Khutulun (ca. 1260 – ca. 1306), also known as Aiyurug or Khotol Tsagaan, was the most famous daughter of Kaidu and the niece of Kublai Khan. Her father was most pleased by her abilities, and she accompanied him on military campaigns. Marco Polo and Rashid al-Din both wrote of her.
Khutulun was born about 1260.[1] By 1280, her father Kaidu became the most powerful ruler of Central Asia, reigning in the realms from western Mongolia to Oxus, and from the Central Siberian Plateau to India.
According to Marco Polo, Khutulun was described as being a superb warrior; one who could ride into enemy ranks and snatch a captive as easily as a hawk snatches a chicken. She assisted her father in many battles, particularly against the Yuan Dynasty of her cousin the Great Khan - Kublai (r. 1260-94).
Khutulun refused to marry unless a man could first defeat her in wrestling. Many men came forward to try, but none succeeded. She would challenge suitors who wanted to marry her to a wrestling match, in which the prospective groom would have to forfeit 100 horses if he lost. She gained 10,000 horses this way. Her parents became anxious for her to marry.
The people alleged that she maintained an incestuous relationship with her father and thus would take no other man while he lived. Realizing the price her father paid for such malicious propaganda, Khutulun chose a man from among her father’s followers and married him without wrestling him. Sources vary on her husband's identity. Some chronicles say her husband was a handsome man who failed to assassinate her father and was taken prisoner while others refer to him as Kaidu's companion from the Choros clan. Rashid al-Din wrote that Khutulun fell in love with Ghazan, Mongol ruler in Persia.
Her father Kaidu increasingly relied on Khutulun for advice as well as for political support. She was unmistakably his favorite child, and according to some accounts, he attempted to name her to be the next khan before his death in 1301. However, his choice was declined due to her male relatives. When Kaidu died, Khutulun guarded his tomb with the assistance of her brother Orus. She was challenged by her other brothers including Chapar and relative Duwa because she resisted their succession. She died in 1306.
In 1710, while writing the first biography of Genghis Khan, the French scholar François Pétis de la Croix published a book of tales and fables combining various Asian literary themes. One of his longest and best stories derived from the history of Khutulun. In his adaptation, however, she bore the title Turandot, meaning “Turkish Daughter,” the nineteen-year-old daughter of Altoun Khan, the Mongol emperor of China. Instead of challenging her suitors in wrestling, Pétis de La Croix had her confront them with three riddles. In his more dramatic version, instead of wagering mere horses, the suitor had to forfeit his life if he failed to answer correctly.
Fifty years later, the popular Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi made her story into a drama of a “tigerish woman” of “unrelenting pride.” In a combined effort by two of the greatest literary talents of the era, Friedrich von Schiller translated the play into German as Turandot, Prinzessin von China, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe directed it on the stage in Weimar in 1802.
More than a century later, Italian composer Giacomo Puccini was still working on his opera Turandot at the time of his death in 1924. Unlike his other operatic heroine, Madame Butterfly, who lived and died for the love of a man, Turandot rejected any man whom she deemed inferior to her. Puccini's opera became the most famous of the artistic variations of her life’s story.