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Genghis Khan's mother was kidnapped
The Cart on the Hill
Only women drove carts, so a moving cart meant a woman was moving house, and this one carried a young bride with her husband riding a horse close beside it. Yesuke, hunting with a falcon on the hill above, got his two brothers and came racing down. The husband fled, figuring the men would chase him instead, and they did. He circled around and came back to the cart.
The bride's name was Hoelun, and while he was gone she had decided it mattered more for him to live. She told him to flee, to find another wife and call her Hoelun, and to remember her when he was with her. He rode off with his braids whipping from his chest to his back as he looked behind him.
The three men came straight for the cart and took her. She did not say a word until her husband was over the ridge, and then she began to scream and wail. One of the brothers told her she could shake the waters out of the river and the mountains with her screaming, and she would never see this man again.
A Child Named Temujin
Yesuke was away fighting the Tatars when her son was born. He had killed a Tatar named Temujin Uge, which means person of iron, and he named the baby Temujin after the man he had just killed.
Did the Merkit ever get revenge?
Hoelun had been the bride of Chiledu, a man of the Merkit people, before Yesuke took her. The Secret History, the Mongol chronicle of Genghis Khan's life, presents a later Merkit raid on Temujin's camp as payback for that abduction. In that raid the Merkit seized Temujin's wife, Börte. He won her back with troops from Wang Khan and Jamukha.
How did Hoelun keep her children alive?
According to the Secret History, Yesuke was poisoned by Tatars when Temujin was a boy. His followers then abandoned the family, leaving Hoelun alone with her young children. The chronicle says she fed them by digging wild roots, gathering fruit, and fishing in the river. Orphans that Genghis Khan adopted were later raised in her household.
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