In 1178, a 17 year old Mongol woman married a man she hardly knew. And while her husband traveled and fought and conquered, she ruled those who remained in Mongolia, managing every aspect of daily life in a massive nomadic camp. Commanders and shepherds alike reported to her, and she coordinated complex seasonal migrations of thousands of people and their livestock. At 28, she became the Grand Empress of the Mongol Empire; her name was Borte.  Borte's husband, Chinggis Khan (also known, based on Aribic translation, as Genghis Khan), receives all the glory for founding the largest contiguous land empire the world has ever known, but Borte and her immense contributions have been largely forgotten. While their husbands fought in distant years long military campaigns, Borte and other Mongol women kept the empire running. Some women also rode to war. Khutulun, Chinggis Khan's great-great-grand daughter, would swoop down on the enemy "as deftly as a hawk" wrote Marco Polo. So without women running the place where Mongols lived, there wouldn't have been a camp for the Mongol men to return to from their military campaigns. Historians have found evidence that more than we thought of the Mongol armed forces were, in fact, women-maybe 20 percent. Without Mongol women, there would have been no Mongol conquest, no Mongol empire. There would have been nothing. In mongol society, you have something like 90 percent of men able to mobilize and engage in warfare. No other contermorary society-not Medeival China, not Medieval Iran, not Medieval Europe-can do that, because men have to do other jobs. They have to be their priests, farmers, administrators. In Mongol society, women do all that stuff. So without women behind the scenes running everything else, men would not have gone anywhere.  -Atlas Obscura spoke with central asia scollar Anne Broadbridge, author of "Women and the Making of the Mongol Empire, -about the many roles women had in the Mongol empire.