The Mongol Storm
Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East
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Publisher Description
'Brain-stretching . . . pulsating . . . irresistable' The Sunday Times
'Deeply researched and elegantly written - essential reading' Dan Jones
'Erudite, often thrilling and much-needed' Daily Telegraph
How the Mongol invasions of the Near East reshaped the balance of world power in the Middle Ages.
For centuries, the Crusades have been central to the story of the medieval Near East, but these religious wars are only part of the region's complex history. As The Mongol Storm reveals, during the same era the Near East was utterly remade by another series of wars: the Mongol invasions.
In a single generation, the Mongols conquered vast swaths of the Near East and upended the region's geopolitics. Amid the chaos of the Mongol onslaught, long-standing powers such as the Byzantines, the Seljuk Turks, and the crusaders struggled to survive, while new players such as the Ottomans arose to fight back. The Mongol conquests forever transformed the region, while forging closer ties among societies spread across Eurasia.
This is the definitive history of the Mongol assault on the Near East and its enduring global consequences.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A series of Mongol invasions in the 13th century brought "sudden and dramatic change" to societies stretching from Vietnam to China, the Middle East, and Europe, according to this dense and revealing study. Historian Morton (The Field of Blood) explains how the Mongols' nomadic culture and the massive size of their armies (up to 80,000 men) gave them an advantage over the agricultural and hybrid societies they invaded, including the Khwarazmian Empire of Central Asia, the Anatolian Seljuk Sultanate, and the smaller caliphates of the Middle East. Contending that the Mongol Empire's "greatest military strength was the sheer terror it provoked" (they reportedly slaughtered 200,000 people during the siege of Baghdad in 1258), Morton notes that many societies decided to submit rather than fight. Morton provides a wealth of evidence showing that the Mongols left "a much more connected Eurasia in their wake" by opening new trade routes to China, allowing multiple religions to coexist within their empire, and incorporating innovative military technologies from the forces they conquered. Though the byzantine details of political infighting and dynastic upheavals slow things down, this expert study casts the Middle Ages in a new light.
