Jack Weatherford

By his father's own brothers.

See, the men who kidnapped her, they had an obligation under Mongol law and custom to marry her when her husband died.

They did not.

They should take care of her and her children because her children are the children of their brother.

They count as the sons of the clan, or they should.

But no, they had all deserted, all betrayed him.

He learned very early on that you cannot trust family.

The story of Temujin is not a unique story for that time.

Now, as an isolated family of outcasts, of course, he's not participating in the various feuds and the raids of the people around him, but they are constantly raiding in the winter, and for women and for horses and for any kind of valuables that they can find.

It's almost like their way of getting trade goods from China, that one group raids the other in order to find out whatever they have for textiles or for metal,

Mongols produced nothing.

They could produce felt to make their tents, but they were not craftsmen.

And so they had to get these items from somewhere, and it was through raiding.

And so even in the genealogy of Temüjin, you see going back generation after generation of women having been kidnapped, children born who are not necessarily the father's child, and it's unclear who the father was.

And all of these issues go back for a long time.

Later, Genghis Khan will realize, once he becomes Genghis Khan, he will realize that the true source of most of the feuding on the steppe is over women.

And later he will outlaw the kidnapping of women and the sale of women.

In part, not only because of what had happened to his mother,

but what happened to him next in his life.

At age 16, Bertha, the girl he had met when he was eight years old and she was nine, she's now 17, and she and her mother come.