Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval, I'm Matt Lewis.

The Mongol Empire that rose in the early 13th century was fractured and in crisis by the mid 14th. While the Black Death claimed

lives across the continent and England and France were absorbed by the

hundred years war, a new warlord arose in Inner Asia who sought to rebuild what had once been the most powerful empire in the world.

His name was Tamulane, or at least that's how we remember him, perhaps from the Christopher Marlow play that bears his name.

Peter Jackson's new book, From Genghis Khan to Tamulain, The Reawakening of Mongol Asia,

tells the story of the Mongol world and the last effort to fully revive it.

Peter is emeritus professor of medieval history at Kiel University

and has previously written on the Crusades, the Mongols and the

book title uses the name islamic world welcome to God medieval Peter

thank you the book title uses the names Genghis Khan and Tamalain but inside throughout you refer to them as

Chingis Khan and Timor. Why are the names recorded differently?

Both names as popularly used go back to misspellings,

bastardized forms that were current as far back as the

18th century in Chingis Khan's case

and in Tamolanes were actually contemporary with his life.

If I had used the correct forms in the title, I was afraid that in fact nobody would recognize whom I was talking about Chingiz Khan very probably, but Timur would have meant nothing to an awful lot of people.

So I decided to cheat by using the bastardized forms in the title and then correcting them in the introduction.

Seems like an entirely reasonable cheat to me.

It's important that people know what they're reading, I think, isn't it?

He has entered popular imagination as Genghis Khan and Tamulain.

Those are the names that we know them by, so if you want to book on them, I guess that's the name you're expecting to see on the cover still.

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