Age of Conquest: A Kings and Generals Podcast

As Kublai Khan and Ariq Boke fought for the Grand Khanate in the east, in the western half of the Mongol Empire another dramatic war broke out. This was the Berke-Hulegu war, the concurrent civil war…

Mongke Khaan was dead. Over his 8 year reign, he had ruled the Mongol Empire firmly, strengthening government and renewing the conquests. Yet had not solved the tensions and problems which had been s…

Now that we’ve taken you through Hulegu’s campaigns during Mongke’s reign, it’s time we cut back east to Mongke himself, and the Mongol invasion of the Song Dynasty, the great and immensely wealthy m…

“From the King of Kings of East and West, the supreme Khan:

 In your name, O God, who stretched out the earth and lifted up the heavens; Qutuz is of the race of those Mamluks, who fled to this region…

In the dusty flood plain, 100,000 men and many times that in horses surround the walls of Baghdad. Catapults lob stones relentlessly into the city walls, hauled from great distance. Here, towers coll…

Before we get into this week's episode, I want to give a shout out to another podcast that we’ve recently discovered here at Ages of Conquest! Pax Britannica is a narrative history podcast on the Bri…

Most popular discussions of the Mongol invasions of Japan simply end with the typhoon of 1281 wiping out the Yuan fleet off the coast of Kyushu. This was not the end of Kublai Khan’s dreams to conque…

For most who experienced the Mongol invasions first hand, it was a sight of untold horror, an unstoppable enemy bringing fire and ruin. For Takezaki Suenaga, a samurai who fought against the Mongols …

For the release of the new Sucker Punch video game, Ghost of Tsushima, which depicts a lone samurai defending a Japanese island from Mongol invaders, we’re going to change up our presentation for a f…

Had you to guess a kingdom to offer decades of resistance to the Mongols at the height of their power, Korea might not have been high on your list. Situated close to Mongol dominated North China and …

From Anatolia to Central China; from northern Korea to the eastern edge of Europe; from the forests of Siberia to the borders of India.  This was the empire of Grand Khan Mongke, perhaps the single m…

Especially in modern textbooks and broad historical surveys, the Mongol withdrawal from Europe in 1242 is presented as the Mongols ‘disappearing into the mists of the east,’ as far as the Europeans w…

You could be forgiven for not knowing the name of Guyuk Khan. Guyuk, as Great Khan of the Mongol Empire since 1246, makes a poor figure compared to the likes of his grandfather, Chinggis Khan, his fa…

Over our previous few episodes, we’ve taken you from the ascension of Ogedai as Great Khan in 1229 to a whirlwind journey of conquests across Asia. The final conquest of the Jurchen Jin Dynasty in No…

For two days’ walk a trail of corpses lead from the bridge over the Sajo River. Arrows protruding from fallen Hungarians, limbs bent at unnatural angles, leading to a dense marsh where armoured bodie…