The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2023

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The most disruptive and transformative event in the Middle Ages wasn’t the Crusades, the Battle of Agincourt, or even the Black Death. It was the Mongol Conquests. Even after his death, Genghis Khan’s Mongol Empire grew to become the largest in history—four times the size of Alexander the Great’s and stretching from the Pacific to the Mediterranean. But the extent to which these conquering invasions and subsequent Mongol rule transformed the diverse landscape of the medieval Near East have been understated in our understanding of the modern world.

Today’s guest is Nicholas Morton, author of “The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Middle East.” We discuss the overlapping connections of religion, architecture, trade, philosophy and ideas that reformed over a century of Mongol rule. Rather than a Euro- or even Mongol-centric perspective, this history uniquely examines the Mongol invasions from the multiple perspectives of the network of peoples of the Near East and travelers from all directions—including famous figures of this era such as Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Ibn Khaldun, and Roger Bacon, who observed and reported on the changing region to their respective cultures—and the impacted peoples of empires—Byzantine, Seljuk and then Ottoman Turks, Ayyubid, Armenian, and more—under the violence of conquest.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Scott here with another episode of the History and Plug podcast.
0:07.9	After his death, Genghis Khan's Mongol Empire grew to be the largest in history.
0:11.8	It was four times the size of Alexander the Great's conquests and it stretched from the
0:15.6	Pacific to the Mediterranean.
0:17.4	The Mongols believed they had a right to rule the entire planet and for many years this
0:20.8	ambition seemed realistically within their grasp.
0:23.0	In 1260 they planned on conquering Egypt and in 1261 they were preparing for a massive
0:28.0	invasion of all of Europe.
0:29.7	Most of the monarchs were terrified they knew that Mongol spies were already moving among
0:33.4	their kingdoms and it heard about the destruction of other empires so their ease and thought
0:37.0	that there was nothing they could do to stop them.
0:38.8	For reasons we'll get into later that didn't happen, but it was clear that in the near
0:42.0	east the Mongols took a network of trade routes and political systems that had been developed
0:46.7	for several centuries in spanned all of Eurasia, shattered it practically overnight and
0:51.4	reformed it into a new system that eventually brought the Middle Ages to an end.
0:55.5	In today's episode we're talking to Nicholas Morton, author of the Mongol storm, making
0:59.1	and breaking empires in the medieval near east.
1:01.7	We take a panoramic view of the empire the Mongols sought to create and look at the victories
1:05.6	of advancing armies, long-side developments in art, architecture, and fashion, and follow
1:10.0	journeys of famous explorers like Marco Polo or Raban Barzama who traveled from China
1:15.1	to Europe.
1:16.1	Above all we're not so much looking at the military victories of the Mongols which is what
	...

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