Mongolia is Relevant: Our Lady of the Mongols

I found out I’d be spending the summer in Mongolia just before I went to Istanbul. I was initially interested in two (very broad) aspects of Mongolian society—nomadic culture and traditional literature, and modern Mongolia’s development—and didn’t know much about the Mongol Empire. It was something that pushed on the fringes of what I studied, but rarely explicitly intersected with it, at least in what I read (mostly European/American texts). So it was a bit of a joy to encounter in Istanbul the character “Mary of the Mongols.” Mary was so nicknamed because she married a Mongol khan, after his father (her original betrothed) died. When that husband was assassinated by his brother, the brother also wanted to marry Mary, so she fled back to her father (an Emperor), who then planned to marry her off to a different Mongol khan (the fourth in this story). Instead, Mary joined a convent and gave enough money to rebuild the nunnery and attach a church. In honor of her, the church is referred to as the Church of St. Mary of the Mongols, and she is affectionately termed “Our Lady of the Mongols.” She also donated money to help build/decorate Christ Chora, (or I think she did—she was certainly featured in the mosaics there along with other benefactors).

So I heard about this woman and her churches and discovered, for the first time, Mongolia making an impact in a tangible and permanent way, only days after discovering that Mongolia would be making an impact on me in a tangible and permanent way. We (myself included) tend to reduce the image of Mongolia to some remote steppe and desert, whose empire was as brief as it was massive. But that’s just not true, as a little bit of Mongolian-history sleuthing will show you. For a while, Mongolia was there, not only pressing at the edges of the world, but slipping into and out of it and leaving their mark all over the continent. They may not have constructed many extant buildings, and Genghis Khaan may not have left much documentation, but as Our Lady of the Mongols demonstrates: Mongolia is relevant.