In order to make sense of the influential and outspoken role acquired by some Mongol women in the politics of the empire as seen in previous chapters, it is important to uncover if and how these ladies participated in the imperial economy. However, to write on the economic history of nomadic societies presents a number of challenges marked by the lack of documents generally associated with the economy of empires, such as testaments, commercial treaties, notarial documents, and so on. Not having any of this type of documentation forces us to rely upon those sources we use for writing the more general history of the Mongol Empire and try to isolate from it references to the empire's economy. In the case of women in the empire, the task is even more arduous, since the information regarding their activity is arguably even slimmer than what we have for men. In order to bypass this methodological issue, this chapter mostly focuses on one fundamental element in the life of the Mongol nomads: the ordo. Due to the ordo's centrality in the economic life of the Mongol Empire, I believe it is safe to include it among one of the Mongol institutions that helped to articulate an imperial economy in constant transformation.

The word ordo has been widely used by Mongolists for decades to refer to the Mongol royal encampment. The Turkish term appears originally to have referred to the group of tents belonging to the elite cavalry of the khan in the middle of which stood the yurt of the ruler. The Persian chroniclers used it when specifying where the king or other member of the royal family was at a certain time. However, this is not to say that its precise meaning always remained constant; sometimes the sources refer to the ordo as a political entity (similar to the itinerant court of medieval European kingdoms) and at other times as a centre of economic and military importance. A clearer definition has been offered by Christopher Atwood, who defined the ordo as ‘the great palace-tents and camps of the Mongol princess, princes and emperors, which served as the nucleus of their power’.