register is admonition rather than miracle, hence speech not legendary. Her death is one clause, with no time given, no burial, no mourning - and the next section shows the brothers ignoring the advice.

With their mother dead the brothers divide the family stock. Four take their shares; Bodonchar is given nothing at all, on the grounds that he is a fool and a half-wit and not to be counted as one of the family.

The unity lesson of §22 is broken in the very next section and the text lets the juxtaposition stand without comment. Undated.

Seeing that he no longer counts as kin, Bodonchar asks why he should stay, mounts a white horse with a black sore back and a mangy tail, leaves living or dying to chance, and rides fast off downstream along the Onon. At Baljun Aral he builds a hut of grass and makes his home there.

“If I die, I die; if I live, I live”

Phrase kept because the section turns on it; the translator records an alternative reading in which the line is spoken of the wretched horse, not of himself, which changes the tone entirely. Baljun Aral is an island or peninsula on the Onon, not the later Baljuna. No date.

Living there, he sees a grey female hawk eating a black grouse it has caught. He twists a snare from the hair of his sore-backed, mangy-tailed white horse, takes the bird, and rears it.

The wretched horse of §24 supplies the means of catching the hawk that keeps him alive; the text makes nothing of the chain. Undated.

When he has nothing to eat he stalks game that wolves have penned against the cliffs, shoots it, feeds himself and the hawk on it, and also gathers up what the wolves leave. On that he gets through the year.

The translator reads 'that year' as that winter. An ancestor living off wolves' leavings is recorded without embarrassment - and the wolf is the animal the whole line descends from in §1. No date.

When spring comes and the ducks arrive, he starves the hawk and flies it, and lays the ducks and geese it takes all about him - a two-line verse says every tree stump reeked and every dead tree stank with them.

The turn from starvation to gross surplus is marked by a couplet, described rather than quoted. Season only, no year.

A band of people on the move comes down the Tünggelik from the northern side of Mount Düyiren. Having flown his hawk in the daytime, Bodonchar takes to going over to drink kumis with them, and at night returns to sleep in his grass hut.

The text does not say who these people are, and §29 makes that ignorance mutual and deliberate. Undated.

They ask him for the hawk and he will not give it. Otherwise they get on well enough: they never ask whose son he is or what clan he belongs to, and he never asks what people they are.

The mutual incuriosity is stated as a positive fact, and it is exactly the leaderless indifference Bodonchar later turns into a reason for raiding them (§35). Undated.

His elder brother Buqu Qatagi, reckoning that Bodonchar went off downstream along the Onon, comes looking for him and asks the people who had moved down the Tünggelik about a man of such-and-such a description with such-and-such a horse.

The text does not say why one of the four brothers who cut Bodonchar out now goes after him, or how much time has passed.

The people confirm the description: there is such a man and such a horse, and a hawk besides; he comes daily for kumis and goes, and no one knows where he sleeps - but when the wind is from the north-west, duck and goose down drifts over to them like swirling snow, so he must live close by. It is about his hour, they say; wait a little.

Almost the whole section is their reply. The tracking is done by drifting feathers rather than by name or kin - these people still do not know who he is.

Before long a man comes up along the Tünggelik, and it is indeed Bodonchar. His elder brother knows him the moment he sees him, leads him off, and they set out trotting upstream along the Onon.

No words pass between the brothers - no reproach, no apology, nothing about the withheld inheritance. Undated.

Riding behind his brother, Bodonchar remarks on the way that a body ought to have a head and a coat a collar. Buqu Qatagi attaches no importance to the words.

“a body to have a head, a coat a collar”

Phrase kept because the section is nothing but this saying and its dismissal; the translator glosses it as meaning a body of people must have a chief. The half-wit of §23 is the one who says it. Undated.

He says the same thing again and is ignored again without an answer; further on he says it a third time, and his brother finally asks what these words are that he keeps repeating.

The threefold repetition is the point; the text makes the elder brother slow rather than the younger one foolish. Undated.

Bodonchar spells it out: those people staying on the Tünggelik make no distinction between great and small, bad and good, high and mean - all of them equal, and so easy to take. He proposes raiding them.

The people who fed him kumis all winter are proposed as plunder precisely because they had no chief, and the text records this without a flicker of comment. The founding political argument of the whole work.

The elder brother agrees at once: if that is so, as soon as they reach home they will take counsel with the brothers and raid those people.

A single line of assent. The plan must still go to the brothers collectively - counsel before action, as with every later decision in the work.

Home again, the older and younger brothers talk the matter over together and then set out on horseback, sending Bodonchar himself on ahead as scout.

The brother refused a share is now put at the head of the column; the text marks his reinstatement by function, never by any statement of reconciliation. Undated.

Riding ahead on reconnaissance, Bodonchar seizes a woman half-way through her pregnancy. Asked her clan, she names herself an Adangqan Uriangqai of the Jarchi'ut.

She is never named. The pregnancy is stated precisely because the paternity of the child she carries matters for §40 - and for the ancestry of Jamukha. Undated.

The five brothers plunder those people together, and by it get livestock, people to serve them, and a place to live.

One flat sentence turns five destitute brothers into a household with dependants; plunder is treated as the ordinary means of becoming a people. Undated, and the victims are never named.

The captured woman comes to Bodonchar and bears the son she was carrying; because he is another man's, they name him Jajiradai, and he becomes ancestor of the Jadaran. Four generations on, the same line reaches Jamukha.

Names explained by folk etymology from a word meaning 'foreign' (translator). Jamukha - Temüjin's sworn brother and greatest rival - is introduced only as the endpoint of a genealogy, long before he appears, and nothing else is said of him. Undated.

The same woman then bears Bodonchar a son of his own. Because she was a captured woman he is named Ba'aridai and made ancestor of the Ba'arin; his son had many wives and sons in great number, and from them come the Menen Ba'arin.

Another folk etymology - the name derives from a verb meaning to seize or abduct (translator), so the woman's capture is written permanently into the clan name. Undated.

Five lines matching each of Alan Qo'a's sons to the clan descended from him. The last, from the brother who was given no share of the herds, is the Borjigin.

A five-item list and nothing more; the text does not remark that the ruling clan of the Mongols descends from the excluded half-wit, though the structure has been building to it since §23. Undated.

Bodonchar's own wife bears him Qabichi; a housemaid who had come with his mother's dowry, taken as concubine, bears him Je'üredei. At first Je'üredei had a place at the Jügeli sacrifice, where meat is hung on a pole and offered to Heaven.

The one glimpse of ancestral ritual in this chapter, and it appears only because a man's exclusion from it is about to be recorded (§44). The words 'at first' do all the work. Undated.

Once Bodonchar is dead, Je'üredei is shut out of the Jügeli on the argument that the Adangqa Uriangqai man was always about the tent and must be his father. He is made to take a separate clan name and becomes ancestor of the Je'üret.

The accusation made against Alan Qo'a in §18 here sticks, and it works by exclusion from a sacrifice - descent is settled by who may make offering, not by evidence. The reasoning is attributed to 'they', not to the text itself. Undated.

Qabichi's son is Menen Tudun, and Menen Tudun's seven sons are named in a row.

Names only; §46 supplies what each produced. Menen Tudun's son Qachi'un is a different man from Temüjin's brother of that name in §60, so a distinct id is used. Undated.

The next generation, with each clan name accounted for by a habit or a nickname: a man who liked to play the chief gives the Noyakin, big-bodied heavy eaters the Barulas, sons who cooked porridge without regard to seniority the Buda'at, a man who carried slander between his brothers the Adargin, and Nachin Ba'atur's sons the Uru'ut and Mangqut.

The text's own folk etymologies, not history: clan names explained by appetite, temper and bad manners. Qaidu alone is given a named mother, and nothing more is said of her here. The Uru'ut and Mangqut matter later as fighting clans. Undated.

Qaidu's three sons head three branches: one runs to Tumbinai Sechen and so toward Temüjin's own line, another to Senggüm Bilge and his son Ambaqai, from whom the Tayichi'ut take their name, and the third produces a cluster of six clans. A son by a sister-in-law taken to wife founds the Besüt.

The most consequential fork in the genealogy: the Tayichi'ut, who will abandon Hö'elün's family and hunt Temüjin, branch off here as close kin, not as strangers. Recorded without emphasis. Undated.

Tumbinai's two sons are Qabul Qa'an and his brother, and Qabul's seven sons are listed in order - among them Bartan Ba'atur, who will be Temüjin's grandfather, and Qutula, later khan.

The first man in the line titled qa'an appears here with no account of how he got the title - that comes only at §52. The translator flags 'Sem Sechüle' as a corrupt form. Undated.

The eldest of Qabul's sons heads the branch that becomes the Yürkin clan, whose chiefs are Sacha Beki and Taichu.

The Yürkin/Jürkin descend from Qabul's eldest son, which is the seniority claim behind their later quarrel with Temüjin. The name is written Sacha Beki elsewhere in the text (translator). Undated.

Bartan Ba'atur's four sons are named, Yesügei among them. A cousin from another branch, Büri Bökö, is identified here in advance as the man who will open Belgütei's shoulder with his sword at the feast in the woods by the Onon.

Temüjin's father and uncles enter as names in a list. The forward reference to the sword-blow (told at §131) shows the genealogy written with the later story already in view; the text expects its audience to know the allusion. Undated.

Qutula's three sons include Altan; another cousin, Yeke Cheren, is noted as the master of two free herdsmen, Badai and Kishiliq; and two of Qabul's sons left no issue.

Two servants are named in a royal genealogy purely for what they will later do - the text points forward to §169, where Badai and Kishiliq bring warning of a night attack. 'Jochi' here is Qutula's son, not Chinggis's, hence a distinct id. Undated.

Qabul ruled over all the Mongols. Although he had seven sons of his own, the rule passed after him, by his own will, to Ambaqai of the other branch.

A ruler passing over seven sons for a cousin is stated as fact with no reason given, and the text does not say the sons objected. This precedent of designated rather than hereditary succession underlies what follows. No date, and no indication how long Qabul ruled.

Ambaqai gives a daughter to a Tatar group on the Urshi'un between lakes Buyur and Kölen and escorts her there himself. He is seized by Tatars and sent off toward the Jin emperor, and on the road contrives to send word back by a Besüt messenger to Qutula and to his own son Qada'an Taishi: let his example teach them never to deliver a daughter in person, and let them wear their fingernails and fingers away, says a four-line verse, in avenging him.

Origin of the Tatar blood-feud that drives much of the rest of the work and the reason Yesügei is later poisoned. The dying charge is verse, described not reproduced. The 'Altan Qa'an of the Kitat' is the Jin emperor, a different figure from Altan son of Qutula in §51. No year; the text does not say here what became of Ambaqai.

At that time Yesügei is out hawking along the Onon when he meets the Merkit Yeke Chiledü taking home an Olqunu'ut girl he has married. Leaning over for a better look, he sees she is an uncommonly beautiful young woman; he gallops back to his tent and returns bringing his elder and younger brothers.

The Merkit grievance that will cost Temüjin his own wife twenty years later begins here, set down as an ordinary incident of a hunting day. The woman is not yet named. Undated.

Chiledü takes fright and bolts on his fast dun mare. Hö'elün, when he circles back to her cart, tells him the three men mean to kill him and that he must save himself: there are girls in the front seat of every cart and women in every black cart, he will find another like her, and he may call her Hö'elün too. She pulls off her shirt and hands it up to him as the riders close in, and he lashes the mare and flees upstream along the Onon.

Her speech carries a four-line verse, described rather than quoted; the shirt and the request that he not forget her scent are set down without comment. No date.

The three chase Chiledü over seven hills and turn back. Yesügei leads her cart by the halter, one brother going ahead and the other alongside the shaft, while Hö'elün laments her husband in verse - a man whose hair was never blown against the wind, whose belly never went hungry - wailing until the waters of the Onon stir and the woods and valleys ring. Daritai, riding beside her, answers in verse that the man she mourns has crossed too many ridges to hear or be tracked, and tells her to be quiet. So Yesügei took Hö'elün into his tent.

Two verse passages face each other - her lament and his order to be silent - both described rather than reproduced. The text closes with a plain sentence naming what happened as a carrying-off, with no euphemism. No date.

Acting on Ambaqai's message, which had named both Qada'an and Qutula, the Mongols and Tayichi'ut gather in the Qorqonaq valley on the Onon and raise Qutula as khan. They dance and feast, and a couplet says they trod round the Leafy Tree of Qorqonaq until there was a trench to their waists and dust to their knees.

A khan made by assembly acting on a dead khan's instruction - the same combination of designation and gathering that produces the 1206 quriltai. The Tayichi'ut are still part of 'all the Mongols' here. The dancing is a couplet, described not quoted. No date.

As khan, Qutula moves with Qada'an Taishi against the Tatar people. They fight the Tatar chiefs thirteen times over and are still unable to take revenge or requite the killing of Ambaqai.

Only here does the text let slip that Ambaqai was killed; §53 left him being carried off. The failure is stated flatly and is the unfinished business Temüjin inherits. Thirteen engagements are counted but no year, place or outcome is given for any.

Yesügei brings back Tatar captives, among them one named Temüjin Üge. At that time Hö'elün is pregnant, and it is at Deli'ün Boldaq on the Onon that Chinggis Qa'an is born - born gripping in his right hand a clot of blood the size of a knucklebone. Because the Tatar Temüjin Üge had just been brought in captive, they give the child that man's name.

What the text does NOT give: any year or year-animal, any portent beyond the clot, or any comment on naming the boy after a captured enemy. 1162 is nowhere in the text - it is the editor's and general scholarly reckoning, hence 'inferred'. Deli'ün Boldaq means 'Spleen Hill' (translator).

The household set out: four sons by Hö'elün and one daughter, with their ages given against Temüjin's ninth year - Qasar seven, Qachi'un five, Temüge three, Temülün still in the cradle. A bracketed sentence adds that Yesügei's second wife bore Bekter and Belgütei.

Dated only by relative ages, never by a calendar year, so year_estimate is null. The sentence naming the second wife and her two sons is bracketed in this edition, i.e. supplied rather than present in the base text - worth flagging, since the killing of Bekter later depends on that half-brother relationship being established here.

In Temüjin's ninth year Yesügei sets out for Hö'elün's Olqunu'ut kin, taking the boy with him, meaning to ask the maternal uncles for a girl for him. On the road, between two named hills, he falls in with Dei Sechen of the Onggirat.

The text dates this only by the boy's age (nine); 1170 follows only if the inferred birth year of 1162 is granted, so this is inference upon inference and takes the weaker confidence. The intended marriage to his mother's kin never happens - the journey is diverted here by chance. The Onggirat of this chapter are the Qonggirat.

Dei Sechen asks where he is bound; Yesügei says he is on his way to the Olqunu'ut, the boy's maternal uncles, to ask for a girl for him. Dei Sechen looks at the child and says in a two-line formula that here is a boy with fire in his eyes and light in his face.

The first description anyone gives of Temüjin, and it is a formula of omen rather than a physical description; the same two lines return in §66 applied to Börte. 'Quda' means relative by marriage (translator) - he uses it before any match is proposed. Undated.

Dei Sechen tells the dream he had the night before: a white gerfalcon came down holding both the sun and the moon in its claws and settled on his hand. He had told people about it, puzzling that he could formerly see sun and moon only from afar and now a bird had brought them to him. He reads it now as the august spirit of the Kiyat announcing this very visit.

An omen delivered as a man's own account of his dream, not as narration - the text does not vouch for it. The translator reads it as a portent of good fortune for the Onggirat, i.e. as much about the profit of the marriage as about the boy. Undated.

A long verse in Dei Sechen's mouth setting out what the Onggirat are: a people who from of old have never striven for dominion or for subjects, who put their fine-cheeked daughters on a great cart drawn by a black male camel, trot them off to whoever has become qa'an, and seat them beside him on the qatun's place. Their khatuns are their shields and their daughters their intercessors, and they live by the good looks of their girls.

A whole clan's political strategy stated openly in verse: survive by supplying wives to rulers rather than contending with them. The verse is described, not reproduced. Undated and outside the narrative sequence.

The verse closes by contrasting the two sides of a match - for their sons seeking a bride what is looked at is the wealth of the camp; for their daughters being sought, only their beauty. Then Dei Sechen invites Yesügei to his tent to look at his daughter, who is still small, and has him dismount.

The translator's notes make explicit which family is meant on each side of the contrast. The invitation comes before any proposal - Dei Sechen steers the whole match. Undated.

Yesügei sees the girl - light in her face, fire in her eyes - and is pleased with her. She is Börte, ten years old, a year older than Temüjin. Next morning he asks for her, and Dei Sechen answers that a girl given after much asking is valued and one given easily is despised, but that a girl's fate is not to grow old in the house she was born in: he will give her, provided the boy stays behind as son-in-law. Yesügei agrees, asks only that his son not be frightened by dogs, leaves his spare horse as pledge, and rides away without him.

Two details given without explanation and never repeated: Börte is the elder of the two, and Temüjin is afraid of dogs - almost the only thing recorded of him as a child. The bride-service arrangement parts father and son here, which is what makes §§67-68 irreversible. No date.

Riding home, Yesügei comes on Tatars feasting on the Yellow Steppe by Mount Chekcher and, being thirsty, gets down and joins them. They recognize him, remember his old raid on them, and with intent to harm mix poison into his food. He sickens on the road and reaches his tent after three days and nights.

The feud opened at §53 and left unavenged at §58 comes back on Yesügei personally - killed at a feast he joined of his own accord. The translator records an alternative reading in which the Tatars grievously injure him rather than poison him. No year, only the three days on the road.

In a bad way, Yesügei asks who is at hand, and when told that Mönglik, son of Old Charaqa of the Qongqotat, is nearby, he has him brought. He tells him his children are small, that he left Temüjin behind as a son-in-law and was secretly harmed by Tatars on the road home, charges him to look after the little ones he leaves and the widowed woman of the house, and to go quickly and fetch Temüjin back. Then he dies.

The year rests on a chain - an inferred birth year plus the stated age of nine - hence speculative, not inferred. The translator notes that 'younger brothers' and 'elder sister-in-law' here are figurative terms of address, not literal kin. The text does not say what Mönglik did next.

Carrying out Yesügei's dying charge, Mönglik tells Dei Sechen that Yesügei's heart aches with longing for his son and that he has come to fetch him. Dei Sechen releases the boy on condition that he be sent straight back once seen, and Mönglik brings Temüjin home.

The section never states that Mönglik conceals Yesügei's death, yet he speaks of him as a living man aching for his son; the deception is left entirely unsaid. No date, no indication of how long the journey took.

In spring, Ambaqai Qa'an's widows Örbei and Soqatai make the ancestral sacrifice; Hö'elün arrives late and is left no share of it. She confronts them: because Yesügei is dead and her sons not yet grown, they cut her out of the ancestral meat and drink, eat in front of her without asking her to join, and would break camp without even waking her.

A season is given (spring) but no year, so no year can be fixed. The text does not say why Hö'elün was late, and does not name the widows' clan here: the Tayichiud are named only from §72.

The two widows answer with a taunting verse built on paired proverbial lines: Hö'elün is a woman whom the rule does not require to be called or invited to eat, one who eats only what she chances upon. They finish by asking whether it is because Ambaqai Qa'an is dead that even someone like her now speaks to them this way.

The section breaks off mid-sentence and their speech runs on into §72. The verse is a formal insult in parallel couplets, not a rule the text endorses; nothing in the section says the widows had authority to exclude her.

The widows' counsel is that the Tayichiud should leave these mothers and children in camp and move on without them. The next day Targhutai Kiriltuq, Tödö'en Girte and the rest start off downstream along the Onon; when Old Čaraqa of the Qongqotat goes after them to stop them, Tödö'en answers with a proverb about deep water dried up and bright stone shattered, then rides off and spears the old man through the spine from behind.

The abandonment is decided in one line of advice and executed the next morning; the text gives no debate and no dissent except Čaraqa's. The proverb about dried water and shattered stone is glossed by the translator as meaning the situation is beyond repair. No date.

The wounded Čaraqa lies in his tent and tells Temüjin, who comes to see him, that the whole people his late father had gathered has been led away, and that this is what he got for trying to stop it; Temüjin weeps and goes out. Hö'elün takes up the standard, rides out entirely alone and brings back half the people, and then even those drift off after the Tayichiud.

Yesügei appears only as 'your late father' and is not named. The text does not say Čaraqa died, and does not say how Hö'elün, a widow, could hold the standard: it simply records that she did, and that it failed. This is the moment the family is left with nothing.

With the Tayichiud kinsmen gone, the text turns to verse in praise of Hö'elün alone with her small sons: she pulls her tall hat down, hitches her belt to shorten her skirt, and runs up and down the Onon gathering bird cherries and crab apples, digging burnet and silverweed roots with a sharpened spruce stick. The boys are fed on wild garlic, wild onion and lily bulbs, and the verse claims that sons raised on such famine food became rulers, wise and law-abiding.

The catalogue of wild roots is itself the argument: the future rulers were raised on what the steppe gives the destitute. The verse gives no span of time and no date, and never says how the family got through a winter.

The verse continues: the boys fed on wild leek and onion by their mother grow handsome, valiant and bold, and then turn to feeding her in return. They sit on the bank of Mother Onon, bend needles into hooks and take poor, damaged fish, then salmon and grayling, and finally weave seines and dragnets for fingerlings, which they bring to their mother with grateful hearts.

Hö'elün is never named in this section, only called the noble mother and the beautiful lady; the river is addressed as a mother too. The improvised tackle, needles bent into hooks, is the measure of their poverty. No date.

The four boys are angling on the river bank when a bright little dace takes the line and Begter and Belgütei snatch it away from Temüjin and Qasar. The two complain to their mother, but she rebukes them instead: with no friend but their shadow and no whip but their horse's tail, and the Tayichiud outrage still unavenged, elder and younger brothers must not fall out as Mother Alan's five sons once did.

The proverb about shadow and horse-tail recurs three times across §§76-78 and is the text's measure of the family's isolation. The section does not explain why the two half-brothers claim the catch, and never states that Begter and Belgütei are Yesügei's sons by another wife: the reader is assumed to know. The mother's appeal to the Alan Qo'a story treats the origin legend as binding precedent.

Stung by their mother's words, Temüjin and Qasar recall a lark taken from them the same way, say they cannot go on living with their half-brothers, and walk out. Begter is sitting on a rise watching the nine light-bay geldings; seeing them creeping up front and back, he asks why they treat him as a lash in the eye and a thorn in the mouth when the Tayichiud wrong is unavenged, and begs them only not to put out his hearth and to spare Belgütei. He sits down cross-legged to wait, and they shoot him from both sides at close range and walk away.

Begter's plea to spare Belgütei is granted and Belgütei serves him for life. Nine geldings are named here where §90 has eight stolen; the text does not reconcile the count. No date, and no age is given for any of the boys.

When the two come back in, their mother reads the whole thing in their faces and curses them as destroyers of life. She says one of them was born clutching a black clot of blood, then piles up a chain of animal similes: a dog snapping at its own afterbirth, a panther at a cliff, a lion beyond control, a snake swallowing prey alive, a gerfalcon attacking its own shadow, a rutting camel biting its foal's heel, a wolf hunting under a blizzard, a duck eating its own chicks, and returns to the refrain that with no friend but their shadow they have turned on each other instead of on the Tayichiud.

The 'Qasar dog' simile is a pun, qasar is a word for a mastiff, so the insult names her son as she throws it. The verse says 'this one' was born clutching a black clot of blood without saying which son. The section is entirely her speech; neither brother answers, and the text records no punishment and no forgiveness. No date.

Targhutai Kiriltuq arrives at the head of his bodyguard, saying the snot-nosed little rascals have shed their down and grown. The frightened family barricades itself in thick forest: Belgütei tears up trees for a palisade, Qasar trades arrow shots, and Qachi'un, Temüge and Temülün are pushed into a cleft in the rock. When the Tayichiud shout that they want Temüjin alone and have no use for the rest, the family puts him on a horse and sends him off; the pursuers see him go, but he gets into a thicket on the Tergüne Heights that they cannot enter, so they ring it and keep watch.

The text does not say whether the family was giving Temüjin up or saving him: only that they mounted him and made him escape. Hö'elün is not mentioned in the fighting at all, and no reason is given for the raid beyond the taunt that the boys have grown. No date.

After three days and nights in the thicket Temüjin decides to leave, and as he leads his horse out the saddle works loose and drops behind him, although the girth and the breast-strap are both still fastened. He asks whether this is a warning from Heaven and goes back for three more days; when he tries again a white rock the size of a tent falls across the opening, and he asks the same question and waits three more. After nine days without food he refuses to die so meanly, cuts through the brush around the rock with his arrow-sharpening knife, slips his horse out, and the Tayichiud, still watching, seize him.

Built on a threefold pattern of three-day waits. Heaven's two warnings are voiced as his own questions, never as narration, and the text does not say whether disregarding them caused his capture: it only places the capture immediately after. No date.

Targhutai orders that the prisoner be moved round the camp, spending one night in each household in turn. On the sixteenth of the first month of summer, the day of the full moon, the Tayichiud hold a feast on the bank of the Onon and scatter at sunset; Temüjin, left in the charge of a weak young man, wrenches the leash of his cangue away, strikes him once on the head and runs. Reckoning that he would be seen if he lay up in the woods by the river, he lies on his back in the current with the wooden collar floating and only his face clear of the water.

A day and month are given, the sixteenth of the first summer month, the day of the Red Circle, but no year-animal and no year, so nothing here fixes a date. The section assumes the reader knows a man in a cangue cannot swim, only float; it never explains why he is kept alive and passed from tent to tent rather than killed.

The man who lost him shouts that the prisoner has escaped, and the scattered Tayichiud regather to search the woods by the Onon in moonlight as bright as day. Sorqan Šira of the Suldus happens past and sees Temüjin lying in the stream; he tells him it is precisely his cleverness, the fire in his eyes, the light in his face, that makes his kinsmen jealous, that he should lie just so, and that he will not tell. He then steers the search by proposing that each man go back over his own ground, and on passing again warns Temüjin that his kinsmen are coming with their teeth sharpened.

Sorqan Šira gives no reason for helping beyond his own reading of the boy's face; the text supplies no prior relationship and no promise of reward. He is a Tayichiud dependent risking his household, which the section states only by implication. No date.

On the third round Sorqan Šira talks the Tayichiud out of searching: if they lost a whole man in bright daylight, how will they find him in the dark? Let each go back over his own ground, look where they have not looked, then disperse and reassemble tomorrow: where can a man in a cangue get to? They agree, and as he passes Temüjin again he tells him to wait until everyone has completely scattered, then go and find his mother and younger brothers, and never to let on that it was he who saw him.

The rescue is done entirely by argument. Sorqan Šira saves him three times without once touching him. The text does not say whether the Tayichiud suspected him. No date.

Temüjin waits until they have all gone, then reasons his way toward shelter. When he was being passed from household to household he spent a night at Sorqan Šira's tent, where the two sons Čimbai and Čila'un were sorry for him, took off his cangue and let him rest; and now the father has passed him twice without a word. Concluding that those same people will surely save him, he goes downstream along the Onon looking for their tent.

The section is pure reasoning: a captive calculating who owes him nothing but has already shown mercy. It also supplies retrospectively the night in Sorqan Šira's tent, which was not narrated when it happened. Čila'un will become one of Chinggis's commanders; the text says nothing of that here. No date.

The household is known by the sound of kumis churned all night until daybreak, and Temüjin listens his way to it. Sorqan Šira is angry, did he not tell him to go and find his mother and brothers?, but the sons Čimbai and Čila'un answer their father with the image of a sparrow-hawk driving a sparrow into a bush that then saves its life. Displeased with him, they smash the cangue open and burn it, hide Temüjin in a wool-laden cart standing behind the tent, and put him in the charge of their sister Qada'an, who is told not to say a word to a living soul.

The sons overrule the father, and the household takes on a capital risk it never discusses. Qada'an, a daughter given a dangerous job in one line, is named here and then dropped by the text. No date.

On the third day the Tayichiud conclude that someone must be hiding him and decide to search among themselves, going through one another's households: tents, carts, even under the beds. They climb the wool-cart behind Sorqan Šira's tent and pull the wool out from the front opening; just as they are reaching the back he remarks that in heat like this nobody could bear to be inside wool, and the searchers get down and go away.

One sentence does the whole rescue, and the text does not say whether the searchers were convinced or simply chose not to look further. The heat is the only seasonal marker; there is no date.

Once the searchers have gone, Sorqan Šira tells Temüjin he nearly had him blown away like hearth-ashes, and sends him off to look for his mother and brothers. He mounts him on a barren tawny mare with a white mouth, cooks him a lamb fattened on the milk of two ewes, and gives him mare's milk in a large and a small skin, along with a bow and two arrows, but he gives him neither saddle nor firesteel.

The withheld saddle and firesteel are stated without any explanation: the text simply lists what he was not given, leaving a rider who can neither make fire nor be traced by borrowed gear. No reward to Sorqan Šira is mentioned here; the translator's note points forward to Targhutai's own version of the affair in §149. No date.

Temüjin rides to the place where they had earlier built the palisade and made their stand, then follows tracks in the grass upstream along the Onon and up the Kimurqa Stream, which flows into it from the west, until he comes upon his own people, camped at the time at Qorčuqui Hill on the Beder Promontory.

Tracking by bent grass is the section's whole method, and it recurs in §§90 and 101. The text gives no reunion scene at all: it stops at the arrival, with nothing said or felt.

Reunited, they move on and pitch camp at Blue Lake on Mount Qara Jirügen by the Senggür Stream, in the Gürelgü mountains south of Burkhan Khaldun. There they stay, living on marmots and field-mice.

Two sentences of geography and a diet of rodents: the family still has no herds. Burkhan Khaldun is named here only as a bearing, without the sacred weight it acquires in §103. No date.

Robbers drive off the eight light-bay geldings standing beside the tent, in plain sight, and the brothers, on foot, are left behind. Belgütei comes in at dusk leading a short-tailed chestnut so loaded with marmots it staggers; all three brothers offer to give chase, Temüjin takes the chestnut and tracks the thieves three days and nights. On the fourth morning he meets a brisk lad milking mares who offers to show the trail, hides his pails in the grass, gives him a fresh mount and rides on with him without even going home, saying that men's troubles are the same for all, and naming himself Bo'orču, only son of Naqu Bayan, and after three more days they find the geldings grazing at the edge of a great circular camp and drive them off together.

Eight geldings are stolen here although nine were named in §77 and the text does not reconcile the count. Bo'orču's clan is not given, only his father's name; the camp raided is never identified. No date.

The men come after them in separate parties, and one on a white horse carrying a pole-lasso outruns the rest and closes with them. Bo'orču asks for the bow and arrows so he can trade shots; Temüjin refuses, saying he fears his friend will come to harm on his account, and turns to shoot himself. The lasso-man stands aiming at him, his companions catch up, but the sun sinks, dusk comes down and the pursuers halt and are left behind for good.

The refusal to let Bo'orču shoot is the pair's first exchange of obligation and the text underlines it without comment. Nobody is killed and no one is named among the pursuers. No date.

They ride all that night and three more days and nights before they get back. Temüjin says he would never have recovered the horses without him and offers to divide them, asking how many he will take. Bo'orču refuses: he came along because a good man in trouble had approached him and he wanted to help; he is Naqu Bayan's only son, his father's property is ample, and help that took payment would be no help at all.

The whole section is the refusal of a share, stated three times over: the text treats unpaid help as the thing worth recording. No date, and the destination is not named.

At Naqu Bayan's tent the father has been weeping over his lost son, and when the two suddenly appear he both wails and scolds. Bo'orču brushes it aside, a good friend came in trouble, he went with him, and now he is back, and rides off to fetch the pails he hid in the grass; they kill a lamb fattened on two ewes' milk and load mare's milk as provisions for the road, and Naqu Bayan tells the two young men to keep seeing each other and never to abandon one another. Three days' riding brings Temüjin back to his tent on the Senggür, where his mother and brothers, who had been anxious, are glad to see him.

The father's instruction never to abandon each other is the nearest thing to a formal bond in the episode; no oath is sworn and nothing is exchanged. The text does not say whether Naqu Bayan knew who Temüjin was. No date.

Temüjin and Belgütei ride downstream along the Kherlen to look for Börte, Dei Sechen's daughter, from whom he has been parted since the betrothal visit at the age of nine. Dei Sechen the Onggirat, camped between Mount Čekčer and Mount Čiqurqu, is overjoyed, he says he knew the Tayichiud were jealous of him and had worried and despaired, and marries the two, then escorts the bride and turns back at the Uraq Čöl bend of the Kherlen. Börte's mother Čotan takes her the rest of the way to Temüjin's camp on the Senggür Stream in the Gürelgü mountains.

The text gives no interval: only that they had been apart since he was nine, with no age for either of them now, and no year. Nothing is said of Börte's own view, and the betrothal contracted by a father who has since died is honoured without any renegotiation.

Temüjin sends Čotan home and then sends Belgütei to invite Bo'orču to come and be his companion. Bo'orču says nothing whatever to his father: he jumps onto his arch-backed chestnut, tucks his grey woollen cloak up behind him and rides back with Belgütei. This, the text says, is how they became firm companions after first having joined in friendship.

The mounting is given in two verse lines inside an otherwise plain section. It marks a formal step, an existing friendship converted into attached service, and once again Bo'orču leaves without telling his father, as in §90. No date.

The camp moves from the Senggür to the Bürgi Escarpment at the source of the Kherlen. Čotan had brought a black sable coat as a bride's gift for Temüjin's mother; Temüjin, Qasar and Belgütei take it away and carry it instead to Ong Qan of the Kereit in the Black Forest on the Tuul, on the argument that a man who was his father Yesügei's sworn anda stands to him as a father. Ong Qan is delighted and promises in return to gather Temüjin's divided people and reunite his scattered ones, sealing it with a saying that pairs the place of the kidneys in the back with the place of good faith in the breast.

The coat is taken from the mother it was given to and redirected into politics; the text does not say whether Hö'elün consented or even knew. Ong Qan's promise assumes Temüjin has a people to reunite, which at this point in the text he does not. No date.

While they are living on the Bürgi Escarpment, Old Jarči'udai of the Uriangqai comes down from Burkhan Khaldun with a smith's bellows on his back, leading his son Jelme. He recalls that when the family was at Deli'ün Boldaq on the Onon and Temüjin was born he gave sable swaddling-clothes as a gift, and gave this son too, but took him back because he was still small; now, he says, let Jelme put on Temüjin's saddle and open his door, and he hands the boy over.

The birth-gift and the earlier offer of the son are supplied only here, retrospectively, in Jarči'udai's own mouth: the text gives no independent account of them. The bellows mark him as a smith, and the two tasks he names for his son (saddling, door-opening) are the language of household service, not of arms.

They are camped on the Bürgi Escarpment at the source of the Kherlen when, in the yellow light of early dawn, Old Qo'aqčin, a servant in Hö'elün's tent, gets up and calls to her to rise at once: the earth is shaking and the sound of trampling hooves can be heard: could it be the dreaded Tayichiud approaching?

An old servant woman opens the most consequential episode in the chapter. Her guess names the Tayichiud, and §102 reveals it was wrong; the text lets the error stand uncorrected in the moment. No date.

Hö'elün orders the sons woken and rises in haste herself. Temüjin, Hö'elün, Qasar, Qachi'un, Temüge Otčigin, Belgütei, Bo'orču and Jelme each grab a horse, Temülün is set in front of her mother, and one more is harnessed as a spare. There is no horse left for Börte.

A roll-call of nine riders and a spare, whose entire force is in the last line. The text offers no explanation, no decision, no blame and no reaction: it does not say who chose, whether anyone noticed, or that the spare horse could have carried her.

While it is still early Temüjin and his brothers set out toward Mount Burkhan. To hide Börte, Old Qo'aqčin puts her into a stoutly covered black cart yoked to an ox with dappled loins and drives upstream along the Tenggelik; as day is breaking, soldiers come trotting toward her, surround her and ask who she is. She says she belongs to Temüjin, that she came to shear sheep at the great tent and is going home; asked whether Temüjin is there and how far off, she says the tent is nearby but she did not notice whether he was in it, since she got up and left from the back.

The men ride for the mountain and the two women are left to an ox-cart; the text records this without comment. Qo'aqčin's lie is precisely built: she claims exactly enough ignorance to be useless without being suspicious. The raiders are still unidentified.

The soldiers trot away, Qo'aqčin whips the ox on to make better speed, and the cart's axletree snaps in two; she and Börte decide to run for the forest on foot, and at that moment the same soldiers come trotting back. Belgütei's mother is already up behind one of the riders with both feet dangling. Asked what is in the cart, Qo'aqčin says wool; the elders tell the younger men to dismount and look, they lift off the cart's door and find a lady sitting inside, drag her out, mount both women behind riders and follow the tracks in the grass after Temüjin toward Mount Burkhan.

Belgütei's mother is seized here but is never named, appearing only as his mother, and the text does not say when or where she was taken. The wool answer that saved Temüjin in §86 fails here, and the text sets the two searches against each other without remarking on it. Börte does not speak.

The raiders circle Burkhan Khaldun three times in pursuit of Temüjin and cannot take him: swallowing quagmires and woods so tangled that a gorged snake could not creep in keep him out of reach even when they are on his heels. Only now does the text name them, the Three Merkit: Toqto'a of the Uduyit, Dayir Usun of the U'as, Qa'atai Darmala of the Qa'at, and give their reason: they had come to avenge the abduction of Hö'elün from Čiledü. Declaring that seizing the women has repaid the debt, they come down off the mountain and go home.

The section frames Börte's seizure as the exact repayment of Yesügei's theft of Hö'elün: the story's own accounting, stated by the Merkit themselves. 'Three times round the mountain' is a formula; the translator's note calls it hyperbole. Börte is not named here, only 'their women', and the text says nothing about what became of her or of Belgütei's mother on the ride. No date, though this is the injury that drives the next chapter.

Unsure whether the Three Merkit have really gone or are lying in ambush, Temüjin sends Belgütei, Bo'orču and Jelme to shadow them for three days and nights, and only when he is certain does he come down from the mountain. Beating his breast, he speaks a long verse of thanks: because Old Qo'aqčin's hearing was as keen as a weasel's and her sight as sharp as an ermine's he got away with his body whole, climbing the mountain on a hobbled horse along deer and elk tracks and making a shelter of elm and willow twigs, his life, a louse's life, a grasshopper's life, shielded by Burkhan Khaldun. He vows to sacrifice to the mountain every morning and pray to it every day, and binds the offspring of his offspring to do the same; then, facing the sun, he hangs his belt round his neck, holds his hat over his hand, beats his breast with his fist and kneels nine times, offering a libation and a prayer.

He measures his own life as a louse's and a grasshopper's and thanks an old servant woman before he thanks the mountain. The text does not mention Börte at all here: he prays for his own deliverance while his wife is being carried off, and the section closes the chapter on that silence. No date.

Temüjin rides with Qasar and Belgütei to To'oril Ong Qan of the Kereit, camped in the Black Forest on the Tuul, and asks him to recover his stolen wife. To'oril recalls the sable coat and the pledge he gave in return, to gather Temüjin's scattered people, and says he will now honour it: he will take the field with two tümen as the right wing, and Temüjin is to send word to Jamukha in the Qorqonaq valley to raise two more as the left wing, with Jamukha choosing the time and place of the rendezvous.

No date of any kind: no year-animal, no season. The text does not name Yesügei here. To'oril says only 'in my father's time', so no id is coined for him. To'oril quotes his own earlier words back at Temüjin (the sable-coat promise of §96), so the section is layered speech rather than event.

Qasar and Belgütei carry to Jamukha both Temüjin's appeal, kinship put as a question, the emptied bed, the torn breast, and To'oril's pledge of two tümen. Jamukha answers in a long formal poem: he says the news wounded him, then names where each of the three Merkit chiefs must be camped and mocks each in turn for the noise that makes him bolt. He ends with the plan: bind rafts of sedge, take the shortest crossing of the Kilqo, come down through the smoke-hole of Toqto'a's tent and wipe out his people entirely.

Undated. The section distinguishes three Merkit branches, Uduyit, U'as and Qa'at, but only 'merkit' is given as the clan id; the branch names are here in the notes rather than invented as separate clans. Almost nothing happens: the whole section is two messages, and the bulk of its length is Jamukha's set-piece verse, so register is verse rather than speech.

Jamukha sends a second message, cast as the same war-boast twice over with the images varied: standard consecrated, drum beaten, horse mounted, armour on, spear or sword in hand, arrow already on the string: once against the Qa'at Merkit, once against the Uduyit. He then fixes the movements: To'oril is to march past Temüjin on the south side of Burqan Qaldun and come on with him, while Jamukha comes up the Onon, the two tümen meeting at Botoqan Bo'orji at the river's head.

Undated. The doubled boast is a poetic device, not two separate speeches; the translator's notes gloss the standard's streamers as yak tails. Nothing is narrated: the section is entirely a spoken message.

The message is relayed on and To'oril takes the field with two tümen. Because To'oril's line of march runs straight through Temüjin's camp on the Bürgi escarpment of the Kherlen, Temüjin clears out of his way, moves up the Tünggelik and pitches on the Tana stream south of Burqan Qaldun before advancing with his own men. To'oril with one tümen and his younger brother Jaqa Gambu with another halt at Ayil Qaraqana on the Kimurqa, and Temüjin joins camp with them.

Pure itinerary, undated and with no season given. Jaqa Gambu appears here without introduction: the text does not explain who he is beyond 'To'oril Qan's younger brother'. Note the small courtesy the text records without comment: Temüjin moves his own camp aside so as not to sit in the path of the marching army.

The three arrive at Botoqan Bo'orji to find Jamukha already there three days ahead of them and drawn up in battle order; they form up in turn, and only on recognizing each other do the two lines relax. Jamukha rebukes them for the delay, appealing to the rule that a Mongol's 'yes' binds like an oath and that whoever fails it is cast out of the ranks. To'oril accepts the fault plainly and tells Jamukha it is his to punish and to lay blame.

Undated. The text does not say who was actually at fault or why they were late, and it does not record any punishment being given: the exchange simply ends. The detail that both sides deployed for battle before recognizing each other is left without comment.

The allies cross the Kilqo on rafts and fall on the Bu'ura steppe, and the destruction of Toqto'a's camp is told back in the same words Jamukha had used to promise it: tent-frame smashed, wives and children carried off, the people stripped bare. But the surprise is only half a surprise: fishermen, sable-trappers and hunters who happened to be by the Kilqo had ridden through the night to warn Toqto'a while he slept. He and Dayir Usun join up, run downstream along the Selenge into Barqujin, and get away with a handful of men and nothing but their lives.

Undated. The attack is narrated by repeating Jamukha's boast of §105 almost word for word, a deliberate echo rather than fresh description. Neither Temüjin nor Jamukha nor To'oril is named in the fighting: the text says only 'they'. Börte is not mentioned at all here, though finding her is the whole point of the campaign.

The Merkit break and run down the Selenge in the dark with the army pressing after them and the plundering still going on. Temüjin rides through the fleeing crowd calling his wife's name aloud; Börte is among those people, hears his voice, gets down from her cart and runs to him, and she and the old servant Qo'aqchin catch hold of his reins and tether. There is moonlight enough for him to see her, and they fall into each other's arms. He sends word to To'oril and Jamukha that he has found what he came for and that the night march can stop, and the Merkit, still scattered somewhere out in the dark, stop and spend the night where they are too.

“Börte, Börte!”

Undated. Note what the text withholds: not one word about what was done to Börte in captivity, nothing about her state, no speech from her at all. The phrase is kept because it is a name called twice, not translated prose.

The narrative doubles back to explain the raid: the three Merkit chiefs had ridden out with three hundred men to avenge Hö'elün's abduction years before from Yeke Chiledü, Toqto'a's younger brother, and it was while Temüjin was circling Burqan Qaldun three times that they seized Börte and handed her to Chiledü's younger brother Chilger Bökö to keep. Chilger's flight is given as a long verse of self-abasement in bird images, the carrion crow that reached for goose and crane, the buzzard that lives on mice and aspired to swans, in which he calls himself base, says he has brought ruin on all the Merkit for laying a hand on a noble lady, and asks who will shelter a life worth a sheep's dropping.

Undated, and the flashback is not dated either: 'in former days'. Structurally this is the book answering the abduction of §§54-56 with the abduction of §§100-102: the Merkit raid is revenge for Yesügei's own bride-theft, and the text states that motive without softening it. Chilger's lament is entirely self-directed: the text gives Börte no voice and no reaction here.

Qa'atai Darmala is taken, put in a wooden cangue and marched off to Burqan Qaldun. Told that Belgütei's mother is in a nearby camp, Belgütei goes to fetch her, and as he comes in at the right-hand door she goes out at the left, in a ragged sheepskin, saying to someone outside that her sons are said to be qans now while she has been joined to a base man, and how can she face them. She runs into thick forest and is never found, and Belgütei goes about shooting blunt arrows at any man of Merkit stock, demanding his mother. The three hundred who had once ridden round the mountain are wiped out to the last child, scattered like ashes; the women left over are taken to bed or taken in at the door as slaves.

Undated. The text never names Belgütei's mother, she is only 'Belgütei's mother', so no id is coined for her, and it never says what became of her. It also does not condemn Belgütei's shooting, nor soften the fate of the surviving Merkit women; the same rescue that restores Börte produces slaves and concubines, and the text sets the two side by side without comment.

Temüjin thanks To'oril and Jamukha in a short formal speech: taken as a companion by his qan father and his sworn friend, and strengthened by Heaven and Earth, called by Mighty Heaven and carried by Mother Earth, they have emptied the breasts and torn the livers of a vengeful people, emptied their beds, destroyed their kin and taken their women. Having said that the Merkit are destroyed, he proposes that the allies withdraw.

Undated. Worth noting how the speech is framed: the Merkit are described as 'people who take their revenge as a man does': the text lets Temüjin acknowledge that the enemy was avenging something even as he destroys them. Heaven and Earth appear here as the sanction for Temüjin's success, the formula that will carry through the rest of the book.

In the abandoned Uduyit Merkit camp the soldiers find a five-year-old boy left behind, with fire in his eyes and the name Küchü: sable cap, boots of doe-shank hide, a coat sewn from otter skins with the hair stripped off. They bring him back and hand him to Mother Hö'elün as a gift.

Undated. The whole section is three sentences of physical detail; the text does not say who his parents were or what happened to them, and it does not comment on a captured child being given away as a present. The costume is described precisely enough to signal that he came from a wealthy tent.

With the locked carts broken open and the best Merkit women carried off, the allied force withdraws from Talqun Aral between the Orkhon and the Selenge. Temüjin and Jamukha pull back together toward the Qorqonaq valley, while To'oril goes home the other way: north of Burqan Qaldun, through the Hökörtü valley and two wooded passes where he hunts game along the road, back to the Black Forest on the Tuul.

Undated, no season. The division of the spoils is never described; the text says only that the women were taken. That Temüjin and Jamukha ride off together while To'oril goes his own way is the quiet hinge into the next four sections.

Camped together in the Qorqonaq valley, Temüjin and Jamukha decide to renew the sworn-friend bond and love each other again, and the text stops to explain where that bond came from. The first time Temüjin was eleven: Jamukha gave him a roebuck knucklebone, Temüjin gave a copper one back, and they played knucklebones on the ice of the Onon. The second time was the following spring, shooting with firwood bows, when Jamukha gave him a whistling arrowhead made from the split and glued horns of a two-year-old calf and Temüjin gave a blunt arrow tipped with juniper.

No year given, though it is the only section in the chapter that pegs an age: Temüjin was eleven at the first oath. That is a flashback into beat 1 inside a beat-2 section; the beat is set to 2 for the section's own present. The translator notes this is the first time the earlier oath is mentioned at all: the book has said nothing until now about Temüjin and Jamukha knowing each other as boys.

Quoting the old men's saying that sworn friends share a single life and never abandon one another, the two swear the bond again, and this time seal it with the loot of the campaign. Temüjin girds Jamukha with the golden belt taken from Toqto'a and gives him Toqto'a's yellowish-white mare that has not foaled for years; Jamukha girds Temüjin with Dayir Usun's belt and gives him Dayir Usun's kid-white horse with a horn-like growth on its forehead. At the Leafy Tree below the Quldaqar cliff in the Qorqonaq valley they feast and revel, and that night the two of them sleep alone under one blanket.

Undated. The exchanged gifts are all plunder from the Merkit: the friendship is renewed with the proceeds of the raid, which the text states plainly and does not remark on. The horses given are both flawed or odd (a mare barren for years, a horse with a growth on its head); the text offers no reading of that. The single blanket is stated as fact, without embarrassment or explanation.

After a year and a half together they break camp, on the sixteenth day of the first month of summer. Riding ahead of the carts, Jamukha says two paired lines: camp by the mountain and the horse-herders will have shelter, camp by the river and the shepherds and lamb-herds will have food. Temüjin cannot make out what is meant, says nothing, drops back through the moving column to ask his mother. Before Hö'elün can answer, Börte does: Jamukha is known to tire of his friends, he has tired of them now, and those words were aimed at them, so do not pitch camp at all, keep moving, and separate from him completely, travelling through the night.

The text gives a day, the sixteenth of the first summer month, the day of the full moon, but no year, so year_estimate stays null; the calendar precision without a year is itself worth recording. Jamukha's words are never explained; the reader gets only Börte's reading of them, and Börte speaks over Hö'elün to give it. The section does not say whether she was right.

Everyone agrees with Börte and they move off without camping, riding through the night, and their line of march takes them past the Tayichiud camp. The Tayichiud take fright and that same night, in confusion, go over to Jamukha's side. In the Besüd camp among the Tayichiud, Temüjin's people pick up a small boy left behind, Kököchü by name, bring him back and give him to Hö'elün, who takes him into her care.

Undated. The split is instant and mutual: Temüjin's night flight and the Tayichiud's panic move in opposite directions on the same night, and the text offers no motive for either beyond fear. This Kököchü is the second foundling given to Hö'elün in the chapter and is not Teb-tenggeri (also called Kököchü, son of Mönglik of the Qongqotan): hence a distinct id, kokochu-besud. Temüjin himself is not named in the section; 'our people' is the text's phrasing.

At daybreak the three Toqura'un brothers of the Jalayir catch up, having ridden all night, and after them the section becomes a muster-roll: chief after chief arrives with his brothers and his following, each named with his clan. Some of the arrivals are family reunions. Bo'orchu's younger brother leaves the Arulat to join him, Jelme's younger kinsmen Cha'urqan and Sübe'etei leave the Uriangqan to join him, Butu of the Ikires comes as a son-in-law, and the roll closes with Qorchi, Old Üsün and Kökö Chos bringing the Menen Ba'arin in as one camp.

Undated. Temüjin is nowhere named in this section, the men simply 'draw near', but he is listed as a person because the whole roll exists only as a list of who joined him. The text gives no reason for any of these defections and no numbers: it is a bare register of names, and the future high command (Sübe'etei, Qubilai, Jetei, Arqai Qasar) enters the book buried in it without emphasis. Temülün is not named here; the translator's footnote, not the narrative, identifies Butu's bride.

Qorchi arrives and explains that his people and Jamukha's descend from the same woman that Bodonchar captured, so they are of one womb and he would never have left him, except that a sign from Heaven was shown to him. In his telling, a fallow cow circled Jamukha, butted his tent-cart and then Jamukha himself, breaking off one of her horns, and stood there bellowing for her horn and kicking up dust; then a hornless fallow ox harnessed the great tent-shaft to itself and dragged it along the road after Temüjin, bellowing that Heaven and Earth have agreed together that Temüjin shall be lord of the people. Having told his omen, Qorchi asks what he will get for it: promised command of ten thousand, he says that is not enough: he wants also to pick thirty beautiful girls freely as wives, and to be listened to whenever he speaks.

Undated. Framed strictly as what Qorchi says he saw: the text does not vouch for the vision, and it lets the bargain follow immediately, so the omen and the price for it sit in the same breath. Register is legendary because the content is portent and claimed revelation, not event. The clans are inferred from §120 (Qorchi came in with the Ba'arin) and from Jamukha's Jadaran affiliation; neither is named in this section.

The muster continues: the Geniges under Qunan come as one camp, then Daritai Otchigin, Mulqalqu of the Jadaran, the Ünjin and the Saqayit. Then, also breaking with Jamukha, come three camps of a different weight. Sacha Beki and Taichu, sons of Sorqatu Jürki of the Jürkin; Quchar Beki, son of Nekün Taishi; and Altan Otchigin, son of Qutula Qan. They join Temüjin where he has camped at Ayil Qaraqana on the Kimurqa, and from there the whole camp moves to Kökö Na'ur below Mount Qara Jirügen on the Senggür stream in the Gürelgü mountains.

Undated. The text takes care to give the fathers of the last three arrivals, a son of Sorqatu Jürki, a son of Nekün Taishi, a son of Qutula Qan, because their descent, not their following, is what matters: these are the senior line, and they are the men who will elect Temüjin in §123 and quarrel with him later. The section itself passes no judgement and gives no motive for their leaving Jamukha.

Altan, Quchar and Sacha Beki settle it among themselves first and then tell Temüjin they will make him qan. Their pledge is a long verse of what they will bring him: riding as vanguard after the enemy and bringing back fine women and ladies of rank, palatial tents, foreign girls and good geldings at the trot, and in the battue driving the game together for him until the beasts' bellies touch. Then the curse-clause: if they disobey his commands in war let him strip them of goods and wives and throw their heads on the ground; if they break his counsel in peace let him cut them off from retainers, possessions and wives and cast them out into empty country. On that oath they make him qan and name him Chinggis Qa'an.

The section gives no date at all: no year-animal, no season, no place. The year offered is the conventional external dating of this first election (usually put around 1189), which is disputed and comes from scholarship, not from the text; hence 'speculative' rather than 'inferred'. Note who does the electing, the three senior-line princes of §122, not the men who followed him out of Jamukha's camp, and note what they promise: loot, women and driven game, not government. The text never explains what the name means.

His first act as qa'an is to hand out offices, and each man answers with his own boast. Four are made quiver-bearers; three take charge of food and drink and promise he will never go without his morning or evening drink; Degei asks for the sheep and answers in verse that he was a base and greedy man and will now herd sheep and eat tripe; his brother takes the carts and swears no linchpin will slip and no axle break on the road; Dödei Cherbi takes the household servants. Qubilai, Chilgütei, Qarqai Toqura'un and Qasar are given the swords and told to cut the necks of braggarts; Belgütei and Qaraldai take the geldings, three others the horse-herds, and four more are made his far-flying and near-flying arrows, meaning envoys. Sübe'etei closes the section by promising to be a rat that hoards for him, a crow that gathers, a felt cover and a felt windbreak against the wind on his tent.

Undated. The scale of the new khanate is exactly the scale of a household: quivers, drinks, sheep, carts, servants, horses. Nobody is given an army. Dödei Cherbi is appointed here without having appeared in the roll of §120. Sübe'etei, the future commander of the western campaign, enters the command as a man promising to be a rat and a piece of felt.

Chinggis Qa'an turns to Bo'orchu and Jelme apart from the rest: when he had no friend but his own shadow they became his shadow, when he had no whip but his horse's tail they became that tail, and for that they will live in his mind and in his breast. Since they stood by him from the beginning, he asks, should they not stand at the head of all these others? He then addresses the senior men who left Jamukha to come to him, calls them the lucky companions given him when Heaven and Earth took him into their protection, and says he has assigned each of them his office.

Undated. The two men singled out above all the rest are the two who came to him when he had nothing: the ranking is by early loyalty, not by birth or by following, which quietly contrasts with the princes who elected him in §123. Both honours are phrased as questions rather than commands.

Two envoys are sent to To'oril Qan of the Kereit with the news that Temüjin has been made qan. To'oril sends them back with his approval, making his son Temüjin qan is right, and how could the Mongols be without a qan, followed by a three-line warning to the electors: do not break this agreement of yours, do not dissolve your bond, do not tear off your collar. With that the chapter ends.

Undated. To'oril's approval is the only external sanction the new khanate gets, and he gives it in the language of fatherhood, which keeps Temüjin junior. The warning is aimed at the men who elected him, not at Temüjin: the text has To'oril doubt the electors' constancy from the first day. The envoy named Daqai here is identified by the translator's note with the Taki of §120 and the Taqai of §124, so the id taqai is reused; the narrative itself does not make that identification.

Chinggis sends the envoys Arqai Qasar and Cha'urqan to Jamukha. Jamukha answers nothing to Temüjin directly; instead he returns a message aimed at Altan and Quchar, accusing them of needling the two sworn brothers apart and demanding to know why they never raised Temüjin as qan while the two were still together. He ends by telling them to keep to what they said and be good companions to his anda.

No date, no place, no numbers. Jamukha's reply is entirely indirect: he never addresses Temüjin, and the text does not say how the message was received or what followed from it. Register is speech because almost the whole section is Jamukha's words; it contains a short two-line stinging figure (poking flanks, pricking ribs) which is described rather than quoted.

Taichar, a junior kinsman of Jamukha, drives off Jochi Darmala's horse herd from the Sa'ari Steppe. Jochi Darmala's companions lack the nerve to ride with him, so he goes alone, comes up on the edge of the herd at night crouched over his horse's mane, kills Taichar with one arrow through the spine and takes his horses back. The section reports a horse raid and its answer, and says nothing about what will come of it.

No date. The text calls Taichar a younger brother, but the translator notes this must mean a junior kinsman, since Jamukha states in §201 that he had no younger brothers. The section does not say Jamukha ordered the raid, and does not say Chinggis knew of the killing: the causal link to the war is supplied only in the next section.

To avenge Taichar, Jamukha gathers thirteen tribes into three tümen, crosses the Ala'ut Turqa'ut range and marches on Chinggis, who is warned in the Gürelgü mountains by Mülke Totaq and Boroldai of the Ikires and forms his own thirteen camps into three tümen. They fight at Dalan Baljut; Chinggis is driven off and takes refuge in the Jerene Gorge on the Onon. Turning for home, Jamukha has the Chinos princes boiled alive in seventy cauldrons and drags the severed head of Chaqa'an U'a of the Ne'üs behind his horse.

No date is given. Dalan Baljut is conventionally placed around 1187 in scholarship, but nothing in the section supports a year, so year_estimate is null. This is one of the very few places where the Secret History records Temüjin losing a battle and it does not soften the loss. The cauldrons and the dragged head are stated flatly, with no comment or condemnation.

Jürchedei brings the Uru'ut over from Jamukha and Quyuldar the Mangqut; Father Mönglik of the Qongqotat comes across with his seven sons, and Chinggis takes the defections to mean the whole people is turning to him. At a feast in the forest by the Onon with Hö'elün, Qasar and the Jürkin leaders Sacha Beki and Taichu, the kumis is poured first for Ebegei, a junior wife of Sacha Beki's father, and the ladies Qorijin and Qu'urchin, slighted, have the steward Shiki'ür beaten. He cries out under the beating that this only happens to him because Yisügei Ba'atur and Nekün Taishi are dead.

No date. The section does not explain why Ebegei was served first, nor what the two ladies' standing was relative to hers: the whole quarrel is over pouring order. Shiki'ür's cry ties the insult to the deaths of the senior generation, which is the section's real subject.

The feast had been arranged by Belgütei on Chinggis's side and by Büri Bökö on the Jürkin side; Belgütei was standing outside with the qan's geldings. He catches a Qadagin man stealing a tether from the horse station, Büri Bökö takes the thief under his protection, and slashes open Belgütei's right shoulder, bare in the way he always wrestled. Belgütei lets the blood run, makes nothing of the wound, and asks his elder brother to wait rather than fall out with kinsmen they have only just become friendly with.

No date, no place named. The text does not say whether the sword-blow was deliberate or the end of a scuffle, and gives Büri Bökö no words at all here. The translator connects the bare shoulder to the episode alluded to in §50. The section exists to record Belgütei's restraint, which the next section overrides.

Chinggis will not be held back: both sides break off branches and pull the churning-sticks out of the kumis skins and set about beating each other. The Jürkin are overpowered and the two ladies seized, then handed back when the Jürkin send word that they want peace. While envoys are still going back and forth about the peace, news reaches Chinggis that the Jin emperor, because Megüjin Se'ültü and other Tatars would not come to terms, has ordered his commander Ongging Chingsang out against them, and that the Tatars and their herds are being driven upstream along the Ulja.

No date. The Jin campaign against the Tatars is usually placed in 1196, but the section gives no year-animal and nothing internally datable, so year_estimate is null. The text cuts from the brawl straight to the news from the Jin court with no transition and no explanation of how the news travelled.

Chinggis calls the Tatars the people who destroyed his fathers and forefathers and sends To'oril a proposal to strike them together while the chance is there; To'oril agrees and marches on the third day. The same summons goes to Sacha Beki, Taichu and the Jürkin, who never come, and after waiting six days the two set out without them, moving down the Ulja to join Ongging Chingsang's advance. They take the Tatar stockades at Qusutu Shitü'en and Naratu Shitü'en, kill Megüjin Se'ültü on the spot, and Chinggis carries off his silver cradle and a blanket sewn with big pearls.

No date; scholars place the Ulja campaign in 1196, but the text supplies no year-animal or datable marker, so year_estimate is null. The six days' wait for the Jürkin is stated as plain fact here and becomes the grievance used to destroy them in §136: the text lets the reader make that connection itself.

Ongging Chingsang, delighted to hear that Megüjin Se'ültü is dead, gives Chinggis the title ja'ut quri and gives To'oril of the Kereit the title ong: the section pauses to say that this is where the name Ong Qan comes from. He promises to report the service to the Jin emperor and to let him decide whether a higher title still should be conferred on Chinggis, then withdraws. Chinggis and Ong Qan plunder the Tatars, divide the spoil between them and go back to their own camps.

No date. The section is as much an etymology of the title Ong Qan as a narrative. It does not say whether the promised higher title ever came, and the promise is simply left hanging; the translator glosses ja'ut quri and jautau as Chinese-style commands, but the text itself does not explain them.

While the camp at Naratu Shitü'en is being plundered the Mongols come across a small boy left behind, wearing a gold ring in his nose and a gold-stitched silk waistcoat lined with sable. Chinggis brings him back and gives him to his mother Hö'elün, who says he must be the son of a man of rank. She names him Shikiken Quduqu and brings him up as a younger brother to her five children, a sixth child.

No date. The boy's parents are never named and the text says nothing about the rest of the camp's survivors; the clothing is the only evidence given for his birth. The name appears as Shikiken Quduqu here and Shigiken Qutuqu in §138: the same person, later Shigi Qutuqu the judge.

The Jürkin fall on the base camp at Lake Hariltu, stripping fifty men of their clothes and killing ten. Chinggis's anger runs through the whole tally: the beaten steward, Belgütei's cut shoulder, the ladies handed back for the sake of peace, the six days wasted waiting for them before the Tatar campaign, and he concludes that by leaning on the enemy the Jürkin have made themselves the enemy. He plunders them at Dolo'an Bolda'ut on Ködö'e Aral by the Kelüren, runs down Sacha Beki and Taichu at the Telëtü Pass, and when they admit they did not keep the words they had spoken, he holds them to those words, kills them and leaves their bodies where they fell.

No date; nothing datable in the section, so year_estimate is null. The translator notes that Ködö'e Aral, named here in passing, is where the Secret History was itself first set down (§282).

Having disposed of Sacha and Taichu, Chinggis returns to the Jürkin camp and is about to move the people away when the three sons of Telegetü Bayan of the Jalayir turn out to be among them. Gü'ün U'a hands over his sons Muqali and Buqa, and Chila'un Qayichi his sons Tüngge and Qashi, each in a formal verse pledge inviting the qan to cut the boys' heel tendons or tear out their livers if they ever leave his threshold and his door. Chinggis gives Jebke to Qasar, and Jebke brings a small boy called Boro'ul out of the Jürkin camp and presents him to Hö'elün.

No date. Register is verse because the bulk of the section is two formulaic pledges in parallel poetic lines, which are described rather than quoted. Muqali and Boro'ul both enter the story here as handed-over property rather than as volunteers: the translator notes these are the qan's personal slaves (emchü bo'ol). The text does not say what became of the rest of the Jürkin people beyond the previous section's statement.

A short enumeration of the four boys Hö'elün raised in her own tent, each named with the camp he was picked up in: Güchü from the Merkit, Kököchü from the Besüt among the Tayichi'ut, Shigiken Qutuqu from the Tatar, Boro'ul from the Jürkin. Her reason is given in a single paired image: that these foundlings are to be eyes for her sons to see by day and ears for them to hear by night.

No date and no place. Register is list because the section is essentially a four-item roster plus one saying. Each boy is identified by the defeated camp he came out of, so the list is also a list of victories, though the text passes no judgement on that. The eyes/ears saying is a paired poetic figure and is described, not quoted.

An explanation of where the name Jürkin came from. Qabul Qan's eldest son was Ökin Barqaq, whose son was Sorqatu Jürki; because this was his eldest, Qabul picked out for him the hardest men of his own people, described in a five-line catalogue of gall in the liver, thumbs good at shooting, lungs full of courage and mouths full of fury. From that fury and pride, the text says, the name Jürkin derives. The section ends by noting that Chinggis subjugated this proud people, destroyed the Jürkin clan and made its people his own subjects.

No date. This is an etiology rather than a narrative: it derives the clan name from a quality, not from an ancestor's name, and the catalogue of fierce men is a verse passage, described here rather than quoted. The closing statement that the clan was destroyed and absorbed is made without any comment on it, immediately after the killing of its leaders in §136.

Chinggis proposes a wrestling match between Büri Bökö and Belgütei. Büri, who had once thrown Belgütei with one hand and one foot and held him helpless, and who was the strongest man among his people, lets himself be toppled; Belgütei cannot hold him, glances back, sees Chinggis bite his lower lip, and understands: he crosses the ends of the collar, sets a knee to the spine and breaks it. Büri dies saying he would never have lost but took the fall out of fear of the qa'an, and the section then sets out the descent from Qabul Qan and reads the death as the price of Büri stepping over the senior line to keep company with Barqaq's proud sons.

No date. No order is ever given: the text records only that Chinggis bit his lip and that Belgütei understood, so the killing is done entirely by signal. The genealogy at the end is the section's own explanation of the death, framed as a breach of seniority within Qabul Qan's line rather than as revenge for the shoulder wound of §131.

In the Year of the Hen a coalition assembles at Alqui Spring: Qadagin and Salji'ut, the Dörben who had made peace with the Tatar, the Tatar, Ikires, Onggirat and Qorolas, Buyiruq Qan of the Naiman, Qutu son of Toqto'a Beki of the Merkit, Quduqa Beki of the Oirat, and the Tayichi'ut under Tarqutai Kiriltuq, Qodun Örcheng and A'uchu Ba'atur. They swear together by hacking the backs of a stallion and a mare, move down the Ergüne, and on the promontory where the Kan flows into it they raise Jamukha of the Jajirat as gür qan, then resolve to attack Chinggis and Ong Qan. Qoridai of the Qorolas carries the news to Chinggis in the Gürelgü mountains, Chinggis passes it to Ong Qan, and Ong Qan comes at speed.

Dated by the text itself, Year of the Hen, 1201, so confidence is attested. Roughly half the section is a roster of tribes and leaders rather than action, which is why register is close to list; the oath and the elevation carry it. The text does not say why Qoridai, from a tribe inside the coalition, warned Chinggis.

With Ong Qan brought in, the two move down the Kelüren together against Jamukha. Chinggis puts Altan, Quchar and Daritai in the vanguard, Ong Qan sends Senggüm, Jaqa Gambu and Bilge Beki, and lookout posts are placed ahead of them at Enegen Güiletü, Mount Chekcher and Mount Chiqurqu. At Utkiya, while the vanguard is deciding whether to camp, a rider from the Chiqurqu post brings word that the enemy is close; they ride out to find out who it is, and it proves to be Jamukha's vanguard under A'uchu Ba'atur, Buyiruq Qan, Qutu and Quduqa Beki. The two sides shout at each other, but the light is going, so they agree to fight in the morning and fall back on the main army.

The section itself gives no year; 1201 is carried over from the Year of the Hen stated in §141, of which this is the unbroken continuation, hence confidence inferred rather than attested. The section is almost entirely order of march and a chain of lookout posts: no numbers are given for either side, and nothing is said about Jamukha's own position.

The armies are sent forward next day and meet at Köyiten, pressing on each other downhill and uphill and re-forming their ranks. Buyiruq Qan and Quduqa Beki, who know how to raise a rainstorm by magic, start to conjure one, but the storm rolls back and falls on their own side. Unable to advance, they tumble into ravines, tell each other that Heaven does not love them, and scatter.

Year inferred as 1201, continuing the campaign the text dates in §141. Legendary framing: the rain-magic (jada) is reported as something that simply happened and backfired, and the losers' own words make Heaven the agent of their defeat: register is kept narrative because the section is a battle report, but nothing here is presented as natural cause. The text names no Mongol commander and does not say who won the field.

The coalition comes apart in four directions: Buyiruq Qan toward Uluq Taq south of the Altai, Qutu toward the Selenge, Quduqa Beki toward the forest on the Shisgis, A'uchu Ba'atur toward the Onon. Jamukha plunders the very people who had just made him qan and goes back up the Ergüne. Ong Qan chases Jamukha down the Ergüne while Chinggis chases A'uchu, who hurries his people along and draws up with Qodun Örcheng in battle order at Ülengüt Turas across the Onon; the two sides fight back and forth until evening and then spend the night lying right beside each other, with the fugitives' circular camp alongside.

Year inferred as 1201, continuing from the Year of the Hen in §141. The text records that Jamukha plundered the people who had just elected him gür qan and offers no explanation whatever for it. The battle at Ülengüt Turas is deliberately left unfinished: the section ends with the two armies bedded down next to each other in the dark, which sets up §145.

Chinggis is wounded in a vein of the neck and cannot stop the bleeding. Jelme sucks the clotting blood through the whole night, swallowing and spitting it rather than trust anyone else or leave his side; when the qa'an revives at midnight and says he is thirsty, Jelme strips to his pants, walks into the enemy camp bedded down beside them, finds no kumis because the mares had been turned loose unmilked, and carries back a covered bucket of curds which he mixes with water and gives him to drink three times. In the morning Chinggis asks about the puddles of blood spat all around him and about the naked walk into the enemy, and Jelme answers both, including the story he had ready if he had been caught. Chinggis counts three times Jelme has given him back his life and says these will stay in his heart.

Year inferred as 1201 from the campaign the text dates in §141; scholars differ on exactly when the Tayichi'ut fighting falls, so confidence is kept at inferred rather than attested. The text does not say who wounded Chinggis; the translator raises the possibility of a poisoned arrow, but the narrative itself never mentions poison. The single editorial comment, that Heaven protected Jelme on his errand, is the narrator's, not a character's.

By daylight the enemy who had bivouacked alongside have slipped away in the night, leaving only the people of the circular camp who could not have got away. As Chinggis is bringing the fugitives back, he himself hears a woman in a red coat on a ridge wailing his name; asked, she says she is Qada'an, daughter of Sorqan Shira, and that she was calling on Temüjin to save her husband, whom the soldiers were killing. He rides to her and they embrace, but the husband is already dead, and he has her sit beside him that night. Next day Sorqan Shira and Jebe come in from Tödöge of the Tayichi'ut; asked why he took so long, Sorqan Shira says that coming earlier would have cost him his wife, children and herds at his masters' hands, and Chinggis tells him he did right.

Year inferred as 1201, same campaign as §141-145. The rescue fails: the text is explicit that the husband was already dead by the time Chinggis reached her, and it never names him or says what became of Qada'an afterwards. Sorqan Shira's answer is a defence of having waited, and the text lets it stand without irony. The translator notes that this meeting is not recorded back in §102 where it might have been expected.

Chinggis asks who it was that shot from the top of the ridges at Köyiten and severed the neckbone of his tawny, white-mouthed warhorse. Jirqo'adai answers that he shot it, and says that if he is put to death he will rot on a patch of earth the size of a palm, but if he is spared he will charge for the qa'an so as to split deep water and shatter stone: a pledge delivered in verse. Chinggis observes that a former enemy usually hides his person and his tongue out of fear, while this man makes his killings known instead, so he is a man to have as a companion; he renames him Jebe after the arrow and tells him to stay at his side, and the section closes by saying this is how Jebe came over from the Tayichi'ut.

Year inferred as 1201, same campaign as §141-146. Jebe's reply is a verse pledge and is described rather than quoted. Note the precision the text keeps: the Köyiten arrow hit the horse, not Chinggis, the neck wound of §145 came later, in the Tayichi'ut fighting, and the translator notes that Jebe means both weapon and a particular type of arrow.

Chinggis breaks the Tayichiud and destroys the men of their ruling line, A'uchu Ba'atur, Qoton Örcheng, Qudu'udar, down to the children of their children, in an image of ashes blown off a hearth. He takes their common people into his own following and winters at Quba Qaya.

The section names no year. Its winter camp at Quba Qaya is the same place named again in §151 and dated indirectly by §153 (the winter before the Year of the Dog), but §148 itself dates nothing, so no estimate is entered. The hearth-ash line is the text's own simile and is described, not quoted. The text distinguishes the killing of the Tayichiud lineage from the taking-over of their ordinary people; both are stated flatly, without comment.

Old Shirgü'etü of the Nichügüt Ba'arin and his sons Alaq and Naya'a take the fugitive Tayichiud chief Targhutai, too heavy to ride, and cart him off. When Targhutai's kin ride to rescue him the old man sits astride him with a knife, and it is Targhutai himself who calls his rescuers back, arguing that Temüjin will not kill him because he once took the fatherless boy out of an abandoned camp and taught him like a young colt. On the road Naya'a persuades his father that men who deliver up their own lord will be cut down as untrustworthy, so they set Targhutai free and go to Chinggis with nothing but themselves, and Chinggis says their reasoning was right and shows Naya'a favour.

It also states, from below, the principle the rest of the book is built on: a man who lays hands on his rightful lord is unfit for company. Register set to speech because the section is carried almost entirely by three long speeches (Shirgü'etü's, Targhutai's, Naya'a's) rather than by action; Targhutai's description of the child runs in short verse-like lines, described here rather than reproduced. No year is given. The text never says what became of Targhutai afterwards.

Jaqa Gambu of the Kereit comes over to Chinggis at Dersüt, helps beat off a Merkit attack, and brings two broken-off Kereit groups, the Tümen Tübegen and the Olon Dongqayit, into submission with him. The section then reaches back to explain the old bond with Ong Qan: having killed his own father's younger brothers, Ong Qan fell out with his uncle Gür Qan, escaped through the Qara'un gorge with a hundred men to Yesügei, and Yesügei took the field, drove Gür Qan off toward Qashin and gave Ong Qan his people back, which is why the two called each other sworn friends.

Two layers, neither dated: a present-tense recruitment at Dersüt, then a flashback a generation earlier explaining the Yesügei–Ong Qan anda pact. The text states Ong Qan's killing of his paternal uncles without judgement, as simple background. A translator's note flags that Yesügei is given the title Qa'an here, almost certainly a later scribal slip; the man is Yesügei Ba'atur throughout the rest of the book.

Ong Qan's brother Erke Qara escapes a death sentence by submitting to Inancha Qan of the Naiman, and Ong Qan is driven into a long flight: past three cities to the gür qan of the Kara-Khitai, a revolt against him too, then a road around Uighur and Tangut country kept alive by milking five goats with their kids muzzled and bleeding his camel. He reaches Lake Güse'ür starving; Chinggis, honouring the old sworn friendship with Yesügei, sends envoys, rides up from the headwaters of the Kherlen to meet him in person, raises a levy for his keep and brings him into camp, then winters at Quba Qaya.

Year inferred, not stated: §153 opens by saying that after this winter at Quba Qaya came the autumn of the Year of the Dog, so this is the winter of 1201-1202; the section itself supplies no year-animal. Note that Chinggis taxes his own people to feed his patron: the text says this plainly and does not moralise about it. The 'three cities' are unnamed.

Ong Qan's brothers and chiefs talk against him among themselves, running through his whole life as evidence: carried off by the Merkit at seven and set to pounding grain, taken with his mother by Ajai Qan of the Tatar at thirteen and escaping with a herdsman, the flight to the Kara-Khitai gür qan on the Chui and the revolt within the year, the beggared return past Uighur and Tangut country with one blind horse, and ask what is to be done with a man who owes his life to his son Temüjin and is still ungrateful. Altun Ashuq reports the talk; Ong Qan has the conspirators fettered, Jaqa Gambu alone gets away to the Naiman, and Ong Qan spits in their faces, has them unchained, and everyone in the tent spits on them after him.

A biography delivered as hostile gossip: almost the whole section is one speech, so register is speech. It opens with a two-line insult about the Qan's foul character (a 'rotten liver'), described rather than quoted. No date anywhere, and the childhood episodes it recalls are decades earlier. The punishment is a shaming, not an execution: the text lets that stand without explaining it.

After the winter at Quba Qaya, in the autumn of the Year of the Dog, Chinggis fights four Tatar groups at Dalan Nemürges. Before the battle he and his commanders jointly issue a law: nobody stops for plunder, since the plunder will be shared afterwards anyway; anyone forced back must rally to the point where the charge began, on pain of death. The Tatars are driven back onto the Ulqui Shilügelǰit and stripped, and when Altan, Quchar and Daritai break the rule and stop for loot, Chinggis sends Jebe and Qubilai to take everything they had seized away from them.

Attested: the text gives the year-animal (Year of the Dog) directly, and dates the preceding winter to Quba Qaya. Historically the load-bearing detail is that the decree is issued jointly with the commanders, it is law, not whim, and that the first men punished under it are Chinggis's own senior kinsmen. The word rendered 'decree' is jasaq, which is also simply 'law'.

The kinsmen decide in council, in formal verse, to avenge their fathers and forefathers by holding the Tatars against a cart linchpin and killing every one taller than it, dividing the rest as slaves. Belgütei tells the Tatar Yeke Cheren what was decided; the Tatars barricade themselves, and the Mongols take heavy losses storming them and heavier losses again when the trapped men agree to die each taking an enemy with him. The massacre is carried out, and Chinggis rules that Belgütei is barred from great councils in future: he will handle outsiders and judge thieves and liars, and may rejoin only after the council's wine has been drunk.

It is also the text judging its own side: the punishment falls on Chinggis's half-brother, and the offence is not cruelty but indiscretion. Year inferred only: the section follows on directly from the Dog-year Tatar campaign of §153 and gives no date of its own. The verse resolution and the linchpin measure are described, not reproduced.

Chinggis takes Yisügen, daughter of the Tatar Yeke Cheren, as a wife. She tells him her elder sister Yisüi is the better woman, fit for a ruler, and lately married off, and promises that if the sister is found she will give up her own seat to her. The search turns Yisüi up in a wood with the bridegroom she had been given to; he runs, she is brought back, Yisügen keeps her word and moves down a place, and Chinggis, finding it as she said, puts Yisüi among his principal wives.

Year inferred from position only: it opens 'on that occasion', i.e. immediately after the Tatar campaign dated by year-animal in §153. The text says nothing about how either sister regarded the man who had just exterminated their people; the silence is total and is worth preserving. The fleeing husband is left unresolved here and picked up in §156.

Sitting outside drinking with Yisüi and Yisügen on either side of him, Chinggis hears Yisüi let out a deep sigh. He thinks it over, then has Bo'orchu, Muqali and the other chiefs line everyone present up by family group and pick out any man standing in a group not his own. One handsome young man is left over: Yisüi's former bridegroom, who says he fled when the plundering began and has slipped back now hoping to pass unnoticed in the crowd. Chinggis says such men have already been measured against the linchpin, and has him cut down at once.

The text never says what Yisüi was sighing about, and never returns to her afterwards; it does not editorialise on the killing either. Year inferred from the Tatar campaign frame only ('after having completely ravaged the Tatars'); no date is given.

In the same Year of the Dog, while Chinggis was riding against the Tatars, Ong Qan rode against the Merkit: chasing Toqto'a Beki toward the Barqujin lowland he killed the eldest son Tögüs Beki, seized Toqto'a's two women Qutuqtai and Cha'alun along with his wives, and plundered the two sons Qutu and Chila'un together with their people. Of all of it he gave Chinggis nothing.

Attested: the text names the same Year of the Dog. The last clause, not one thing of the booty, is the section's whole point and the first visible crack in the Kereit alliance; the text states it and moves on without comment. A translator's note records a textual doubt over whether Qutuqtai and Cha'alun were Toqto'a's daughters or his wives. Toqto'a's son Chila'un is a different man from Chila'un Ba'atur, son of Sorqan-shira, who appears in §163.

Chinggis and Ong Qan ride together against Buyiruq Qan of the Güchügüt Naiman and reach him at Soqoq Usun below the Uluq Taq. Buyiruq will not stand and fight; he crosses the Altai and is chased down the Ürünggü past Qum Shinggir. One of his patrol commanders, Yedi Tubluq, is caught on a hillside when his saddle-strap snaps, and Buyiruq himself is run down at Lake Kishil Bash and finished off.

No date of any kind: the section opens only with 'after that'. It sits between the attested Year of the Dog of §157 and the attested spring of the Year of the Pig of §166, so it belongs somewhere in 1202-1203, but the text does not say and no estimate is entered. The broken saddle-strap is the kind of concrete detail the text keeps and the chronology drops.

On the way back the Naiman champion Kökse'ü Sabraq is waiting for them drawn up at the Bayidaraq confluence. Both sides form up, but the day is too far gone, so they agree to fight in the morning and pass the night in battle order. Ong Qan has his fires lit where he stands and slips away that same night, moving upstream along the Qara Se'ül.

Undated. The decoy fires are the text's detail, not an inference. The section reports the desertion without any stated motive: the reason is supplied only afterwards, by Jamukha's slander in §160.

Riding away beside Ong Qan, Jamukha turns him against Temüjin, claiming his sworn friend has long been sending envoys to the Naiman and has stayed behind to submit to them. He puts it as a four-line verse addressed to the Qan, in which he is the lark that keeps to one place and Temüjin the bird that migrates. Gürin Ba'atur of the Ubchiq rebukes him on the spot for backbiting and slandering an upright kinsman.

Register set to verse: the section exists for its bird simile, which is given here as description only and not reproduced. Undated. Note what the text does not explain: how Jamukha, last seen as Temüjin's rival, comes to be riding in Ong Qan's column; it simply has him there. A translator's note corrects the clan name in the manuscript (Ubchiqtai, probably for Übchiritei).

At first light Chinggis looks across to fight and finds Ong Qan's ground empty. Saying they have been treated like the burnt leavings of an offering to the dead, he pulls out too, crosses at the Eder-Altai confluence and camps in the Sa'ari steppe. He and Qasar, having seen for themselves what state the Naiman are in, stop counting them as an enemy worth reckoning with.

Undated. The remark about sacrificial leavings is the text's own idiom for being used and discarded; described, not quoted. The closing sentence is compressed to the point of obscurity: the text asserts a change in how the Naiman are judged without narrating any engagement that would justify it.

Kökse'ü Sabraq turns on Ong Qan instead: he takes Senggüm's wife and all his people, and half of Ong Qan's people and herds that were at the Telegetü pass, and goes home with them. In the same confusion Qutu and Chila'un, Toqto'a's two Merkit sons who had been with Ong Qan, break away with their own following and go down the Selenge to rejoin their father.

Undated. The night desertion of §159 is punished immediately and the text draws no moral from the symmetry. The Merkit brothers had evidently been in Ong Qan's hands since §157: the text never says how they came to be with him.

Robbed by the Naiman, Ong Qan sends to Chinggis and asks his 'son' for the loan of his four steeds to get his people back. Chinggis sends Bo'orchu, Muqali, Borokhul and Chila'un Ba'atur with troops; they arrive at Hula'an Qut just as Senggüm, his horse shot through the thigh, is about to be taken, save him, and recover the people and the wife entire. Ong Qan says the father once restored his lost people to him and now the son has done it again, and leaves the repaying of it to Heaven and Earth to settle.

Undated. 'Four steeds' is the text's own name for the four companions and is kept here as description. Ong Qan's speech states a debt across two generations and then declines to say how it will be paid, which is exactly what the rest of the chapter is about.

Ong Qan speaks of his own age, of the day he goes up to the heights and the cliffs, and asks who will govern his people then: his brothers have no character and his one son Senggüm might as well not exist. So he decides to make Temüjin elder brother to Senggüm and have two sons. They meet in the Black Forest on the Tuul and declare themselves father and son, on the strength of the old sworn friendship with Yesügei, and bind it with paired oaths, to attack and to hunt as one, and never to take the word of a venomous snake against each other without first checking it mouth to mouth and face to face.

Ong Qan's motive is stated as coldly dynastic: his heir is worthless and he wants a second son. Register speech: the section is declaration and oath, with two verse passages (the old man's image of his own death, and the venomous-snake couplets) described here rather than reproduced. No date given.

Wanting affection on top of affection, Chinggis asks for Senggüm's younger sister Cha'ur Beki for his son Jochi and offers his own daughter Qojin Beki to Senggüm's son Tusaqa in exchange. Senggüm, thinking a great deal of himself, answers in terms of where each girl would sit in the tent, theirs by the door, facing inward, ours in the place of honour facing out, and refuses. From those words on, the text says, Chinggis lost his affection for Ong Qan and Nilqa Senggüm in his heart.

Undated. The whole refusal is expressed through tent geography: door versus the back of the tent, servant versus lady. The text marks this, not any act of war, as the moment the alliance dies inwardly: a small social insult given as the cause of everything that follows.

In the spring of the Year of the Pig, Jamukha, Altan and Quchar, Ebügeǰin and Noyakin of the Qarta'at, To'oril of the Söge'en and Qachi'un Beki come to an understanding and go to Nilqa Senggüm at Berke Elet, north of the Jeje'er heights. Jamukha tells him Temüjin is in secret correspondence with Tayang Qan of the Naiman, his mouth says father and son but his conduct says otherwise, and offers to fall on his flank. Each of the others pledges his part in turn: Altan and Quchar to kill Hö'elün's sons, the two Qarta'at to seize his hands and feet, To'oril to strip him of his people, Qachi'un Beki to follow Senggüm to the farthest limit.

Attested: the text names the spring of the Year of the Pig. Register speech: the section is a sequence of formal pledges, several of them in couplets, described rather than reproduced. Note that Altan and Quchar are Chinggis's own kinsmen, the same men punished for looting in §153. The To'oril here is of the Söge'en and is a different man from Ong Qan To'oril, hence the separate id.

Senggüm sends the plan to his father through Sayiqan Töde'en, and Ong Qan refuses it: Temüjin has been their support, Heaven will not love them if they turn on him, and Jamukha's tongue is too glib to trust. Senggüm sends twice and three times and cannot move him, so he comes himself, taunting his father with the age when a man chokes on white milk and is stifled by black meat and asking whether Temüjin will then let anyone govern the people Qurchaqus Buyiruq gathered. He shoves the tent door aside and walks out, and Ong Qan, afraid of losing his son's affection, calls him back and tells him to do whatever he can: it is for him to decide.

Year inferred: the section runs straight on from the attested spring of the Year of the Pig in §166 and carries no date of its own. A man argued out of his own judgement in stages, and the text tracks each stage. The image of extreme old age, choking on white milk, stifled by black meat, is the text's, described not quoted. Ong Qan's fear of Heaven's disfavour is stated twice and then abandoned without being answered.

Senggüm proposes using the betrothal feast for Cha'ur Beki as the trap, invite them to dine, then seize them, and the others agree and make a compact with Ong Qan. Chinggis sets out with ten men and stops overnight at Father Mönglik's tent, and Mönglik points out that the people who despised the match now suddenly offer the girl, advises caution, and suggests pleading spring and lean horses. Chinggis turns back from Mönglik's tent, sending Buqatai and Kiratai to eat the betrothal meal in his place; when they arrive alone, Senggüm's party say they have been found out and will surround him at first light.

Year inferred from the attested spring of the Year of the Pig in §166; the section itself says only that it is spring and the horses are thin. Mönglik's reasoning is purely social, the same people who refused the girl now offer her, therefore they are lying, and it saves Chinggis's life. This is the same Mönglik whose son Teb-tenggeri will later have to be destroyed; the text here presents him only as the trusted counsellor.

Yeke Cheren, Altan's younger cousin, comes home and wonders aloud what reward a man might get for carrying word to Temüjin that they mean to take him at dawn; his wife Alaq It tells him to stop talking nonsense, and their horse-herder Badai, bringing the milk in, overhears. Badai tells his fellow herder Kishiliq, who goes to check and hears the son, Narin Ke'en, sharpening arrows and ordering two named geldings brought in and tethered for a night ride. The two herders take those very horses, kill a lamb that evening and cook it with the boards of their bed, ride through the night, and report from behind Chinggis's tent everything that was said: adding that if he trusts them he should not hesitate.

Year inferred from the spring of the Year of the Pig in §166; the section gives none. This Yeke Cheren is called Altan's younger cousin and is a different man from the Tatar Yeke Cheren of §§154-156, hence the distinct id. The chapter breaks off here, mid-crisis, before the reward Badai speculated about is ever mentioned.

Warned by Badai and Kishiliq, Chinggis abandons his baggage that same night, slips away, leaves Jelme of the Uriangqai as rearguard on the north side of Ma'u Heights, and halts at Qalaqaljit Sands; two of Alchidai's horse-herders, out grazing the geldings, spot the pursuers' dust rounding Hula'an Burqat and raise the alarm just in time. Riding with Ong Qan, Jamukha is asked who among Temüjin's men will really fight, and answers with a short verse on the Uru'ut and Mangqut, whose ranks hold whenever they wheel; Ong Qan then stacks his tribes into successive waves. Jirgin, Tümen Tübegen, Olon Dongqayit, the thousand bodyguards, then his own main body. Told to draw up the army himself, Jamukha concludes aloud that Ong Qan is the lesser man, and secretly sends Chinggis the entire order of battle with a warning to be on his guard.

The text gives no year-animal anywhere in this chapter; 1203 is the scholarly consensus date for the battle at Qalaqaljit Sands, hence 'inferred'. The section does not explain why Ong Qan attacked, the rupture is in the previous chapter, and it does not say what Badai and Kishiliq's intelligence was. Jamukha's judgement of the Uru'ut and Mangqut is a four-line verse on their ranks holding as they turn; described, not quoted. Qadaq appears here only as the Jirgin commander named in Ong Qan's dispositions. One bracketed clause in the message (the Olon Dongqayit's place in the order) is supplied by the editor, not the manuscript.

Chinggis offers the vanguard to Jürchedei of the Uru'ut, but before he can answer Quyildar Sechen of the Mangqut claims it: he will fight in front of his sworn friend, and leaves the care of his orphans-to-be to Chinggis's judgement. The two draw up their Uru'ut and Mangqut ahead of the army: they break the Jirgin, Quyildar is speared off his horse by Achiq Shirun and shielded by his own men, and Jürchedei rolls on through the Tümen Tübegen, the Olon Dongqayit and the thousand bodyguards. Senggüm charges without his father's leave, takes an arrow in the cheek and falls; the whole Kereit force turns back to stand over him, and as the sun touches the hilltops Chinggis's men withdraw carrying the wounded Quyildar and camp far off for the night.

The section names no place at all, the battlefield is only knowable from §170, and gives no date; 1203 is inferred from the adjacent Qalaqaljit engagement and scholarly consensus. It does not say the battle was won, only that Chinggis's men withdrew at sunset and moved away; the next sections make plain how badly mauled they were. Quyildar's request about his orphans is set up here and paid off in §175 and §185.

They pass the night still in battle order, and at the dawn roll-call Ögödei, Borokhul and Bo'orchu are missing. Chinggis says the two men would never have parted from Ögödei, living or dying, and keeps the army standing ready in case of pursuit. At first light a rider comes up from behind: it is Bo'orchu, who explains that his horse was shot from under him, he ran on foot, and during the lull while the Kereit were shielding Senggüm he cut the load off a stray pack-horse, rode away on the bare pack-saddle, and followed his own side's tracks back.

No place and no date are given; 1203 is inferred from the adjacent battle. The section deliberately leaves Ögödei's fate unresolved, Bo'orchu returns alone and says nothing about him, and that suspense is the point of the break between §172 and §173. The manuscript writes the name as Öködei.

A second rider comes in, his legs dangling oddly, so that from a distance it looks like one man on a horse: it is Borokhul riding double behind Ögödei, blood running from the corners of his own mouth. Ögödei has taken an arrow in the neck vein, and Borokhul has kept the clotting wound sucked clean the whole way. Chinggis's eyes fill and his heart is pained; he has a fire made, the wound cauterized and drink found for his son. Borokhul reports that the enemy's dust is drawing away in a long trail in the opposite direction, and Chinggis decides not to pursue but to regather his men and fight later, moving up the Ulqui Shilügeljit to Dalan Nemürges.

No date is given; 1203 is inferred from the adjacent battle. The text does not say how badly Ögödei was hurt beyond the neck wound, nor whether he recovered here.

Qada'an Daldurqan comes over to Chinggis, leaving his wife and children behind, and reports what was said on the other side. When Senggüm fell with an arrow in the cheek, Ong Qan lamented in verse that they had stirred up and provoked a man they should have left alone, and were themselves the cause of the nail driven into his son's face, and wanted to attack at once. Achiq Shirun talked him out of it: Senggüm was a son long prayed and charmed for and must be looked after; most of the Mongols, with Jamukha, Altan and Quchar, are already on the Kereit side; and the few who left with Temüjin, men with nothing but a horse to ride and a tree for shelter, can be scooped up later like dry dung gathered in a skirt. Ong Qan agreed, told them not to jolt his son as they carried him, and went home.

The whole section is speech nested inside speech, a deserter quoting Ong Qan and Achiq Shirun, which is why the register is 'speech' and not 'narrative'. Ong Qan's self-reproach is a short verse and Achiq Shirun's dismissal of Temüjin's followers a two-line figure; both are described, not reproduced. No date; 1203 inferred from the battle just narrated. The text never says what became of Qada'an Daldurqan's abandoned family, and never explains the 'uchumaq' arrow.

Leaving Dalan Nemürges and following the Qalqa downstream, Chinggis has his surviving force counted: two thousand six hundred men, half of them moving with him along the west bank and half, the Uru'ut and Mangqut, along the east. They live off what they can hunt as they go, and Quyildar, whose wound has not healed, ignores Chinggis's warning to ride after game; the wound reopens and he dies. Chinggis buries him at Keltegei Qada by the Or Bend of the Qalqa.

One of the very few explicit head-counts in the work: 2,600 men, given as a bare number with no comment on how catastrophic that is. No date; 1203 inferred from the surrounding campaign. The text does not say Quyildar was buried with any rite, only where; and it makes no connection here to his vow in §171, which is only redeemed in §185. The translator's footnote allows an alternative reading of the burial place as 'the slanting cliff of the Or Bend'.

Knowing that the Onggirat under Terge Emel and others are camped where the Qalqa runs into Lake Buir, Chinggis sends Jürchedei with the Uru'ut, carrying a message: if they still hold that the Onggirat have always lived by the good looks of their daughters and granddaughters, they will submit; if they mean to resist, there will be a fight. They submit without fighting, and Chinggis leaves their property untouched.

The saying about Onggirat daughters is a short verse; described, not quoted. The section does not mention that the Onggirat are Börte's people or that Dei Sechen was of them: the reader is expected to supply that. No date; 1203 inferred from the campaign sequence. Spelled Onggirat here (elsewhere Qonggirat).

Camped east of the Tüngge, Chinggis sends Arqai Qasar and Sügegei Je'ün to Ong Qan with the longest message in the work. He asks what grievance made his father frighten him, and why frighten his brothers and their wives too, upsetting their couches and scattering the smoke of their tents; he recalls the oath they swore not to be turned against each other by slander unless they spoke face to face, and asks whether Ong Qan explained face to face when he parted; he calls himself the second shaft and the second wheel of Ong Qan's cart. He then recites Ong Qan's whole career back to him: succeeding his father, killing his two brothers and driving Erke Qara to the Naiman, being chased out by his uncle Gür Qan and rescued by Yesügei, marrying a daughter to the Merkit, fleeing to the gür qan of the Qara Kitai, coming back destitute through Uighur and Tangut country on a single blind horse; then the Merkit plunder Chinggis handed over whole, the campaign against Buyiruq Qan, the night Ong Qan slipped away leaving his fires burning at the Bayidaraq confluence, Kökse'ü Sabraq's seizure of Senggüm's household, and the four steeds sent to get them back. He ends by demanding named envoys.

Two distinct men called Chila'un appear. Toqto'a's Merkit son (id chilaun-merkit) and Chila'un Ba'atur of the four steeds (id chilaun); likewise 'Gür Qan' is Ong Qan's uncle, while the gür qan of the Qara Kitai is a separate ruler. Several passages are verse (the couch and smoke lines, the venomous-snake oath, the hunger-and-leanness lines); described, not quoted. The requested envoy Idürgen is the Itürgen of §184.

Ong Qan answers with a two-line confession that in abandoning his son he abandoned the norm and in parting from him he parted from his duty. Grieving, he swears that if he ever again thinks evil at the sight of his son, let his own blood be shed like this, and pricks the ball of his little finger with an arrow-notching knife, catches the blood in a small birch-bark casket, and sends it back with the messenger to be given to Chinggis.

Register is 'speech' because the section is Ong Qan's reply, with the blood-drawing as its seal; the confession is a verse couplet, described not quoted. year_estimate null on the same principle as §177: an exchange of messages with no date given. The text records no reaction from Chinggis to the blood, and Ong Qan's oath is simply overtaken by events: nothing in the section anticipates §185. No clan is named in the section, so the clans list is empty rather than filled in from context.

Chinggis sends word to Jamukha: it was because Jamukha could not bear the sight of him that the rift with Ong Qan opened, and the old jealousy over who rose first to drink from Ong Qan's blue cup: now Jamukha may drain it, but how much can he take? To Altan and Quchar he sends a longer reproach: he reminds them that he offered the khanship first to Quchar as Nekün Taishi's son, then to Altan as the son of Qutula Qan, then to Sacha and Taichu of the senior line, and only took it himself when none of them would; and he sets out in verse the plunder, women and horses he would have brought them, and the game he would have driven together off cliff and bank and steppe, had he served as their vanguard instead. He closes by telling them to be good companions to Ong Qan now, so nobody says they tire easily of friends, and to let no one settle at the source of the Three Rivers.

The clearest statement in the work that Temüjin took the khanship only after the senior claimants refused it: offered here as an accusation, not as history. year_estimate null: an embassy with no date given, sent in the same sequence as §177. The plunder-and-battue passage is a long verse; described, not quoted. The text says only 'the source of the Three Rivers'; the translator's footnote identifies them as Onon, Tuul and Kherlen with their source at Burkhan Khaldun, so no river ids are asserted here. The footnote also flags 'Bartan Ba'atur' as an error for Barqaq Ba'atur, and 'cha'ut quri' as ja'ut quri of §134.

Chinggis sends a message to the man he calls 'younger brother To'oril', explaining exactly why he uses the word. He traces the descent: Oqda the Slave, taken captive by Tumbinai and Charaqai Lingqu; his son Sübegei the Slave; his son Kököchü Kirsa'an; his son Yegei Qongtaqar; and To'oril is that man's son. To'oril keeps flattering Ong Qan with promises to hand over people: whose people? Altan and Quchar will hardly let anyone rule Chinggis's. The reason he is called 'younger brother' is that he is the threshold slave of Chinggis's great-great-grandfather and the door slave of his great-grandfather.

This To'oril is emphatically NOT Ong Qan: he is Sügegei Je'ün's brother (see §181) and a hereditary house-slave of Temüjin's line, so a separate id (toril-qongtaqar) is used to keep him apart from toghrul. Register is 'speech' though the substance is a four-generation slave pedigree, which is the whole force of the insult. year_estimate null: a message, undated. The closing threshold/door-slave lines are verse; described, not quoted. The footnote equates Yegei Qongtaqar with Jegei Qongdaqor of §120.

To his sworn friend Senggüm, Chinggis sends this: though he was like a son born clothed and Senggüm like a son born naked, their father treated them alike, and Senggüm drove him out out of jealousy that he might come between them; now Senggüm should comfort the old man morning and evening and stop wounding him by talking of becoming qan while he still lives. He asks for named envoys, Bilge Beki and Tödö'en, and demands two messengers each from Ong Qan, Senggüm, Jamukha, Altan, Quchar, Achiq Shirun and Qachi'un. Senggüm answers with contempt: when did Temüjin ever say 'our father the Qan' rather than 'the old murderer', or call him sworn friend rather than a shaman got up in a sheep's tail? These are the words that come before a fight: raise the standards and fatten the geldings. Arqai Qasar carries the answer back, but Sügegei Je'ün, whose wife and children are with To'oril, dares not go with him and stays.

year_estimate null: the section is the last of the undated embassy block, though it clearly leads straight into the fighting of §185. Senggüm's jibe names 'Toqto'a the shaman wearing the tail of a Sartaq sheep'; the referent is not certain (the footnote points to §§137 and 211), so a separate id toqtoa-shaman is used rather than linking him to Toqto'a Beki of the Merkit. 'Qachi'un' here is a Kereit noble, not Chinggis's brother, hence qachiun-kereit. One bracketed clause about sending at least the second envoy is supplied by the editor. The text never says whether Sügegei Je'ün's family was ever recovered.

Chinggis moves on and camps at Lake Baljuna. Just as he is settling there the Qorulas of Cho'os Chaqan turn up and submit without a fight. So does a stranger: Asan the Sartaq, come from Alaqush Digit Quri of the Önggüt, driving a thousand wethers down the Ergüne with a white camel, on his way to buy sable and squirrel pelts: he meets Chinggis while watering his sheep at the lake.

What the Secret History actually gives is a camp, a small clan submitting, and a merchant with sheep. No date; 1203 is the consensus year for Baljuna, hence 'inferred'. The Önggüt connection through Alaqush Digit Quri is left undeveloped here.

While Chinggis is watering his animals at Baljuna, Qasar arrives. He had left his wife and his three sons Yegü, Yisüngge and Tuqu behind with Ong Qan and come away with a handful of men and nothing but their bodies; he crossed the ridges of Qara'un Jidun without finding his brother, ate hides and sinews on the way, and finally reached him at the lake. Chinggis is overjoyed, and they turn Qasar's situation into a stratagem: Qali'udar of the Je'üret and Chaqurqan of the Uriangqai are sent to Ong Qan with a message in Qasar's name: a lament that he watched for his brother and lost him, called and was not heard, and now lies with a clod of earth for a pillow, with his family still in Ong Qan's hands, and would come back if someone trustworthy were sent. A meeting place is fixed at Arqal Geügi on the Kherlen; scouts go ahead, and the whole army leaves Baljuna for it.

The text never calls the message a lie: it simply has the army set off for the rendezvous in the same breath, which is how the reader learns it is a trap. Qasar's lament is a verse passage; described, not quoted. The fate of Qasar's wife and sons, still in Ong Qan's camp, is raised and then dropped. No date; 1203 inferred from the Baljuna and Kereit campaign sequence.

The two envoys find Ong Qan feasting in his golden tent of fine woollen cloth, suspecting nothing. He takes the message at face value, let Qasar come, and sends Itürgen back with them as the guarantor asked for. Near the meeting place at Arqal Geügi, Itürgen sees the signs of a large force ahead and bolts. Qali'udar's horse is faster but he does not dare lay hands on the envoy, so he blocks him, riding ahead of him and behind him; Chaqurqan, on a slower horse, shoots Itürgen's gold-saddled black gelding in the rump at extreme arrow range and drops it on its haunches. They bring him to Chinggis, who will not speak to him and sends him to Qasar to be dealt with; Qasar cuts him down without a word.

The refusal of both Chinggis and Qasar to speak a single word to Itürgen is the whole weight of the section, and the text offers no comment on it. Qali'udar's reluctance to seize an envoy with his own hands is noted without explanation: an envoy's person was not lightly touched. Itürgen is the Idürgen requested in §177. No date; 1203 inferred from the campaign sequence.

Told that Ong Qan is feasting and completely off guard, Chinggis agrees to strike at once: scouts go ahead, the army rides through the night, and they surround the Kereit camp at the Jer Gorge pass of Jeje'er Heights. After three days and three nights the Kereit are worn out and surrender, but Ong Qan and Senggüm slip away in the dark, and nobody knows how. The last to keep fighting is Qadaq Ba'atur of the Jirgin, who explains that he could not stand by while his rightful lord was taken and killed, and fought on to buy him his escape; if he must die he will, and if favoured he will serve. Chinggis judges such a man worthy to be a companion, spares him, and assigns him with a hundred Jirgin to serve Quyildar's widow and children in perpetuity: their sons bound to Quyildar's descendants, their daughters not to be married off at their parents' will but kept in that household's service. And because Quyildar Sechen spoke up first, ahead even of Jürchedei, his line is granted the bounty due to orphans.

What the text does NOT do is describe Ong Qan's or Senggüm's escape or their fate; it says outright that how they got away was not known, and their end is left to a later chapter. No date; 1203 is the consensus year for the fall of the Kereit, hence 'inferred'. Qadaq Ba'atur is the Jirgin commander first named in Ong Qan's battle order in §170, closing the chapter's circle with Quyildar's vow in §171 and his death in §175.

With the Kereit broken, Chinggis parcels their people out on every side; Taqai Ba'atur of the Suldus is paid for his service with a hundred Jirgin. Ong Qan's brother Jaqa Gambu keeps his own subjects intact, the Qa'an values him as the second shaft of his cart, while his two daughters are absorbed by marriage: the elder, Ibaqa Beki, taken by Chinggis himself, the younger, Sorqaqtani, given to Tolui.

The section carries no date; 1203 is the conventional year for the destruction of the Kereit (scholarly consensus, and it sits immediately before the Year of the Rat, 1204, attested in §193): hence 'inferred'. The text says nothing about Sorqaqtani's later importance, nothing about what Ibaqa Beki thought of the arrangement, and gives no reason why Jaqa Gambu alone was spared dispersal beyond the cart-shaft image.

Chinggis issues a decree of reward for the two herdsmen whose warning saved him from the Kereit ambush: Badai and Kišiliq receive Ong Qan's golden tent standing as it is, his gold vessels and their attendants, and Kereit bodyguards, plus hereditary free status for their line: quiver-bearing, ceremonial wine, and the right to keep whatever they take in raid or battue. He binds his successors on the throne to remember the two men. The section closes with the Kereit sub-tribes shared out, some stripped in less than a day, the Jirgin too few to go round, and a winter camp at Abji'a Ködeger.

Winter camp is named but no year; 1203-04 inferred from the datable fall of the Kereit and the 1204 Rat year that follows in §193. Two short verse couplets sit inside the decree (the booty and battue formulas): described, not quoted. The text does not say what happened to the Kereit who could not be distributed, and gives no numbers for the whole people.

The two Kereit fugitives come apart. Ong Qan, driven by thirst to a spring, is taken by a Naiman frontier guard who does not recognise him, disbelieves his claim to be Ong Qan, and kills him where he stands. Senggüm skirts the same water and goes into the desert, and while he is on foot stalking wild asses his equerry rides off with his horse; the equerry's wife refuses to go, shames him in a few lines of verse, and makes him at least throw the golden cup back so his lord can drink. When the equerry reaches the Mongols and recounts it all, Chinggis rewards the wife and has the man cut down: no one will take a companion who abandons his rightful lord.

No date in the section; 1203 inferred from Ong Qan's death, a datable event by scholarly consensus and by its position before the 1204 Rat year of §193. The text never says what became of Senggüm after the desert: he simply drops out here.

The Naiman court receives Ong Qan's severed head at the demand of Tayang Qan's mother, who lays it on white felt and has it honoured with the rites owed by daughters-in-law, wine and fiddle-music and an offering, and the head, so honoured, is said to have laughed. Tayang stamps it to pieces, and his old general rebukes him: the omen is bad, the barking of the dogs has turned, and he recalls in verse Inanča Bilge Qan's own doubt that this weakling son could hold so unruly a people. Tayang answers with the boast that there cannot be two rulers on earth though sun and moon both stand in the sky, and proposes to go and take the quivers of those few Mongols in the east; his mother sneers that the Mongols stink and could at most be milked of their women.

No date whatever in the section; left null. Legendary framing: the laughing head is a marvel and a portent, told as the Mongols told it, and it is what licenses the whole doom-reading that follows: the dominant register is nonetheless the run of speeches. The text does not explain the laughter, does not say who the Naiman queen's daughters-in-law were, and never says Gürbesü's contempt reached the Mongols at the time (Chinggis throws it back at her in §196).

Ignoring his general's warning, Tayang sends an envoy to the Önggüt chief inviting him to serve as the right wing against the Mongols; the chief refuses and instead sends his own envoy east to warn Chinggis that his quivers are being hunted. The message arrives while Chinggis is out hunting on the Camel Steppe, in the middle of a ring-hunt, and the campaign is debated then and there. Many object that the geldings are lean; Chinggis's youngest brother retorts that his own are fat, and Belgütei argues that a man who lets an enemy take his quiver while he still lives has no reason to live: the Naiman boasts are the opening, and they should ride at once.

Undated; null. The Önggüt refusal is the first appearance of an alliance that later matters greatly, but the section gives no reason for it beyond the chief's flat 'I cannot'. Nothing is said of what Chinggis himself replied in the council: only his brothers speak.

Chinggis accepts Belgütei's argument, breaks off the hunt and shifts camp to a rock on the Qalqa, and there counts his men and restructures them: units of a thousand, a hundred and ten, each with its named commander, and six chamberlains appointed by name over the household. From the sons and younger brothers of his officers and of ordinary men alike, chosen for competence and bearing, he recruits eighty night guards and seventy day guards, and Arqai Qasar is told to pick a thousand braves who will fight in front of him in battle and serve as day guards in peacetime.

No date; null, though it sits between the winter camp of §187 and the 17 May 1204 departure of §193. Register is 'list' because the substance is a roster of appointments and unit sizes inside a thin narrative frame. The text gives no total troop figure: it says he counted them but never says how many.

A standing ordinance for the guard, given as direct command: quiver-bearers, day guards, stewards, doorkeepers and grooms serve by day and must hand over before sunset and go out to sleep by the geldings; the night guards then lie all round the tent and man the door, and report is made at the morning soup. A turn is three days and three nights, and even after relief the men owe one more night lying around the tent. With the thousands formed, the chamberlains named and the guard recruited, the army leaves the Qalqa camp for the Naiman.

Inferred 1204: the section's closing sentence is the departure against the Naiman that §193 dates precisely to 17 May 1204: the same act, so the same year. The ordinance is quoted as speech but reads as regulation; no penalty is stated here for breaking it (that comes later in the book), and the section does not say how many men were in the household staff besides the 80 and 70.

The campaign is dated exactly, Year of the Rat, sixteenth of the first summer month, the day of the full moon, with the standard consecrated before setting out up the Kelüren, Jebe and Qubilai riding ahead as scouts. On the Sa'ari Steppe the Naiman patrol on a hill captures a Mongol scout's white horse with its loose saddle and concludes from it that the Mongol mounts are lean. Dödei Čerbi's counter is to camp openly and have every single man light fires in five separate places: the horses graze full while the enemy is kept guessing, and the Naiman patrol reports back that the Mongol fires outnumber the stars.

The only fully self-dating section in the chapter: the year-animal, month and day are all given (17 May 1204), hence 'attested'. The text does not say how many men Chinggis actually had: the whole point of the fires is that the number stays unknown, to the Naiman and to us.

Tayang, camped in the Khangai, sends his son a proposal to withdraw the whole people across the Altai, skirmish as they go to draw the Mongols after them, lean down their own fat horses while exhausting the enemy's, and only then turn and strike: argued in verse about Mongols who will not blink or flinch though their cheeks are pierced. The son sends back an insult that his father is a woman who dares go no further than a pregnant woman goes to urinate, and says he has simply lost heart. Then Tayang's own senior commander rounds on him: his father never showed his back to an equal, his mother would make a better general, the old general is too old and the army's discipline has gone slack, Heaven and Earth have given the day to the Mongols, and he strikes his quiver and rides away on his own.

Inferred 1204: unbroken continuation of the campaign dated to 17 May 1204 in §193, with no date of its own. Three separate verse passages are embedded in the speeches and are described rather than quoted. The commander who denounces Tayang bears the same name as the sentry who killed Ong Qan in §188; the text does not say whether they are the same man, and does not say where he rode off to. It is also mentioned in passing that Jamukha and most Mongols are on the Naiman side: asserted by Güčülük, not by the narrator.

The two armies close at last: the Naiman come down the Tamir, cross the Orqon and reach Čakirma'ut, and Chinggis arrays his men in the named march order, formation and mode of attack, taking the vanguard himself with Qasar over the centre and his youngest brother over the remounts. As the Naiman back up the mountain, Tayang keeps asking Jamukha, who has come with the Naiman, who each oncoming body of men is, and Jamukha answers in a sequence of praise-poems: the four hounds fed on human flesh and leashed with iron, the Uru'ut and Mangqut who gambol like foals loosed at dawn, his own sworn brother in whom no awl could find a chink, a gigantic brother born a coiling dragon-snake, and the sleepy youngest who is never late to the line. After each answer Tayang climbs higher.

“four hounds”

Inferred 1204: same battle-day sequence as the dated §193. Dominant register is verse: the bulk of the section is Jamukha's five answers, deliberately hyperbolic and legendary in tone (Qasar three fathoms tall, eating three-year-old cattle, born a dragon-snake); these are epic boasts, not description of fact, and the text presents them as what Jamukha said to frighten Tayang. The text never says why Jamukha is fighting on the Naiman side, and never says whether Tayang believed him. 'four hounds' kept as a phrase because it is the fixed epithet for Jebe, Qubilai, Jelme and Sübe'etei and cannot be paraphrased away.

Jamukha peels away from the Naiman and sends word to his sworn brother that his own words have driven Tayang up the mountain and out of any will to fight, and that he himself has left them. Chinggis rings the mountain at dusk and waits out the night; the Naiman try to slip away in the dark and go over the cliff, piling on one another and dying in heaps like rotten timber. Tayang is finished off the next morning, his son escapes with a handful of men and cannot hold even a temporary camp; the Naiman are broken on the southern slopes of the Altai, and the assorted tribes who had been with Jamukha submit. Tayang's mother is brought in and taunted with her remark about how the Mongols smell, and taken as a wife.

Inferred 1204: the close of the campaign dated in §193; the section itself gives no date. The text does not say where Jamukha went after leaving the Naiman, does not record any reply from Chinggis to his message, and does not say how Tayang was killed: only that he was finished off in the morning.

That same autumn the Merkit chief is beaten at a river head and his people taken on the Sa'ari Steppe, while he and two sons get away with nothing but their bodies. In the confusion a Merkit lord bringing his daughter Qulan to offer to the Qa'an is intercepted by Naya'a of the Ba'arin, who insists on escorting them and holds them three days and nights on the grounds that the roads are full of soldiers. Chinggis is furious at the delay, orders a searching inquiry and makes a standing rule of the case; Qulan testifies that Naya'a's warning was sound and offers her own body for inspection, and Naya'a swears in verse that fine women and fine horses of foreign peoples are always the Qa'an's and never his. The examination bears her out, both are believed, and Naya'a is marked for high responsibility.

Attested: the section dates itself to the autumn of the same Year of the Rat, 1204. Note on ids: the Čila'un here is Toqto'a's Merkit son, a different man from Sorqan-shira's son Chila'un, hence 'chilaun-merkit'. The text does not say what Qulan herself wanted, does not describe the examination, and does not say whether the three-day detention was innocent: only that the inquiry cleared Naya'a. The daughter's tribe is given by a name the translator's note flags as an error in the manuscript.

After breaking the Merkit, Chinggis hands Döregene, wife of Toqto'a Beki's eldest son Qudu, to Ögödei, and sends Sorqan Shira's son Chimbai against the Merkit fortified at Taiqal. Toqto'a escapes, joins the Naiman Güchülüg at the headwaters of the Irtysh, and is killed there by a stray arrow; his sons, unable to carry the body away, cut off his head and take that. The defeated Naiman and Merkit drown in numbers crossing the river, the survivors scattering west to the Qara Khitai gür khan and into the Qangli and Kipchak lands; angered that the already-submitted Merkit rebelled again, Chinggis abandons his plan to keep them as one people and disperses them to the last man.

Dated in the section itself by year-animal (spring, Year of the Ox). Translator's footnotes flag textual trouble here: the wing sent against Taiqal should read 'right' (west) though the text says 'left', and the pass is written Arai. The text does not say what became of Tögei, the other wife, nor where Toqto'a's severed head was taken or what was done with it. Döregene is handed over with no word of her own; only the transfer is recorded.

In the same Year of the Ox Chinggis fits out Sübe'etei with an iron cart and sends him after Toqto'a's fugitive sons, charging him in a long spoken commission: if they take wing he is to become a gerfalcon, if they burrow underground an iron rod, if they dive into the sea a dragnet. He binds the march with rules: spare the mounts before they thin, spare the provisions before they run out, no chasing game, no unlimited battues, bridles loosened so no one can gallop off, and makes breach of them a matter of law, with unknown offenders cut down on the spot. He closes by naming his reason: the fear the Three Merkit gave him as a boy when they circled Burqan Khaldun three times, and tells Sübe'etei that if he keeps the khan always in mind, far as if near, Heaven will protect him.

The section states its own date (Year of the Ox), continuing §198. Two short verse passages are embedded in the charge, one on rivers and mountains and losing heart, one on going to the furthest limit and the bottom of the deep, described here rather than quoted. The text does not say how long the pursuit took or how it ended; the outcome is not narrated in this section at all.

With the Naiman and Merkit destroyed Jamukha loses his people and is reduced to five companions; on Mount Tanglu, eating a wild sheep they have killed, he asks aloud what sort of men these are, and the five seize him and deliver him to Chinggis. Jamukha sends in a paired verse likening the captors to crows taking a mandarin duck and buzzards taking a wild duck, low men laying hands on their own lord, and asks his sworn brother whether he can really be deceived by such a thing. Chinggis has the five cut down in Jamukha's presence, then offers to take him back as companion, two shafts of one cart, naming the two services Jamukha did him: the warning at the Qalaqaljit Sands about what he had said to Ong Khan, and the message that he had frightened the Naiman with words alone.

The section gives no date; 1205 inferred only from its own opening back-reference to the destruction of the Naiman and Merkit, which §198 dates to the Year of the Ox. Jamukha's plea is verse and is described, not reproduced. The text does not name the five companions, does not say why Jamukha put his question to them before they seized him, and does not say whether he expected the answer he got.

Jamukha answers with a long spoken lament: their boyhood oath in the Qorqonaq Valley, food eaten together and words never to be forgotten, one blanket shared, and then someone coming between them, so that shame peeled the skin from his face and he could no longer look his sworn brother in the eye. He refuses the offer of companionship: the time for it is past, and to a man who now holds the world he would only be a louse in the collar, a thorn in the lapel. He asks to be killed quickly and without his blood being shed, promising that his bones laid in a high place will protect Chinggis's descendants forever. Chinggis, saying he has never heard that Jamukha plotted against his life, has him reminded of the Dalan Baljut war and the Jerene Gorge, and grants him the bloodless death and a proper burial.

Date inferred (1205) on the same anchor as §200; the section itself gives none. The text does not say where he was buried, does not identify who came between them, and leaves the line about 'many paternal grandmothers' unexplained. Chinggis's stated reasons shift between omens, propriety and Jamukha's rank without settling on one.

With all the felt-tent peoples brought in, they assemble at the source of the Onon in the Year of the Tiger, raise the nine-tailed white standard, and confer on Chinggis the title of khan; Muqali is made gui ong and Jebe is dispatched to run down Güchülüg of the Naiman. Declaring that he will repay those who stood with him while the nation was being built, Chinggis divides them into units of a thousand and names their commanders: a long roll opening with Father Mönglik, Bo'orchu, Muqali and Qorchi and running through the sons-in-law and the Onggirat, Ikires and Önggüt thousands. Excluding the People of the Forest, the count comes to ninety-five commanders of a thousand.

Dated by year-animal (Year of the Tiger). Register is 'list' because the roster of ninety-five names is the bulk of the section. The text gives no criteria for who was included, and explicitly leaves the People of the Forest outside the count.

Sent to summon Bo'orchu and Muqali, Shigi Qutuqu stops to press his own claim: raised at the khan's threshold from infancy, he says he never thought of anyone else and never put a foot wrong, so why should those two be rewarded above him. Chinggis calls him his sixth younger brother, gives him a share equal to the brothers' and pardon for nine offences, tells him to be his eyes and ears, and hands him the division of all the subject peoples between mother, khan, brothers and sons, along with judicial power over everyone: thefts curbed, lies discouraged, executions and punishments as deserved. Every decision on allotment and judgement is to be written into a blue-script register and made into a book that no descendant may alter; Shigi Qutuqu then asks instead for the people of the walled towns, and is told to settle his own portion himself.

No date in the section; 1206 inferred because it continues the reward distribution that follows the Year of the Tiger assembly of §202. The text does not describe what the blue writing physically was, and does not say whether Shigi Qutuqu actually received the walled-town people: only that he was told to decide for himself.

Chinggis turns to Father Mönglik and calls him a fortunate man born at the same time as himself and grown up alongside him, asking how many times he has helped and shielded him. He singles out one occasion: the night he spent in Mönglik's tent on his way to the betrothal feast to which Ong Khan and Senggüm had treacherously invited him, and says that but for Mönglik talking him out of going he would have walked straight into swirling water and blazing fire. For that alone, he says, no one down to the generations could forget him, and he assigns Mönglik the seat at the very head of one side of his tent, promising yearly and monthly consultation, gifts and favour to his descendants.

No date in the section; 1206 inferred from continuity with the reward distribution begun at the Year of the Tiger assembly in §202. The praise is built on one episode only: the warning that kept Chinggis away from the false betrothal feast. The text here gives no hint of Mönglik's later fall alongside his son Teb-Tenggeri; at this point he is honoured without qualification.

Chinggis reminds Bo'orchu of their first meeting: the eight light-bay geldings stolen, three days and nights of tracking, and a stranger who left his milking pail hidden in the grass, said nothing to his father, gave Temüjin a fresh horse and rode with him three more nights to lift the animals back out of the raiders' camp. The only son of Naqu Bayan, he had joined for nothing but a brave heart, and when Belgütei was later sent to fetch him he came at once. Chinggis names two more proofs: circling Burqan Khaldun with him when the Three Merkit came, and standing all night at Dalan Nemürges facing the Tatar with his felt cloak held over the sleeping khan in the pouring rain, moving one foot only once. Because Bo'orchu and Muqali pushed him toward what was right and away from what was wrong, Bo'orchu is seated above the rest, pardoned nine offences, and given the ten thousand of the right wing westward to the Altai.

No date; 1206 inferred from continuity with the §202 rewards. Everything recounted here is recollection of episodes narrated much earlier, not fresh narrative, and the section does not say when the Dalan Nemürges night took place.

To Muqali, Chinggis recalls camping by the Leafy Tree in the Qorqonaq Valley, the tree Qutula Khan used to dance around, where a heavenly sign spoken to Muqali was taken as a clear portent, and where, remembering Muqali's father Gü'ün Qo'a, he gave his word. On that pledge Muqali is now seated above the others and made gui ong over all the people, the title to pass down through his descendants. He is given command of the ten thousand of the left wing, extending eastward as far as the Qara'un Jidun mountains.

No date; 1206 inferred from continuity with the reward distribution of §§202-205. The heavenly sign is asserted but never described: the text does not say what the portent was, only that it was clear. The title gui ong is made hereditary here, one of the few grants in the chapter explicitly extended beyond the man himself.

Chinggis reminds Qorchi of the prophecy he once made about him, and of the years since when he shared the wet and the cold and stayed a good spirit at his side. Qorchi had asked, if the prophecy came true, for thirty women; since it has come true, he is told to look over the fine women and girls of the submitted peoples and take thirty. Beyond that, his three thousand Ba'arin are to be brought up to a full ten thousand with the Chinos of the Adarkin, the Tö'öles and the Telengüt, with Taqai and Ashiq alongside him; he is to camp freely along the Irtysh up to the People of the Forest and bring them to submission, and no forest people may act without his consent: those who do, he is told not to hesitate to kill.

No date; 1206 inferred from continuity with the reward distribution begun at the Year of the Tiger assembly. The thirty women are recorded flatly as a reward chosen out of the submitted peoples, with no word about the women themselves and no comment from the text. The section grants power of life and death over the People of the Forest but does not say whether Qorchi used it, or whether the forest tribes were in fact subdued.

Chinggis names Jürchedei's greatest service, at the Qalaqaljit Sands, when the outcome was in doubt, it was Quyildar who swore the oath but Jürchedei who carried out the task: breaking the Jirgin, Tübegen and Dongqayit and Quri Shilemün's thousand guards, and putting an arrow into Senggüm's cheek, which is how Heaven opened the way. His second service came after Baljuna: he scouted ahead, the Kereit were broken, the Naiman and Merkit lost heart, and when Jaqa Gambu, spared earlier for the sake of his two daughters, turned hostile again, Jürchedei lured him into a trap and finished him. As payment Chinggis gives him Ibaqa Beki, telling her he finds no fault in her but is honouring the principle that service must be repaid, and ordering that her rank among his wives never be abolished; he keeps a hundred of her two hundred dowry servants and the steward Ashiq Temür, and puts the four thousand Uru'ut under Jürchedei.

No date; 1206 inferred from continuity with the reward distribution that follows the Year of the Tiger assembly, though the deeds recounted belong to 1203. Ibaqa Beki is transferred as payment for a man's service: the text records Chinggis's speech to her and nothing of her answer, and he retains half her dowry servants and one of her stewards as a keepsake. The section does not say what Jaqa Gambu's second break consisted of, nor what became of his people the second time beyond their being plundered.

Chinggis praises Qubilai for bending the strong before him and names Qubilai, Jelme, Jebe and Sübe'etei his four hounds, describing in verse how they crushed stone and cleft water to reach wherever he pointed them. He recalls that with the four steeds, Bo'orchu, Muqali, Boroqul and Chila'un Ba'atur, at his side, and Jürchedei and Quyildar standing before him with their Uru'ut and Mangqut, his mind was wholly at rest, and he puts Qubilai in charge of all military affairs. Qubilai is also to share command of a thousand with the stubborn Bedü'ün, who was given none of his own and whose conduct is to be examined later.

“four hounds”

A reward speech with two long praise-verse passages embedded in it (the four hounds, the four steeds); registered speech because the section also contains plain orders. No date of any kind. The text does not say what Bedü'ün's stubbornness consisted of, and he is never mentioned again.

Chinggis praises Qunan of the Geniges with a wolf-and-crow simile: never stopping when the camp moves, never moving when it halts, and never wearing a different face for a stranger or a mortal enemy, and orders the commanders under Bo'orchu and Muqali and the chamberlains Dödei and Doqolqu to act only in agreement with Qunan and Kökö Chos. He makes Qunan, at the head of the Geniges, a commander of ten thousand under Jochi, and names Qunan, Kökö Chos, Degei and Old Üsün the four who never hid from him what they saw or heard.

Chinggis calls Jochi flatly 'the eldest of my sons'; the section carries no hint of the dispute over his birth that erupts later in the text. The four-truth-tellers formula recurs verbatim at §216. No date.

Chinggis recalls to Jelme that his father, old Jarchi'udai, came down from Burkhan Khaldun with his smith's bellows on his back and gave sable swaddling-clothes when Temüjin was born at Deli'ün Boldaq on the Onon, Jelme himself being then still in the cradle. Because Jelme was born at the same time, grew up alongside him and has since served as the slave of his threshold, Chinggis grants that he shall go unpunished for up to nine offences.

Reaches back to Temüjin's birth but supplies no year for it or for the reward, so no date is inferred. The praise is partly cast in verse; the dominant register is the reward speech.

Chinggis asks Tolun why he and his father should each hold a separate thousand, recalling that Tolun served as one of his father's two wings when they gathered people together and that this is why he was given the title of chamberlain. He tells Tolun to form his own thousand out of the people he acquired himself and made his patrimony, acting in consultation with Turuqan.

Tolun's father is not named in the section, only referred to. 'Gathered the people' is glossed by the translator as conquest. No date.

Chinggis tells the steward Önggür: son of Mönggetü Kiyan, who with his Changshi'ut and Baya'ut, and the three Toqura'ut and five Tarqut, formed a single camp for him: that he never strayed in the fog nor left his side in a fight and shared wet and cold with him, and asks what reward he wants. Önggür asks only to gather his Baya'ut kinsmen, now scattered among the various tribes; Chinggis grants it and gives him a thousand. He then charges Önggür and Boroqul, as the two stewards, to serve the food so that it falls short for no one on either the right or the left side, and shows them where to sit, by the great kumis pitchers, with Tolun and the others in the middle of the tent, facing north.

One of the few sections where the man rewarded names his own reward, and asks for the reassembly of scattered kin rather than rank. The section does not say why the Baya'ut were dispersed. No date.

Chinggis reminds Boroqul how his mother Hö'elün picked up four boys, Shigi Qutuqu, Boroqul, Güchü and Kököchü, off the bare ground in other people's abandoned camps and raised them as her own sons to be companions for her sons. He then recounts two rescues: when the Tatar were being killed to the last man against the measure of a cart linchpin, the survivor Qargil Shira came in begging, snatched the five-year-old Tolui and was pulling out his knife when Boroqul's wife Altani caught him by the plaits and forced the knife from his hand, and Jetei and Jelme ran up with their butchering axes and killed him, and when the three of them argued over whose merit it was, the chief merit was awarded to Altani. At the Qalaqaljit Sands Boroqul likewise sucked the clotting blood from Ögödei's neck wound through the night and brought him back alive riding double, and for saving two of his sons Chinggis grants him immunity for up to nine offences.

Framed throughout as Chinggis's speech, but the substance is two fully narrated episodes, so registered narrative. No date is given: the Tatar massacre and the Qalaqaljit battle are datable from elsewhere in the text, and the reward frame is later still, so a single year would misrepresent the section. The Kököchü named here is one of Hö'elün's foundlings, not Teb Tenggeri.

Chinggis says that his female offspring are to be rewarded too. What those rewards were does not survive: the text breaks off after the single sentence, and the translator marks a lacuna where ordinances about his daughters and granddaughters should stand.

The section is one sentence long. The translator's notes record a lacuna after it and observe that the same sentence is repeated at the close of §214 by scribal error. The silence about what the daughters received is the section's whole content and should not be filled. No date.

Chinggis again names Üsün, Qunan, Kökö Chos and Degei as the four who always reported what they saw and heard and what they understood. Since Mongol custom makes a senior man a beki, he raises Old Üsün, descended from the Ba'arin elder brother and senior to Chinggis himself, to that rank, to wear white, ride a white gelding, sit on a high seat and be waited upon, and to be consulted by him month by month and year by year.

The section states the beki custom and its outward marks but never says what the office actually does; the translator notes the title is obscure and was held by both men and women. 'Elder Brother the Ba'arin' is a lineage reference, not a named person. No date.

For the service of his sworn friend Quyildar, who was first to open his mouth and offer himself when battle came, careless of his own life, Chinggis orders that his descendants, to the offspring of their offspring, receive the bounty granted to orphans.

Very short. The section refers only to Quyildar's offer to lead the charge and does not restate that he later died of his wound; the bounty implies it. No place, no date.

Chinggis tells Narin To'oril that his father Chaqan Qo'a fought zealously in front of him at the battle of Dalan Baljut and was killed there by Jamukha, and grants him the orphans' bounty for that service. To'oril asks instead to be allowed to bring together his Negüs kinsmen, scattered among the various tribes, and Chinggis grants that he and his descendants shall command them.

Dalan Baljut is named but not dated here and the SH nowhere gives it a year-animal, so no year is inferred. The translator identifies this Chaqan Qo'a with the Chaqa'an U'a of the Ne'üs mentioned earlier. Second section in a row where the man rewarded asks for scattered kin rather than rank.

Chinggis reminds Sorqan Shira that when he was small and was seized by Targhutai Kiriltuq of the Tayichi'ut out of his kinsmen's jealousy, Sorqan Shira with his sons Chila'un and Chimbai and his daughter Qada'an hid him, kept him and finally let him go, a service he says he has held in mind by night and by day, though he adds the reproach that Sorqan Shira came over to him late. Asked what he wants, Sorqan Shira asks for the free use of the Merkit lands on the Selenge, and receives them together with darqan standing for his descendants: the right to carry a quiver, drink the ceremonial wine, and go unpunished for nine offences. Chila'un and Chimbai are told to bring their wants to him in person and never through an intermediary, and Sorqan Shira, Badai and Kishiliq, a retainer and two horse-herders by origin, are confirmed as freemen who keep whatever they take in raid or in the battue.

The section pointedly does not explain why Sorqan Shira delayed in coming over, and the reproach is left standing beside the reward. The passage on holding the memory by night and day is verse. No date.

Chinggis recalls how old Shirgü'etü and his sons Alaq and Naya'a laid hands on Targhutai Kiriltuq and set out with him, and how at the Qutuqul Bend Naya'a said they could not go on and make away with their own rightful lord, so they released him and came to offer their service instead: reasoning that men who seize their lord could never afterwards be trusted. Because Naya'a had held to that principle, Chinggis approved him and promised him an important charge, and he now sets Bo'orchu over the ten thousand of the right wing, Muqali, with the title gui ong, over the left, and Naya'a over the centre.

The section says nothing about what became of Targhutai after he was let go; the SH simply drops him. The episode itself was told earlier in the text; here it is recalled as the ground for an appointment. The three ten-thousand commands are stated without any date, and the gui ong title is given here as part of the 1206 settlement without a year attached.

Chinggis orders that Jebe and Sübe'etei shall each command a thousand made up of as many of the people as they themselves acquired and constituted as their own patrimony.

A single sentence. The section says nothing about who those people were or how they were acquired, and gives the two men who will later lead the western raid no special standing here. No date.

Chinggis has Degei the shepherd gather together the unregistered households and puts him in charge of them as a thousand.

Told in the third person rather than as a quoted order, hence narrative. The text does not explain what made a household unregistered. No date.

Because Güchügür the carpenter has too few subjects to make up a thousand, Chinggis orders men collected for him from here and there. Since Mulqalqu of the Jadaran has been a perfect companion to him, the two are to hold the thousand jointly and consult one another.

Mulqalqu is Jadaran, Jamukha's own clan, and is placed in joint command without comment. No date.

Chinggis makes commanders of a thousand of those who built the state with him and suffered with him, organizes the people into tens, hundreds, thousands and ten thousands with commanders at each level, and rewards and commends those who deserve it. He then orders the guard enlarged: where he once had eighty nightguards and seventy dayguards, now that Heaven has raised his power and brought the whole people under his sole rein, nightguards, quiverbearers and dayguards are to be recruited from the various thousands up to a full ten thousand: sons of commanders and of ordinary men alike, chosen as able and of good appearance, each bringing ten, five or three companions and a younger brother according to his father's rank, all levied and mounted by the units they came from, over and above any share of goods they already hold. Whoever transgresses the order is punishable; anyone who shirks the duty as too hard is to be replaced and sent far away out of sight; and anyone who comes wanting to learn service at his side is not to be hindered.

Year inferred, not attested: the section names no year-animal, but it explicitly grounds the order in having brought the entire people under his sole rule, the unification proclaimed at the quriltai, which the tradition and scholarship place in 1206. The neighbouring reward sections carry no such marker and are left undated.

Carrying out the recruitment order, the eighty nightguards of before are brought up to eight hundred and then, on a further word, to a full thousand, and no one wanting to enrol among them is to be hindered; Yeke Ne'ürin is made their commander. The four hundred quiverbearers are chosen anew under Yisün Te'e, son of Jelme, acting in consultation with Bügidei son of Tüge. Yisün Te'e, Bügidei, Horqudaq and Lablaqa each head a company of quiverbearers that joins the dayguard companies on duty, and Yisün Te'e is to bring the quiverbearers up to a full thousand as overall commander.

The translator notes that the four hundred quiverbearers have not been mentioned before, though their duties were described earlier. Jelme's son is placed at the head of the quiverbearers without any comment on the inheritance of office. No date.

Chinggis brings the dayguards formerly enrolled under Ögele Cherbi up to a full thousand and leaves them to him, then names seven more commanders of a thousand dayguards each: Buqa of Muqali's family, Alchidai of Ilügei's family, Dödei Cherbi, Doqolqu Cherbi, Chanai of Jürchedei's family, Aqutai of Alchi's family, and Arqai Qasar: whose thousand are picked braves, dayguards in the many days of peace and men who stand in front of him on the day of battle. With eight thousand dayguards and two thousand nightguards and quiverbearers, the guard comes to ten thousand, and he orders that it be strengthened and become the main body of the army.

An enumeration of eight commands, most identified by the family they come from rather than by clan, so the guard is built out of the households of the great commanders. The arithmetic is stated in the text itself. No date.

Chinggis appoints Buqa, Alchidai, Dödei Cherbi and Doqolqu Cherbi as elders of the four dayguard companies on roster, each to muster his own men and serve three days and nights before being relieved. A guard who misses his turn takes three strokes of the rod, seven for a second lapse, and thirty-seven and banishment out of sight for a third if he is not sick and has not consulted his commanders; the elders must proclaim the order to the guards every third turn or be liable themselves. He also forbids the elders to reprimand or strike guards on the ground of seniority alone: breaches are to be reported to him for execution or beating, and an elder who lays hands on a guard who is his equal will be repaid stroke for stroke and fist for fist.

Pure ordinance, with graded penalties stated numerically. Notable that the ruler reserves punishment to himself and protects the ordinary guard against his own officers. No date, no place, no narrative.

Chinggis rules that his guards stand above the commanders of a thousand outside the guard, and that the guards' own attendants stand above outside commanders of a hundred and of ten. If an outside thousand-commander treats himself as their equal and quarrels with them, it is the thousand-commander who will be punished.

Two sentences of pure precedence law; nobody is named. This is the section that makes the household guard structurally superior to the field army. No date.

Chinggis lays down the daily handover: quiverbearers, dayguards and stewards keep their posts by day, and at sunset turn over their quivers, bowls and vessels to the nightguards and go outside to sleep, returning to their charges only after he has eaten his morning soup. The nightguards lie all round the Palace, arrest anyone crossing behind or in front of it after dark and question him in the morning, exchange passes at the change of watch, and are to cut down anyone forcing the door at night; a messenger arriving in the dark must deliver his message standing with a nightguard at the rear of the tent. No one may sit above the nightguards, walk past them or between them, enter without their leave, or ask their number, the last costs the offender the gelding he rode that day with saddle and bridle and the clothes off his back, and the chapter ends by recalling that Eljigedei, trustworthy though he was, was arrested for walking past them one evening.

Stated as law rather than narrated as event, so registered speech, but it closes with a single-line anecdote about Eljigedei that reads as a wry proof of the rule. The section gives no date and no place beyond the Palace itself.

In a long praise-verse Chinggis credits the nightguards with winning him the throne, through cloudy and starry nights, blizzard and pouring rain they lay in a ring around his tent so that he slept unafraid, and rose the instant an enemy quiver rattled. He then fixes titles in plain prose: elder nightguards, the great dayguards under Ögöle Cherbi, Arqai's elder braves, and the great quiverbearers under Yisün Te'e and Bügidei.

No date of any kind; the section is an ordinance framed as verse. The verse is not reproduced here: it runs through a series of parallel night-images (cloudy, starry, snowstorm, rain, enemy attack) each ending in the claim that the guards won him the throne. Placed in beat 2 because it belongs to the institutional acts of the 1206 quriltai, though the section itself gives no year.

Chinggis speaks of the ten thousand personal guards drawn from the ninety-five thousand, and charges the sons and later descendants who will sit on his throne to treat the corps as a keepsake from him and never give them grounds for discontent. He ends by asking whether such men should not be reckoned his auspicious protecting spirits.

Undated. The section is a single quoted decree with no narrative frame at all; it does not say who the ten thousand were, only how they were selected. Beat 2 by association with the 1206 reorganisation, not by any date in the text.

A long ordinance listing what the nightguards run: the palace women-servants and household slaves, the camel- and cow-herds, the tent-carts, the standards, drums and spears, the vessels, and all the ruler's food and drink, for which they answer if anything falls short. Quiverbearers may not distribute food without the supervising nightguards' leave, and must serve the nightguards first. Nightguards also regulate who enters the tent, keep the door, watch the great kumis jars, ride ahead to pitch the palace tent, and split exactly in half when the ruler hunts.

Undated, and entirely in the ruler's voice: a chain of 'and he said' clauses with no action. The text says nothing about the size of the nightguard or how the duties rotated.

Chinggis forbids the nightguards to take the field unless he goes himself, and makes the troop-commanders liable to punishment if jealousy leads them to send the guards out. He answers the grumbling directly: these are the men who watch over his life at night and manage the palace whether it moves or stands, and they already carry duties enough and quite distinct.

Undated. Note the section quotes the objection ('why are the nightguards not sent on campaign?') as a real complaint, but does not say who made it or whether anyone was in fact punished.

Some nightguards are to decide judicial cases alongside Shigi Qutuqu, some to keep and issue quivers, bows, armour and weapons and to load the hunting nets on geldings, some to hand out silk with the chamberlains. Named quiverbearer and dayguard companies are then posted to the western and eastern sides of the palace, Arqai's braves to the south, and the nightguards close by on the east. Dödei Cherbi is fixed permanently at the rear with charge of all dayguards, household slaves and herders: a posting the text marks with a curt two-line jibe about eating scraps and burning dried dung.

Undated. 'Right', 'left', 'front' and 'rear' are compass terms, the translator glosses them as west, east, south and north, so the posting is a map of the camp, not a hierarchy. The closing two lines about leftovers and dung fires are verse, but the section as a whole is an appointment list.

Qubilai Noyan is sent against the Qarluq. Their ruler Arslan Khan submits without a fight, is brought back and made to do homage, and Chinggis rewards the lack of resistance by saying he will give him a daughter in marriage.

Four sentences, no year, no place named, no fighting described. Scholarship places the Qarluq submission around 1211, but the section itself gives nothing, so no year is recorded here. Beat null: it falls in the gap between the 1206 quriltai and the Jin war.

Sübe'etei, equipped with the iron-fitted cart mentioned earlier, pursues the surviving Merkit under Toqto'a's sons Qutu and Chila'un, overtakes them at the Chui river, destroys them and returns.

A single sentence in the original; no year, no account of the battle, no word on what happened to the survivors. The Chila'un here is a son of Toqto'a of the Merkit, NOT the canonical chilaun (Sorqan-shira's son): hence the distinct id. Beat null: the campaign is usually placed c.1216-1219, before the 1219 Khwarezm window.

Jebe, hunting Küchlüg of the Naiman, catches him at a place the text calls Sariq Qun, destroys him and returns.

Two lines. The text gives no year, no route, nothing of Küchlüg's years in Qara Khitai, and no manner of death. The translator notes Sariq Qun ('Yellow Cliff') may be an error for Sariq Qol. Küchlüg's death is conventionally 1218, i.e. before beat 4's 1219 start, so beat left null.

The Uighur idiqut sends the envoys Atkiraq and Darbai with a petition built on two similes, hearing Chinggis's fame was like seeing the sun when clouds part, like reaching river water when the ice melts, and asks for no more than a ring from the golden belt or a thread from the crimson coat, offering to become a fifth son. Chinggis accepts, promises a daughter, and tells him to come bringing gold, silver, pearls, brocades, damasks and silks. The idiqut comes with the treasure, does homage, and is given Al Altun.

No date; the Uighur submission is usually put c.1209 but the section says nothing. The petition's four-line simile is verse embedded in a narrative frame, so register stays narrative. The text does not mention the Qara Khitai overlordship the idiqut was throwing off: a large silence.

In the Year of the Hare, Jochi takes the right wing against the forest peoples with Buqa guiding; Quduqa Beki of the Oyirat submits ahead of his Tümen and leads him to them at the Shiqshit, after which a long roll of forest peoples comes under submission and the Kirghiz leaders arrive with white gerfalcons, white geldings and black sables. Jochi returns bringing their commanders of thousands and ten thousands to do homage. Chinggis rewards Quduqa Beki by marrying Chechevigen and Jochi's daughter Qoluiqan into his family, gives Alaqa Beki to the Önggüt ruler, and praises Jochi for taking the forest peoples on his very first campaign without a man or a gelding hurt, granting him the people he subdued.

The only dated section in the chapter: the text names the Year of the Hare, and the translator supplies 1207: hence 'attested'. No fighting is described anywhere; the whole northern conquest is submission, guides and gifts. Beat null because 1207 falls after beat 2's 1206 endpoint and well before beat 3.

Boro'ul is sent against the Qori Tumat, ruled since Daiduqul Soqor's death by his widow Botoqui Tarqun; riding ahead of the army with only two men, he is ambushed at dusk on a forest trail and killed. Chinggis is enraged and means to go in person until Bo'orchu and Muqali plead him out of it, and Dörbei Doqshin of the Dörbet is sent instead. Dörbei feints along the watched passes, has his men cut a road with axes and saws along a game trail, and comes down on the feasting Tumat as though falling through their smoke-hole.

No year given; the Tumat campaign is usually placed c.1217, but the text supplies nothing, so year_estimate is null. The 'red bull' whose trodden paths Dörbei follows is glossed by the translator as probably a large deer or elk. The falling-through-the-smoke-hole image is a recurring formula for surprise attack (also §§105, 109), not a description of what happened.

The section doubles back to explain that Qorchi and Quduqa Beki were already captives of Botoqui Tarqun: Qorchi had gone to take thirty wives from among the Tumat girls on Chinggis's word, and the newly submitted Tumat rebelled and seized him. Quduqa Beki, sent after him because he understood the ways of forest people, was seized as well. After the conquest a hundred Tumat are given to Boro'ul's family for his death, Qorchi takes his thirty girls, and Botoqui Tarqun herself is handed over to Quduqa Beki.

Undated, and told out of sequence: it explains a cause of the §240 revolt after the fact. The text does not say how the two captives were released, nor anything about what the thirty women or Botoqui Tarqun thought of their disposal; the section simply records the transfers. The reward of thirty wives is the fulfilment of a promise made to Qorchi much earlier in the work.

Chinggis divides the subject people, saying his mother laboured hardest at gathering them: ten thousand to her and Otchigin together, which she thinks too few and does not say so; then nine thousand to Jochi, eight to Cha'adai, five each to Ögödei and Tolui, four to Qasar, two to Alchidai, fifteen hundred to Belgütei. He then declares he will blot his uncle Daritai from his sight for having gone over to the Kereit. Bo'orchu, Muqali and Shigi Qutuqu argue him down with the image of a man putting out his own hearth-fire and pulling down his own tent, and, thinking of his late father, he relents, snuffling as though smoke were in his nose.

Undated; conventionally tied to the 1206-07 settlement, so beat 2, but the section itself gives no year. The text does not say what happened to Daritai afterwards, nor why Ögödei and Tolui receive less than Cha'adai.

A roster of the commanders attached to each share: four for the ten thousand of the mother and Otchigin, three each for Jochi and Cha'adai, and one or two men apiece for Ögödei, Tolui, Qasar and Alchidai. One aside interrupts the list, because Cha'adai is headstrong and by nature a stickler, Köke Chos is to sit beside him morning and evening and tell him what he thinks.

Undated appointment list continuing §242, hence beat 2 by association only. The Kököchü here is a commander of the mother's ten thousand and is a different man from Kököchü Teb Tenggeri of §244; the Jebke assigned to Qasar reappears fleeing in §244. The translator notes several of these names appear elsewhere in the work in slightly different forms.

Mönglik's seven Qongqotan sons, among them the shaman Teb Tenggeri, gang up and beat Qasar; Chinggis, angry over something else, taunts his brother instead of helping him, and then, told by Teb Tenggeri of a heavenly sign that the nation may fall either to Temüjin or to Qasar, rides out that same night to seize him. Warned by Güchü and Kököchü, Hö'elün drives through the dark behind a white camel, arrives at sunrise to find Qasar's sleeves bound and his hat and belt taken, frees him herself, and sits cross-legged with both breasts laid over her knees to remind her sons which of them drained which, Temüjin with the gift of mind, Qasar with the bow, and to ask whether, now the enemy is destroyed, he can no longer bear the sight of his brother. Chinggis admits shame and fear and withdraws, but quietly cuts Qasar's people to fourteen hundred; the discovery sends his mother into swift decline, and Jebke of the Jalair flees to the Barqujin lowland.

No year; the Teb Tenggeri affair is usually placed c.1210, but nothing in the section dates it, so beat and year are both left empty. The text does not say what the 'other matters' were that had angered Chinggis, does not say whether he believed the prophecy, and never states outright that the seizure of Qasar's people caused his mother's death: only that learning of it made her decline.

The people of nine tongues gather to Teb Tenggeri, Temüge Otchigin's subjects among them; his envoy Soqor is beaten and sent home on foot carrying his own saddle, and when Otchigin comes in person the seven brothers surround him and make him kneel behind the shaman in apology. Weeping before Chinggis at dawn, he is answered by Börte, who sits up covering herself and warns that the Qongqotan are covertly cutting down the brothers who stand like cypress and pine, then asks in verse who will be left to govern a people like tangled hemp and like a flock of birds when his body falls like an old tree or a pillar-stone, while her small sons are still growing. Chinggis leaves it to Otchigin, whose three waiting strongmen break Teb Tenggeri's back outside the tent and dump him by the carts; Mönglik and his six surviving sons close round the fire until Chinggis, frightened, walks out to his guards, and he then has a grey tent set over the body and orders camp struck.

Undated. Börte's speech is verse embedded in a narrative scene; it is not reproduced here, only described. Note what the text withholds: Chinggis never orders the killing, he only says the decision is Otchigin's, and he is explicitly frightened when Mönglik's sons ring the fire: the section shows the khan momentarily outmatched inside his own tent.

What follows is told as a wonder: the sealed tent over Teb Tenggeri, its smoke-hole covered and door blocked and watched, is said to have let him out bodily through the smoke-hole on the third evening at dusk, and the investigation to have confirmed it really was him. Chinggis reads this as Heaven's verdict: the shaman had laid hands on his brothers and spread baseless slander to divide them, so Heaven withdrew its love and took life and body together. He then rounds on Mönglik, saying that unrestrained sons who came to think themselves his equals have cost him this one and that he would otherwise have dealt with him as with Jamukha, Altan and Quchar; but refusing to unsay in the morning what he pledged before, he lets the anger go and restores favour, and with the shaman gone the Qongqotan's pride collapses.

Marked legendary, not narrative: the load-bearing event is a miracle, the corpse rising out through the smoke-hole of a sealed and guarded tent, and the summary reports it as what was told and 'established', never as event. The second half is a rebuke speech, but the theological reading of the disappearance governs the whole section. Undated. The text never says the body was found or buried, and never explains how a broken-backed corpse left the tent; it lets the claim stand and moves straight to Heaven's judgement.

In the Year of the Sheep (1211) Chinggis Khan opens the war on the Kitat (Jin), taking Fu-chou and Söndiivu and sending Jebe and Güyigünek Ba'atur ahead as vanguard. Finding the Chabchiyal defile held, Jebe turns back to draw the defenders out, then wheels on them; the main army breaks the Qara Kitat and Jurchen Juyin troops, forces the pass, and Chinggis camps north of Zhongdu and disperses columns against the towns. Jebe cannot storm Dungchang, so he withdraws six days' march, then rides back through the night with each man leading a spare horse and takes the city unprepared.

The section names the Year of the Sheep, so the date is attested. It does not say how long the campaign lasted, does not name the Jin ruler, and gives no numbers beyond the recurring image of the slain piled like rotten logs. North-Chinese place names are the translator's transcriptions (Vuǰiu = Fu-chou, the northernmost Jin outpost; J̌ungdu = Peking); footnote markers are inlined in the extracted text.

With Zhongdu under siege, the Jin minister Ongging Chingsang counsels his ruler that Heaven's favour may be shifting: the élite Qara Kitat and Jurchen troops are destroyed, Chabchiyal is lost, and an army rallied against its will would either break or turn on its masters. Better, he argues, to submit now, send a princess, gold, silver and satin, and note that the Mongols and their geldings sicken in this country, and take a different counsel after they leave. The Altan Qan agrees; Chinggis accepts the submission, recalls the columns attacking the towns and withdraws, his men loading as much silk and treasure as their horses can carry and lashing it down with bands of heavy silk.

The section gives no date of its own; §250 retrospectively folds it into the Year of the Sheep campaign, but since this section names no year and no datable event, year_estimate is left null. The princess is never named: the translator's footnote observes that 'Gungǰu' is not a name but Chinese kung-chu, 'princess'. The Altan Qan's own name is withheld here (supplied as Aqutai in §§250-251). Register is 'speech' because the minister's counsel occupies most of the section.

Burqan Qan of the Qashin submits, offers his daughter Chaqa, and pledges to serve as Chinggis Khan's right wing. His petition is mostly versified: his people live in permanent camps and towns with pounded-earth walls, so they cannot ride in swift campaigns or fight running battles; instead they will bring camels reared in the tall feather-grass, weave cloth and satin, and train falcons and send the best. He keeps his word, levying so many camels from the Tangut that no more can be driven.

No date in the section, so year_estimate is null; the Secret History attaches the Tangut submission to the same campaign as the Jin war, which historians date separately, but nothing in the text supports a year here. Register 'verse' because the core of the section is Burqan Qan's versified petition, described rather than reproduced. 'Right wing' means west, per the translator's note. The id burqan-khan is used for the Tangut ruler named more fully as Iluqu Burqan in §250.

A short closing summary of the campaign: Chinggis Khan received the submission of the Kitat Altan Qan, here named Aqutai, and took a great quantity of satin; he also received the submission of Iluqu Burqan of the Qashin and took a great number of camels. He then came home from the Year of the Sheep (1211) campaign and camped on the Sa'ari Steppe.

The section itself names the Year of the Sheep, so 1211 is attested, but this one dated sentence is what the text uses to cover several years of separate fighting against the Jin and the Tangut. Both rulers are given personal names only here (Aqutai; Iluqu Burqan); the ids altan-khan and burqan-khan are kept stable across §§248-256.

Because envoys under Jubqan, sent to J̌au Gon to seek allegiance, had been blocked by the Jin, Chinggis Khan marches again in the Year of the Dog (1214), asking how a people who had already submitted could obstruct his envoys. He moves on the Tongguan Pass and sends Jebe by Chabchiyal; the Jin commanders Ile, Qada and Höbögetür hold the defile with the Red Coats in front, crying that the soil is theirs, until Tolui and Chügü Gürigen come up and charge their flanks, breaking them completely. The Altan Qan abandons Zhongdu for the city of Namging, his surviving troops so starved that they eat one another; Tolui and Chügü Gürigen are greatly favoured for their part.

Year of the Dog is named in the text, so 1214 is attested. The text does not explain who J̌au Gon is: the id 'song' reflects the usual identification with the Sung court and is not confirmed by the section. Namging is the Jin southern capital, Kaifeng. Čügü Gürigen is identified by the translator with the Čigü Güregen of §202, an imperial son-in-law. The cannibalism is stated flatly, with no comment.

Chinggis Khan camps at Qosivu and then on the Yellow Plain outside Zhongdu, and Jebe, having smashed the Chabchiyal gate and routed its garrison, rejoins him. Qada, left behind by the fleeing Altan Qan as governor of Zhongdu, comes out to meet the three men sent to inventory the city's treasure, the steward Önggür, Arqai Qasar and Shigi Qutuqu, carrying gold-embroidered satins as a gift. Shigi Qutuqu refuses them on the grounds that the city and everything in it now belong to the Khan and Qada is handing over stolen goods behind his back; the other two accept, and when the story comes out the Khan rebukes them sharply and rewards Shigi Qutuqu, saying he will be the eyes he sees with and the ears he hears with.

No date is given for the fall of Zhongdu, so year_estimate is null. Šira Ke'er is glossed by the translator as 'the Yellow Plain', the open loess country north of Peking, not a town; liušiu is a Chinese term for a temporary vicegerent. The Khan's reward line is laid out as a verse couplet in the translation, so it is described rather than quoted and phrase is left empty.

From Namging the Altan Qan submits in person and sends his son Tenggeri with a hundred companions to serve Chinggis Khan as a dayguard and hostage. Taking the submission as settled, the Khan withdraws through Chabchiyal, sending Qasar with the left-wing troops along the sea coast: subdue the city of Beiging, then cross the country of Vuqanu of the Jurchen, attacking him if he resists, passing through his border towns if he submits, and come back up the Ula, the Na'u and the Ta'ur to rejoin the main camp. Jürchedei, Alchi and Tolun Cherbi go with him, and Qasar carries out the whole sweep and returns to the base camp.

No date. The hostage prince is called Tenggeri: unconnected to Teb-Tenggeri of the earlier chapters, and given an id only because the text names him. The translator queries Beiging (possibly Buiging); the rivers Ula, Na'u and Ta'ur trace Qasar's arc through Manchuria back to the homeland. 'Left wing' means east. The text records the whole sweep as accomplished in a single sentence, with no fighting detail.

When a hundred envoys under Uquna are seized and killed by the Sarta'ul, Chinggis Khan asks how his golden halter can be broken by them and declares he will march to requite the killing. Before he goes, Yisüi Qatun puts to him in verse the question no one else has raised: when his body falls like an old tree, to whom will he leave a people tangled like hemp, and which of his four sons will he name?, and he answers that though she is only a woman her words are more right than right, and that he had been living as if death would never catch him. Told to speak, Jochi is cut off by Cha'adai calling him the bastard offspring of the Merkit; the two grip each other by the collar until Bo'orchu and Muqali pull them apart, and Kökö Chos answers with a long verse: their mother was carried off at a time when the sky turned and men met weapons in hand, not by her wish, and both brothers came from one womb: followed by an account of the Khan's years of danger and their mother's hardship, going hungry so they could eat.

“golden halter”

No date: the section sits immediately before the Hare year of §257, but nothing here dates it, so year_estimate is null. Register 'verse': the bulk of the section is two long versified speeches (Yisüi's counsel and Kökö Chos's reply), described rather than reproduced. Börte is never named, Kökö Chos says only 'your mother' and 'our august Qatun', so no id is coined for her; the Khwarezmian ruler is likewise unnamed. 'Golden halter' is the text's own image for the Khan's bond of sovereignty over other rulers, glossed by the translator.

Rebuked by his father, Cha'adai backs down with a proverb about game killed only with the mouth, admits that he and Jochi are the two eldest and will serve together, and proposes Ögödei, the steady one, as the successor. Jochi agrees. The Khan asks why the two of them need be yoked together at all: the earth is wide and its waters many, and each will be given his own grazing grounds and separated, and he reminds them of Altan and Quchar, who pledged their word and broke it, and whose offspring will be settled among them as a warning. Ögödei accepts warily, worrying aloud about descendants so worthless that no ox would eat them wrapped in grass; Tolui promises to be at his brother's side, and the Khan orders the lines of Qasar, Alchidai, Otchigin and Belgütei each to appoint one of their own to govern.

No date. Register 'speech': the section is almost entirely direct discourse, with proverbs and short verse runs embedded inside the speeches rather than standing as poetry. Otčigin here is Temüge Otčigin (id temuge); Alčidai is the line of Qačhi'un. The 'teachings of the hat' is glossed by the translator as instruction in how to be a qan.

Setting out for the west, Chinggis Khan sends to the Tangut Burqan Qan to make good his promise to serve as the right wing, since the Sarta'ul have broken the golden halter. Before the ruler can answer, Asha Gambu cuts in with a taunt, if the Khan's forces cannot subdue people on their own, why did he go so far as to become khan?, sends no auxiliaries, and returns the envoys with contempt. Chinggis says the insult would be worth turning aside for, but since he is already moving against another people he lets it stand: if Eternal Heaven protects him, he will settle it when he comes back pulling in his golden reins.

No date; the section plants the grievance that returns as the Tangut war at the end of Chinggis's life, but nothing here dates it. The text is careful that the refusal is Aša Gambu's and not the ruler's: the Burqan is silent while his minister forestalls him. Second appearance in the chapter of the 'golden halter' image from §254.

In the Year of the Hare (1219) Chinggis Khan crosses the Alai against the Sarta'ul, taking Qulan Qatun with him from among the ladies and leaving Otchigin Noyan over the main base camp. Jebe leads, backed by Sübe'etei and then Toquchar, all three ordered to swing wide, come out beyond the Sultan and strike from that side. Jebe and Sübe'etei pass Qan Melik's cities untouched, but Toquchar attacks his border towns and plunders his peasants, driving Qan Melik into revolt and into alliance with Jalal al-Din; the two beat Shigi Qutuqu's vanguard and press almost to the Khan before the three commanders come in behind them and destroy them, keeping them from reaching Bukhara, Samarkand or Otrar. The rout ends at the Shin (Indus), where many Sarta'ul throw themselves in and drown; Chinggis camps on the Baru'an plain, sends Bala of the Jalayir after Jalal al-Din, praises Jebe by recalling the Tayichi'ud name he came with, and, though he says the law calls for execution, spares Toquchar and strips him of his command.

Year of the Hare is named, so 1219 is attested. 'Crossing the Alai' is Arai in the manuscript; the translator cross-refers to §198, where the range crossed is the Altai, so the id altai-mountains carries that reading and is not certain. Šin is the Indus; Buqar, Semisgab and Udarar are Bukhara, Samarkand and Otrar, spelled inconsistently across §§257-259.

Turning back from the Baru'an plain, Chinggis Khan sends his three sons Jochi, Cha'adai and Ögödei across the Amui with the right-wing troops to camp at Ürünggeči, sends Tolui against Iru, Isebür and many other towns, and himself encamps at Udirar. The three sons send word that their troops are fully assembled and they have reached Ürünggeči, and ask whose word among them they should act on; the Khan replies that they are to act on Ögödei's.

No date. Ürünggeči (Örünggeči in §260) is Gurganj/Urgench; Udirar here, Udarar in §257 and Udurar in §259 are all Otrar. Iru and Isebür are Khorasanian cities, commonly identified with Herat and Nishapur, but the text does not identify them, so the ids keep the transcribed forms. The sons' question and the one-line answer quietly confirm the decision of §255 in the field.

Having brought Udurar to submission, Chinggis Khan moves on to camp at Semisgab and then at Buqar. There he waits for Bala and passes the summer on the ridge of Altan Qorqan, in what had been the Sultan's summer quarters, sending word to Tolui that the weather has turned warm, the other troops are to make camp, and he is to come and join him. The message finds Tolui with Iru, Isebür and other cities taken, Sisten destroyed and Chuqcheren in the middle of being destroyed; he finishes with Chuqcheren, then breaks camp and rejoins his father.

No date; only a season ('the weather has become warm'), which is not a datable marker. The 'Soltan' whose old summer quarters the Khan occupies is unnamed in the text, the translator identifies him with Muhammad Shah, so no person id is coined for him. Tolui's Khorasan campaign is given as a bare list of cities taken and destroyed, with no siege detail and no numbers.

Jochi, Cha'adai and Ögödei take Örünggeči and divide its people among the three of them, setting nothing aside for their father; when they come to camp he shuts them out of his presence for three days. Bo'orchu, Muqali and Shigi Qutuqu petition that the city and the sons who took it alike belong to him, that the whole army is rejoicing at the Sarta'ul's humbling, and that the young men have understood their mistake, so he admits them, then rebukes them with old sayings until they can barely stand and cannot wipe the sweat from their faces. Three quiverbearers, Qongqai, Qongtaqar and Chormaqan, intercede in turn, comparing the sons to grey falcons only just in training, and offering to be loosed like Tibetan dogs against the Qalibai Soltan of the Baqtat in the west instead; the Khan's anger cools, he keeps the first two beside him and sends Chormaqan on that campaign.

No date. The offence is not the sack but the failure to set aside the Khan's share: the text is precise about that. Two intercessions in sequence get the sons readmitted, and the second deflects the Khan's anger by proposing a new war: this is the text's first mention of Baghdad ('the Qalibai Soltan of the Baqtat', the Caliph), and the commission it records was carried out long after Chinggis's death. Šigi Quduqu here is the Šigi Qutuqu of §§135 and 252.

A single sentence recording another dispatch: Dörbei Doqshin of the Dörbet is sent against Aru and Maru and against the city of Abtu of the Madasari people, in the country lying between the Hindus and the people of Baghdad. Nothing is said of the outcome.

One sentence, no date, no result. The translator marks 'Aru' as an error for Iru (cf. §§258-259), which is why the place id is iru; Maru is usually taken to be Merv, but the text does not gloss it, so the id keeps the transcribed form. Madasari and Abtu are otherwise unidentified here.

A bare commission, given as a list: Sübe'etei Ba'atur is sent northwards to campaign as far as the lands of eleven named peoples, Qanglin, Kibcha'ut, Bajigit, Orusut, Majarat, Asut, Sasut, Serkesüt, Keshimir, Bolar and Kerel, crossing the deep rivers Idil and Jayaq, and on as far as the city of Kiwa Menkermen.

Register 'list': the section is an enumeration, not a narrative. No date, no engagements and no outcome: the western campaign this commission covers is not described here. The identifications are conventional and partly debated: Idil and Jayaq are the Volga and the Ural, Kiwa Menkermen is Kiev, Orusut the Rus, Majarat the Magyars, Bajigit the Bashkirs, Asut the As/Alans, Sasut usually read as Saxons, Serkesüt Circassians, and Bolar and Kerel usually read as Bulgars or Poles and the Hungarian king; the ids reflect those readings, not certainty.

With the conquest of the Sarta'ul complete, Chinggis Khan orders resident commissioners set over the various cities. A father and son of the Qurumshi, Yalawachi and Masqut, come from Ürünggeči and explain to him how cities are run under their own laws and customs; once he understands, he puts the son in charge, together with the commissioners, of Buqar, Semisgen, Ürünggeči, Udan, Kisqar, Uriyang, Güsen Daril and other towns. The father he brings back with him and sets over Zhungdu of the Kitat: both chosen, the text says plainly, because they were adept in the law and custom of cities.

No date. This is where daruqačin, resident commissioners, enter the text, and the reason given for the appointments is explicit: the Mongols did not know the laws and customs of cities and these two did. Udan and Kisqar are Khotan and Kashgar; Semisgen is Samarkand; the father and son are Mahmud Yalavach and Mas'ud Beg, but the ids keep the text's forms. The text does not say what the commissioners actually did.

Chinggis Khan spent seven years in the country of the Sarta'ul. While he was waiting for Bala of the Jalayir, Bala had crossed the Shin and pursued Jalal al-Din and Qan Melik into the country of the Hindus, lost their track, searched as far as the middle of that country, failed to find them and turned back: plundering the border people on his way home and bringing back many camels and many gelded billy-goats. The Khan then went home, summering on the Erdish, and in the Year of the Hen (1225), the seventh year of the campaign, settled at his palace-camps in the Black Forest on the Tuul.

The Year of the Hen is named, so 1225 is attested; the translator notes that the text's 'autumn' should be read as 'spring'. 'Seven years' is the text's own count of the campaign. The chapter ends on a failure honestly reported, Bala simply cannot find the men he was sent after and comes home with livestock instead, and on a homecoming to the Black Forest on the Tuul, the camp associated with Toghrul in the earlier chapters. Ordos, the 'palaces', are royal encampments, not buildings.

Chinggis counts his troops afresh and rides against the Tangut in the autumn of the Dog year, taking Yisüi Qatun with him. A fall from his horse during a winter kulan hunt leaves him burning with fever; his commanders argue that walled towns and fixed camps cannot run away and urge a withdrawal, but he refuses to be seen as having lost heart and sends envoys instead, demanding that Burqan answer for the troops he promised and never sent. When Aša Gambu answers with a taunt, the sick khan calls Eternal Heaven to judge between them, marches on Alašai, defeats him and scatters his people.

The year-animal is given in the text (autumn, Year of the Dog), so attested. The section contains a short chanted passage on the Tangut towns and camps and a repeated couplet about tents of thin wool and laden camels, described rather than quoted. The text does not say what his injury was, only that his body was hot.

Chinggis passes the summer on the Snowy Mountain and sends troops to finish the Tangut who had taken to the hills with Aša Gambu, having them plundered until nothing is left. He then rewards Bo'orču and Muqali, letting them carry off as much booty as their strength allows and dividing the Jüyin of north China between them, since he had never given them a share there. He tells them the Jüyin were the Jin emperor's trusted men and the destroyers of Mongol ancestors, and that the two of them are now his own trusted men.

No year is given: the section says only that he spent the summer on the mountain. It would sit in 1227 if read against §265, but the text supplies no year-animal and no datable event, so year_estimate is null. The reward speech includes the image of the Jüyin sons carrying the falcons and daughters arranging the hems of skirts; described, not quoted.

Moving on from the Snowy Mountain, Chinggis camps at the city of Uraqai and is destroying the city of Dörmegei when Burqan comes out to submit, bringing golden images of the Buddha, vessels, boys and girls, geldings and camels, everything arranged in nines. Chinggis keeps the tent door closed and makes him do homage outside, feeling revulsion as he watches; on the third day he gives him the name Šidurqu, then orders Tolun Čerbi to seize and kill him with his own hands. He afterwards gives Tolun the portable palace and the vessels Iluqu had brought, recalling that Tolun was the man who had spoken up for his life after the fall on the hunt.

Undated in the text; the fall of the Tangut capital is conventionally 1227 but no year-animal or datable event appears here, so year_estimate is null. The renaming (Šidurqu, glossed 'upright' in the notes) is given as an act immediately preceding the killing; the text does not explain the contradiction or say where Iluqu was killed.

After the plundering, the renaming and the killing, an order goes out to destroy the Tangut root and branch, down to the children of their children, and to speak of that destruction aloud whenever the khan takes his meals. The section explains the second campaign as punishment for a word given and not kept, and then states, without elaboration, that having destroyed the Tangut he came back and in the Pig year ascended to Heaven. A great part of the surviving Tangut was given to Yisüi Qatun.

The Pig year is named in the text, so attested. The silence is the point: the text gives no cause, no place, no manner of dying, no burial, no mourning, and no successor scene here; it moves straight from the order that the Tangut destruction be recited at meals to 'ascended to Heaven'. The phrase describing the maiming of the Tangut is textually obscure even to the translator.

In the Rat year the princes gather in full force at Köde'ü Aral on the Kelüren: the right hand headed by Chagatai and Batu, the left by Otčigin Noyan, Yegü and Yisüngge, the centre by Tolui, together with the princesses, the imperial sons-in-law and the commanders of ten thousand and of a thousand. They install Ögödei as qan exactly as Chinggis's own decree had nominated him, and it is his elder brother Chagatai who seats him. Chagatai and Tolui hand over to him the night guards, quiver bearers, the eight thousand day guards, the personal retainers, the ten thousand guards of the ruler's person, and the domain of the centre.

The text names the Rat year, so attested at 1228 as the text has it; most historians place the enthronement quriltai in 1229, and that gap is worth preserving rather than correcting. Otčigin Noyan is Temüge, hence the id temuge. The passage slips into the first person ('my father the Qan') where 'his' would be expected: the translator flags it as a possible error, but it is one of the places where the compiler's own voice shows through.

Ögödei takes counsel with Chagatai and sends Oqotur and Mönggetü to reinforce Čormaqan, who is campaigning against the sultan of Baghdad: a people Chinggis had never dealt with. Sübe'etei, who had crossed the Volga and the Ural and reached the Qanglin, Kipchak, Bashkir, Rus, Alan, Hungarian and other peoples, is in difficulty, so Batu, Büri, Güyük, Möngke and other princes are sent after him, Batu placed over the princes and Güyük over the troops of the centre. Ögödei credits Chagatai with the rule that every prince, commander and commoner send his eldest son on campaign, quoting his brother's argument that such an army will be larger and will look mightier against a hard people at the world's end who would sooner die on their own swords.

No date given. The western campaign under Batu is conventionally 1236-1242 and Čormaqan's Iranian command begins around 1230, but the section itself supplies neither year-animal nor datable event, so year_estimate is null. Meket/Menkermen Keyibe are treated as places (the latter is Kiev); the long run of names is otherwise peoples.

Ögödei sends to ask his elder brother's approval before moving against the Jin, whose business Chinggis had left unfinished, and admits openly what worries him: that people will ask by what merit he came to sit on his father's throne. Chagatai replies that nothing stands in the way, put a capable man over the great base camp and go, and promises to send troops of his own.

Undated. The section is almost entirely an exchange of messages, hence register 'speech'. It breaks off mid-sentence at a page boundary ('Having put Oldaqar Qorči in charge of the Great —'), the sentence completing at the head of §272; the year of the Hare therefore belongs to §272, not here.

In the Hare year Ögödei attacks the Jin, cuts their armies down, crosses the Juyong pass, orders his troops against the cities in every direction, and then falls gravely ill in camp at Šira Degtür, losing his speech. Shamans divine that the land-and-water spirits of north China are raging at the plundering of their people and cities; offers of gold, silver, cattle and food only make them angrier, but the divination eases when a member of the ruler's own family is proposed as substitute. Tolui, the one prince at hand, recalls that their father chose Ögödei as one chooses a gelding and charged Tolui to remind him of what he forgets and wake him when he sleeps, argues in verse that the Mongols would be orphaned and the Jin delighted if the Qa'an died, boasts of his own deeds and looks, drinks the shamans' water, asks his brother to care for his orphaned sons and his widowed sister-in-law Berüde, says he is drunk, and dies.

The Hare year is named for the campaign's start, so attested at 1231; the text gives no separate year for Tolui's death (conventionally 1232) and does not date it. Not smoothed: the text names Jebe as vanguard commander although Jebe died in the west years earlier: either a different man or an error in the source, left as it stands. The section treats the incantation as the efficient cause of the death and offers no other explanation; the register is narrative but the heart of it is a speech that turns into verse (the cleft trout and rent sturgeon, the fair face and tall stature).

Ögödei destroys the Jin emperor and fastens a belittling new name on him, then strips him of gold, silver, gold-embroidered and figured satins, goods, piebald horses and young slaves. He posts scouts and garrison troops and installs resident commissioners in Kaifeng, Zhongdu and cities everywhere, then goes home in peace and pitches camp at Qara Qorum.

Undated. The final destruction of the Jin is 1234 historically, but the section names no year and no year-animal, so year_estimate is null. The renaming of a defeated ruler with a diminutive echoes the treatment of Iluqu Burqan in §267: the same gesture twice in one chapter. Qara Qorum appears here as a camp, not yet described as a built city.

Čormaqan brings Baghdad under submission, and Ögödei, hearing that both the land and the things in it are good, leaves him there as garrison commander with an annual delivery of gold, brocades and damasks, pearls large and small, long-necked western horses, brown Bactrian camels, dromedaries and mules. In the west Batu, Büri, Güyük and Möngke subdue the Qanglin, Kipchak and Bashkir peoples, cross the Volga and the Ural, destroy the city of Meget, cut down the Rus and crush them, and reduce the Alans, Bolar, Kiev and other cities before installing commissioners and garrisons and going home. Yisüder Qorči is sent east to reinforce J̌alayirtai against the Jurchen and the Koreans and to stay on as garrison commander.

Undated: three separate theatres (Iran, the west, Korea) are summarised without a single year. The tribute clause is a list embedded in narrative, but the section as a whole reports events, hence register 'narrative'. Menkerman Kiwa is Kiev, treated as a place.

Batu reports by messenger from the Kipchak campaign: he has destroyed Meget, ravaged the Rus and brought eleven countries under submission, and on the way back the parting feast fell apart. As the eldest prince present he drank the ceremonial wine first; Büri and Güyük took offence and rode off, Büri sneering that a bearded old woman claiming to be their equal should be trampled underfoot, Güyük calling Batu an old woman with a quiver to be struck with a burning brand, and Elǰigidei's son Harqasun adding that a wooden tail should be tied on them. Batu ends by saying that they parted in discord in the middle of a campaign against a foreign rebel people, and leaves the decision to his uncle.

Undated. Almost the whole section is Batu's quoted despatch, hence register 'speech'. The insults are in short chanted lines; described rather than quoted. Batu's claim of eleven subdued countries is his own report, not an independent statement by the compiler.

The report enrages Ögödei. He will not let Güyük near him, curses him for filling his mouth with talk against a senior kinsman and turning on him, and swears to put him in the vanguard and then in the garrison army to climb mountainous and hard-pounded city walls until the nails of his fingers are worn away. Harqasun he abuses as wretched and mean and sends off together with Güyük, saying that cutting Harqasun down alone would look like favouritism, and he tells Batu to pass Büri to Chagatai so that Chagatai may judge him.

Undated; continuous with §275. Register 'speech': the section is essentially one uninterrupted outburst, structured in parallel lines about the two kinds of wall. Note that the man cursed here as fit only to rot like an egg becomes the next Qa'an: the text does not comment on that.

Möngke and the commanders Alčidai, Qongqortai and Janggi remind the Qa'an of Chinggis's decree that campaign matters be settled on campaign as household matters are settled in the tent, and ask him to hand Güyük over to Batu. Ögödei agrees and lets Güyük in, but first rebukes him: on campaign he flogged every man who had a backside to flog and broke the spirit of the whole army; does he really think the Rus submitted out of fear of his temper, when he went out under the shelter of Sübe'etei and Büǰek with the full army behind him and has not yet taken even a kid's hoof as booty? Quoting his father's saying that a multitude makes one afraid and deep water drowns, he credits the counsellors who calmed his boiling heart like a broad ladle, and sends Güyük and Harqasun to Batu for judgement and Büri to Chagatai.

Undated. Register 'speech': a petition and a long rebuke, with two proverb-like couplets and the ladle-and-cauldron image for the counsellors. The translator notes that the Mönggei here is the Möngke of §§270 and 274, so the id mongke is used.

Ögödei reissues the entire guard ordinance, confirming that night guards, quiver bearers and day guards keep the duties his father assigned them. The night watch is set out in detail: guards sleeping beside the ruler, standing at the door and patrolling front and rear, seizing anyone abroad after dark and splitting the heads of intruders who slip in among them; night messages delivered only in the guards' company at the back of the tent; no asking their number, no walking past them or between them, on pain of forfeiting horse, saddle, bridle and clothes; charge of the standards, drums, spears, vessels, the drink and the uncut meat, the palace carts and the kumis jars. He then names the paired company commanders and assigns each pair its left or right station, puts Qada'an over the four night-guard companies and Elǰigidei over the whole guard, sets the penalties for missed duty at three, seven and thirty-seven strokes with banishment for the third offence, forbids company elders to lay hands on guards without leave on pain of blow for blow, and ranks a guardsman above an outside commander of a thousand.

Undated and by far the longest section in the chapter. Register 'list': it is a chain of decrees enumerating posts, pairings and penalties, with almost no narrative. The one story inside it is the precedent of Elǰigidei, arrested by his own guards for walking past them after dark and cited as proof that the guards are trustworthy. The section works throughout by restating Chinggis's arrangements rather than replacing them: it is a claim of continuity as much as an ordinance.

Ögödei says he will not make the nation his father built with such toil suffer, but will let the people rest their feet on the ground and their hands on the earth, and lays down his measures: one two-year-old sheep a year from every flock for the ruler's soup, one sheep in a hundred to the poor and needy of the same unit, mares supplied and milked by the thousands so that drink need not be levied from the people at every gathering, storehouses with storemen and grain keepers for satins, ingots, quivers, bows, armour and the grain tax, camps and waters divided out with campmasters resident in them, wells dug in the desert and walled with brick against wild animals so people can live there, and post stations at every stage with masters and horse keepers, so that couriers stop drifting slowly through the population. He names Čanai and Bulqadar as the men who proposed the measures and refers the whole package to Chagatai, who approves every item, says the post stations are the best proposal of all, and offers to link his own line of stations to Ögödei's and to have Batu link his to Chagatai's.

Undated. Register 'speech' rather than 'list': the measures are argued for in the Qa'an's own voice, each with a reason, and the section closes with Chagatai's replies. Note that the Qa'an submits his own decrees to his elder brother for approval: the deference of §271 repeated in administration. The 'Čöl' is glossed by the translator as the Gobi or desert country generally.

Ögödei announces that the princes of the right and left wings, the princesses and sons-in-law of the centre and the commanders down to tens have unanimously endorsed the measures: the yearly wether for the ruler's soup is no burden, the sheep in a hundred for the poor is good, and post stations will bring peace to the peoples and ease to the couriers. With Chagatai's assent the measures are put into effect: the thousands of every region supply wethers, sheep, mares and their herders, storemen, grain keepers, post masters and horse keepers; the stages are measured out and stations built under Aračan and Toqučar, twenty horse keepers to each. A closing decree threatens to split a man's head or nose in half for letting so much as a length of string or a single wheel spoke fall short of the fixed quota.

Undated. Register 'narrative': unlike §279 this section reports the measures being ratified and carried out, though it enumerates as it goes. The two closing punishment formulas are set as parallel lines and are proverbial in form; the translator's note glosses the penalty as confiscation of half a man's goods rather than literal mutilation, but the text keeps the violent image.

Ögödei totals up his reign in his own voice. Four good deeds: he destroyed the people of north China; he set up the post road and had everything the stations needed carried to them; he dug wells in waterless country so that people had water and grass; and he put scouts, garrisons and commissioners over the cities so the people could rest their feet on the ground and their hands on the earth. Against these he sets four faults: he let himself be beaten by wine; he listened to an unprincipled woman and had girls brought to him from his uncle Otčigin's domain, which was wrong for a lord of the nation; he secretly injured Doqolqu, who had served his father fiercely and faithfully, and asks who will now strive so hard for him; and out of greed he walled in the game so it could not stray to his brothers' territory, and heard their resentment for it.

Undated. Register 'speech': the whole section is a first-person reckoning, symmetrically built as four and four. The text is elliptical about two of the faults: the Otčigin girls incident is nowhere else in the Secret History, and the harm done to Doqolqu is named only as a secret injury, glossed by the translator as possibly poison; do not fill either silence.

The book closes with a note on its own making: the writing was finished while the great assembly was sitting, in a Rat year, in the month of the roebuck, when the palace tents stood at Doloan Boldaq of Köde'e Aral on the Kelüren, between Šilginček and a second place whose name has fallen out of the manuscript.

The section names a Rat year and a month but no cycle, so the completion date is one of the oldest disputes in the field: de Rachewiltz argued for 1228, others for 1240 and later; hence value 1228 with confidence 'speculative' rather than 'attested'. The second place-name is lost to a lacuna in the manuscript and is left as a gap here. The text names no author, no scribe and no patron. beat is null: this is a statement about the book, not an event in the six-beat arc, though the assembly it mentions may be the one in §269.