Mongol Empire

Matt Lewis and guest Dr Eleanor Barraclough as they dive into the turbulent world of late 10th-century Scandinavia and the extraordinary life of Olaf Tryggvason. Exiled, enslaved, raider, and eventually king of Norway, Olaf was a force of nature in an age of shifting loyalties, p ...  Show more

How was folklore woven into the everyday life of medieval Icelanders? How did they make sense of the darkness of their world?During Iceland's endless nights, tales of trolls, ghosts, elves, hidden people and restless spirits were far more than entertainment: they explained an unp ...  Show more

The Crusades are well-known but only part of the complex history of the medieval Near East. During the same era, the region was completely remade by the Mongol invasions.  In a single generation, the Mongols upended the region’s geopolitics. 

In this e ...

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 Alex ...  Show more

The Mongols were an unstoppable force through the 12th and 13th centuries, with an empire that stretched across huge swathes of land, from China to Europe. But its territory also included much of the Near East, where one aggressive power – the Mamluks – finally put a halt to thei ...  Show more

We talk to Dr Nicholas Morton about the arrival of the Mongols into the Byzantine world. Their confrontation with the Seljuks of Anatolia will have serious consequences.Dr Morton is Associate Professor in Middle Eastern and Global history at Nottingham Trent University in the UK. ...  Show more