Meritocracy After uniting the Mongols in 1189, Temujin made his first organizational innovation. In most steppe tribes, the khan’s court was an aristocracy consisting of his relatives. Weatherford writes: Temujin, however, assigned some dozen responsibilities to various followers according to the ability and loyalty of the individual without regard to kinship. He gave the highest positions as his personal assistants to his first two followers, Boorchu and Jelme, who had shown persistent loyalty to him for more than a decade. Mongol women were already treated unusually well for the time, but
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