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Paper abstract:

This paper deals with a central institution in the Mongol Empire, that of the güregen, or son-in-law class. Chinggis Khan established quda (marriage-alliance) relationships with various Turco-Mongol peoples to incorporate them into his early state, and these relationships continued throughout the united Mongol Empire period, as well as in the successor khanates across Eurasia. One of the important lineages with which Chinggis Khan established a marriage alliance was that of Qutuqa Beki, the leader of the Oirat. Beginning with his own daughter Checheyigen, various marriages were organised between Chinggisid princes and Oirat wives and vice versa. Descendants of Qutuqa Beki married into all four princely houses, and travelled far afield with their Chinggisid in-laws on their campaigns and into their uluses, serving as commanders in Hülegü’s conquest of much of the Middle East in the 1250s.

One branch of this family which had a long-standing relationship with the Toluid prince Hülegü and his descendants were Tanggiz and his children. Intermarriages were organised across four generations, until the downfall of the Ilkhanate in the 1330s. The peculiarity of this relationship is that it survived several instances of Tanggiz and his family siding with the wrong Chinggisid house or a failed pretender, mistakes which were routinely punished extremely harshly in the Mongol world. However, these in-laws were not executed, and instead were regularly reconnected to the Hülegüid line. While one of Qutuqa Beki’s güregen descendants, Taraqai, chose to flee to the Mamluk sultanate, Tanggiz’s line remained, eventually producing an Ilkhan from their own family, Abū Saʿīd, son of Ḥājjī Khatun, a great-granddaughter of Tanggiz Güregen. The power of this family culminated in one descendant, ʿAlī Pādshāh, becoming ruler in all but name in 1336. This paper will discuss the importance of these Oirat güregen and how they were able to survive their own treacherous actions.