96 chapter two
the thirteenth century, namely William Rubruck and Pian de Carpine,
about the Mongols and their typical way of making a differentiation
between ‘male’ and ‘female’ work as well between gender and age. He
was ready to accept all this as valid for Khazaria, too. In Rubruck’s
words, Mongol women had to load and unload the yurts from the
carts; they made dresses too, prepared the food, took care of the cows
and produced different things from milk, while the men in the Mongol
society were responsible for the yurts’ manufacturing, for the camels
and mares (along with the koumis) as well as weapons (arrows and
bows) and equipment (saddles, horseshoes, etc.).
Pian de Carpine is a bit extreme. For him, men do nothing except
making arrows and, from time to time, taking care of the flock. They
were mostly preoccupied with bow shooting and other military activi-
ties. According to him, women did everything: they made clothes of
leather, shoes, etc.; they loaded the carts and the camels, etc.^38 Still,
we should bear in mind that in Khazaria’s and Bulgaria’s lands the
process of sedentarization started in earlier times and because of this
fact, some of the details mentioned above (by Rubruck and Pian de
Carpine) may not fit the social roles of women as well as men in Dan-
ube Bulgaria and Khazaria.
But why did women have such a serious impact in the economic
life of steppe Eurasia? Why, in this area again, did polygamy and levi-
rate continue exercising such a tremendous influence? Also, why were
nomads interested not so much in plundering distant lands but in
taking away the others’ women? Was it always because of the exog-
amy? Answers to questions like these could be found out not only in
the traditional notions in the steppes but in the essence of this type of
economy as well as in the specific style of living in such areas. There,
due to security reasons of different kind, labor of un-free women (in
Old-Turkic “küng”) was much more preferable than that of male
slaves (in Old-Turkic “qul”, meaning “un-free man”). To have such
women concentrated in a single place/area was good since they were
easily controlled in the frameworks of the family-and-clan life. These
women usually worked in different places and this gave an opportu-
nity for lots of men to free themselves from boring and tiresome work
(^38) The Mongol Mission 1955, 18 (Pian de Carpine), 103 (William Rubruck).