to talk about and it's a fascinating period in time that you know it's just kind of it's never really

fell out of people's interest really has it this this topic for many reasons which we'll get into so

maybe you can just explain to people what it is you do, what keeps you busy.

Sure, so I'm the Associate Professor at Nottingham Trent University and I specialise in the history of the Crusades and the Mongol

invasions. So I've written a book recently called the Mongol Storm and it's looking at the Mongol

invasions into the Middle East, but doing so from a global perspective, the entire planet or certainly Eurasia and parts of North Africa are in the process in the 13th century of being overthrown by this tidal wave of

invasions from Mongol armies until their empire stretches from the Pacific

coast to the borders of Hungary and Poland or down to

the borders of Syria in the southwest and it's looking at that. It's looking at

this process of conquest and how this enormous process of

invasion and conquest affected particularly societies in the Middle East and

that includes societies like the Byzantine Empire, various Muslim

empires and sultanates and also the crusader states.

In terms of my own interest in it, initially I came to the subject as I'm interested in the Crusades and that

over time I began to get interested in the various other societies in the region and the Mongol certainly rank high among them.

For sure.

Why is you think, I mean I don't know if you've noticed this obviously mentioned the Crusades,

but the Crusades seem to kind of dominate this perception of kind of warmongering

and imperialism and colonialism and things like that.

Why do we kind of not really give the Ottoman Empire and Mongols

and things like that, a kind of equal footing.

Yeah, I mean, something that is quite notable about the history of the Middle East

...