Podcasts about circassians

THE REVERBERATING IMPACT OF THE 1929 HEBRON MASSACREHEADLINE 1: Israel will allow Syrian Druze, along with Circassians – another ethnic minority in Syria – to work in the Israeli Golan Heights. HEADLINE 2: Recent meetings in Qatar between top Hamas terrorists and Adam Boehler, the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, are focused the release of Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander. HEADLINE 3: The Trump administration has followed through on its threat to cancel federal funding to Columbia University, revoking $400 million due to the institution's failure to respond to campus antisemitism.--FDD Executive Director Jon Schanzer provides timely updates and analysis, followed by a conversation with award-winning journalist, Emmy-nominated producer, and bestselling author Yardena Schwartz. Learn more at: https://fdd.org/fddmorningbrief

On 9 January, Ukraine's Parliament has recognised the Russian Empire's 19th century genocide of the Circassians, during which Russian forced killed or deported hundreds of thousands of Circassians from their homeland in the Caucasus. This week, OC Media's Yousef Bardouka talks about the genocide and its impact on the Circassians and the Caucasus and the significance of the resolution, while Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Goncharenko, a co-author of the resolution, talks about how the bill came to be and Ukraine's role in supporting the people of the North Caucasus. Read more: Ukraine recognises Circassian Genocide Support independent journalism in the Caucasus and become an OC Media Member: Join today. …or donate to the collective Georgian media security fund.

Gervase Phillips' book Persecution and Genocide: A History (Routledge, 2024) offers an unparalleled range of comparative studies considering both persecution and genocide across two thousand years of history from Rome to Nazi Germany, and spanning Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Topics covered include the persecution of religious minorities in the ancient world and late antiquity, the medieval roots of modern antisemitism, the early modern witch-hunts, the emergence of racial ideologies and their relationship to slavery, colonialism, Russian and Soviet mass deportations, the Armenian genocide, and the Holocaust. It also introduces students to significant, but less well known, episodes, such as the Albigensian Crusade and the massacres and forced expulsions suffered by the Circassians at the hands of imperial Russia in the 1860s, as the world entered an 'age of genocide'.  By exploring the ideological motivations of the perpetrators, the book invites students to engage with the moral complexities of the past and to reflect upon our own situation today as the 'legatees of two thousand years of persecution'. Gervase Phillips's book is the ideal introduction to the subject for anyone interested in the long and complex history of human persecution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Gervase Phillips' book Persecution and Genocide: A History (Routledge, 2024) offers an unparalleled range of comparative studies considering both persecution and genocide across two thousand years of history from Rome to Nazi Germany, and spanning Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Topics covered include the persecution of religious minorities in the ancient world and late antiquity, the medieval roots of modern antisemitism, the early modern witch-hunts, the emergence of racial ideologies and their relationship to slavery, colonialism, Russian and Soviet mass deportations, the Armenian genocide, and the Holocaust. It also introduces students to significant, but less well known, episodes, such as the Albigensian Crusade and the massacres and forced expulsions suffered by the Circassians at the hands of imperial Russia in the 1860s, as the world entered an 'age of genocide'.  By exploring the ideological motivations of the perpetrators, the book invites students to engage with the moral complexities of the past and to reflect upon our own situation today as the 'legatees of two thousand years of persecution'. Gervase Phillips's book is the ideal introduction to the subject for anyone interested in the long and complex history of human persecution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Gervase Phillips' book Persecution and Genocide: A History (Routledge, 2024) offers an unparalleled range of comparative studies considering both persecution and genocide across two thousand years of history from Rome to Nazi Germany, and spanning Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Topics covered include the persecution of religious minorities in the ancient world and late antiquity, the medieval roots of modern antisemitism, the early modern witch-hunts, the emergence of racial ideologies and their relationship to slavery, colonialism, Russian and Soviet mass deportations, the Armenian genocide, and the Holocaust. It also introduces students to significant, but less well known, episodes, such as the Albigensian Crusade and the massacres and forced expulsions suffered by the Circassians at the hands of imperial Russia in the 1860s, as the world entered an 'age of genocide'.  By exploring the ideological motivations of the perpetrators, the book invites students to engage with the moral complexities of the past and to reflect upon our own situation today as the 'legatees of two thousand years of persecution'. Gervase Phillips's book is the ideal introduction to the subject for anyone interested in the long and complex history of human persecution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Gervase Phillips' book Persecution and Genocide: A History (Routledge, 2024) offers an unparalleled range of comparative studies considering both persecution and genocide across two thousand years of history from Rome to Nazi Germany, and spanning Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Topics covered include the persecution of religious minorities in the ancient world and late antiquity, the medieval roots of modern antisemitism, the early modern witch-hunts, the emergence of racial ideologies and their relationship to slavery, colonialism, Russian and Soviet mass deportations, the Armenian genocide, and the Holocaust. It also introduces students to significant, but less well known, episodes, such as the Albigensian Crusade and the massacres and forced expulsions suffered by the Circassians at the hands of imperial Russia in the 1860s, as the world entered an 'age of genocide'.  By exploring the ideological motivations of the perpetrators, the book invites students to engage with the moral complexities of the past and to reflect upon our own situation today as the 'legatees of two thousand years of persecution'. Gervase Phillips's book is the ideal introduction to the subject for anyone interested in the long and complex history of human persecution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Gervase Phillips' book Persecution and Genocide: A History (Routledge, 2024) offers an unparalleled range of comparative studies considering both persecution and genocide across two thousand years of history from Rome to Nazi Germany, and spanning Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Topics covered include the persecution of religious minorities in the ancient world and late antiquity, the medieval roots of modern antisemitism, the early modern witch-hunts, the emergence of racial ideologies and their relationship to slavery, colonialism, Russian and Soviet mass deportations, the Armenian genocide, and the Holocaust. It also introduces students to significant, but less well known, episodes, such as the Albigensian Crusade and the massacres and forced expulsions suffered by the Circassians at the hands of imperial Russia in the 1860s, as the world entered an 'age of genocide'.  By exploring the ideological motivations of the perpetrators, the book invites students to engage with the moral complexities of the past and to reflect upon our own situation today as the 'legatees of two thousand years of persecution'. Gervase Phillips's book is the ideal introduction to the subject for anyone interested in the long and complex history of human persecution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Gervase Phillips' book Persecution and Genocide: A History (Routledge, 2024) offers an unparalleled range of comparative studies considering both persecution and genocide across two thousand years of history from Rome to Nazi Germany, and spanning Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Topics covered include the persecution of religious minorities in the ancient world and late antiquity, the medieval roots of modern antisemitism, the early modern witch-hunts, the emergence of racial ideologies and their relationship to slavery, colonialism, Russian and Soviet mass deportations, the Armenian genocide, and the Holocaust. It also introduces students to significant, but less well known, episodes, such as the Albigensian Crusade and the massacres and forced expulsions suffered by the Circassians at the hands of imperial Russia in the 1860s, as the world entered an 'age of genocide'.  By exploring the ideological motivations of the perpetrators, the book invites students to engage with the moral complexities of the past and to reflect upon our own situation today as the 'legatees of two thousand years of persecution'. Gervase Phillips's book is the ideal introduction to the subject for anyone interested in the long and complex history of human persecution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gervase Phillips' book Persecution and Genocide: A History (Routledge, 2024) offers an unparalleled range of comparative studies considering both persecution and genocide across two thousand years of history from Rome to Nazi Germany, and spanning Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Topics covered include the persecution of religious minorities in the ancient world and late antiquity, the medieval roots of modern antisemitism, the early modern witch-hunts, the emergence of racial ideologies and their relationship to slavery, colonialism, Russian and Soviet mass deportations, the Armenian genocide, and the Holocaust. It also introduces students to significant, but less well known, episodes, such as the Albigensian Crusade and the massacres and forced expulsions suffered by the Circassians at the hands of imperial Russia in the 1860s, as the world entered an 'age of genocide'.  By exploring the ideological motivations of the perpetrators, the book invites students to engage with the moral complexities of the past and to reflect upon our own situation today as the 'legatees of two thousand years of persecution'. Gervase Phillips's book is the ideal introduction to the subject for anyone interested in the long and complex history of human persecution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky's Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024) tell this story. The book reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky's Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024) tell this story. The book reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky's Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024) tell this story. The book reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky's Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024) tell this story. The book reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky's Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024) tell this story. The book reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky's Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024) tell this story. The book reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford UP, 2024) reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of global migration and forced displacement and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. He is the author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024). Dr. Hamed-Troyansky is currently working on a transnational history of Muslim displacement in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia since 1850. His articles appeared in Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Slavic Review, and Kritika. He received his Ph.D. in History from Stanford University and served as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford UP, 2024) reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of global migration and forced displacement and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. He is the author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024). Dr. Hamed-Troyansky is currently working on a transnational history of Muslim displacement in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia since 1850. His articles appeared in Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Slavic Review, and Kritika. He received his Ph.D. in History from Stanford University and served as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford UP, 2024) reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of global migration and forced displacement and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. He is the author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024). Dr. Hamed-Troyansky is currently working on a transnational history of Muslim displacement in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia since 1850. His articles appeared in Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Slavic Review, and Kritika. He received his Ph.D. in History from Stanford University and served as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford UP, 2024) reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of global migration and forced displacement and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. He is the author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024). Dr. Hamed-Troyansky is currently working on a transnational history of Muslim displacement in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia since 1850. His articles appeared in Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Slavic Review, and Kritika. He received his Ph.D. in History from Stanford University and served as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford UP, 2024) reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of global migration and forced displacement and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. He is the author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024). Dr. Hamed-Troyansky is currently working on a transnational history of Muslim displacement in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia since 1850. His articles appeared in Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Slavic Review, and Kritika. He received his Ph.D. in History from Stanford University and served as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky about North Caucasian Muslims in the late Ottoman period. They discuss the landscape of the Caucasus, the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Empire in the late 19th century. They talk about the diversity of ethnic groups in the Caucasus, the Ottoman Empire as a land of refugees, and why Russian troops perpetrated an ethnic cleansing. They discuss the term muhajir, four major migrations from the Caucasus, the Ottoman Empire as a refugee regime, 1857 immigration law, 1858 land laws, 1860 refugee commission, what happened to Circassian refugees in the Balkans, and Ottoman slavery. They discuss Circassians moving to the levant, the importance of Amman, resettlement in central Anatolia, return migration to Russia, and many other topics. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has his Ph.D. in History from Stanford University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. His main interest areas are in global migration and forced displacement, with expertise in the Ottoman and Russian empires and their successor states. He is the author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State. Website: https://www.vladimirhamedtroyansky.com/ Get full access to Converging Dialogues at convergingdialogues.substack.com/subscribe

Tom Parfitt walked across the northern flank of the Russian Caucasus, from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea, through republics whose names are synonymous with violence, extremism and warfare. He joins me to discuss the Circassians, mass relocations under Stalin, and high mountain villages where resourceful people have survived for centuries on the stoniest ground.

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Celine Kasem about the various ways she culturally identifies, her work in Syria, and activism in our current age. They begin by discussing how she became involved in activism and political work in Syria, and Gen Z's use of digital media tools to spread awareness about issues. They also talk about the various places she has lived, concept of home, ethnic and cultural identities, Circassians, and the various ethnic groups in Syria. They discuss the history of the Syrian conflict and the Arab Spring, how the conflict escalated and failed attempts at peace, the recent Assad Anti-normalization bill, and refugees. They mention the recent Turkish election, activism in the 21st century, and many more topics. Celine Kasem is a human rights activist and public speaker. Currently, she is the Director of media at the Syrian Emergency Task Force. She has her Bachelors in Political Science and will continue her education in Qatar for her Masters in Intercultural Communication. She has Syrian, Circassian, Canadian, and Armenian backgrounds and has a deep passion for Syrians around the world. Website: https://setf.ngo/Twitter: @celinekasemInstagram: @celinekasem This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit convergingdialogues.substack.com

This is just a quick announcement about this year's Intelligent Speech Conference. Intelligent Speech brings together your favourite educational podcasters and their fans in a 3 ring circus of edutainment. The conference takes place online from 10 am Eastern and 3pm London time on June 25th. There will 3 keynote speeches, 8 round tables and 24 individual sessions. Each sessions is about 40 minutes each with a lot of time given to Q&A. Early bird tickets are $20 US and you get 10% off when you use the code ”Germans” at checkout. To book your ticket go to intelligentspechconference.com, there is also Facebook page @intelligentspeechconf and you can email the organisers at intelligentspeech@gmail.com. The theme of this year‘s conference is, “Crossing Lines.” Where lines cross are junctures and our era certainly feels like a major juncture in time; at Intelligent Speech 2022, we will be exploring other times when lines have been crossed in one way or another.  There will be some amazing speakers. I am particularly excited about Roberto Toro of the History of Saqartvelo Georgia talking about Georgian influence on the Holy Land and Eric Halsey of the History of Bulgaria putting a spotlight on the forgotten story of the Circassians exodus from their homeland in the 19th century. David Montgomery from The Siecle will be there and the Pontifact girls. The list of fabulous podcasters and broad topics goes on. Jennifer Dasal from the Art Curious podcast will do a keynote speech, Alycia from Civics and Coffee and the Ancient History Fangirls will do sessions. The closing keynote will be by none other than Jamie Jeffers from the British History Podcast who needs no introduction. Yours truly will talk about Crossing the Alps, the ambivalent relationship between Germany and Italy. As you guys know too well, German and Italian history has been inextricably linked ever since Otto the Great wooed Adelheid, queen of Italy in 951. We also talked about how historians of the 19th century saw the involvement in the south as a sink of resources that led to the collapse of central authority and the delayed nationhood of Germany. But there is another side as well, that of a deep attachment to Italy and its people. It wasn't just the medieval emperors and Frederick II most prominently who fell for the charms of the south. The beacons of the Enlightenment were seeking the “Land where the Citrons bloom”. Goethe, Winkelmann, Jacob Burckhardt to name a few embedded love and admiration for our neighbour to the south. This ambivalent relationship between fear of wasting resources and emotional attachment may go back a 1000 years but still shines through, most recently in the question whether and how Germany should support Italy during the Sovereign Debt Crisis of 2012. So, it is hopefully worth it. Early bird tickets are $20 US and you get 10% off when you use the code ”Germans” at checkout. To book your ticket go to intelligentspechconference.com, there is also Facebook page @intelligentspeechconf and you can email the organisers at intelligentspeech@gmail.com. I hope you will join us.

“The impure and proud Mamai, Lord of the Volga Horde, ruled over the entire Horde, and he slew many lords and khans and he set  up a khan according to his own will. He was, however, in great confusion, and everybody distrusted him because he killed many lords and nobles in his Horde. He even killed his own khan, and although he had a khan, this khan of the Horde was ruler in name only, for it was he, himself, who was ruler and master of all. When he learned that the Tatars loved their khan he became afraid that the khan would assume the power from him. Therefore he killed him and all who were faithful to him and those who loved him.”   So the Rus' Nikonian Chronicle describes the situation in the Golden Horde at the end of the 1370s. Thirty years after the death of Özbeg Khan, the Golden Horde underwent another, much more violent transformation. During the reign of Özbeg's son Jani Beg from 1342 to 1357, he had kept the Golden Horde sailing through rough waters as the overland Asian trade began to unravel and the Black Death ravaged his cities.  But with Jani Beg's death in 1357, possibly at the hands of his own son Berdi Beg, the good fortune of the Golden Horde came to a sudden and bloody end. Now the Horde was to enter two decades of anarchy; the bulghaq, the topic of today's episode. I'm your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.   In 1357, Jani Beg had just returned from his successful conquest of what is now Azerbaijan, when he suddenly died. According to a contemporary writer, al-Ahari, his son Berdi Beg was, at the time of his father's death, still in the Azerbaijani lands. But sources such as the later Nikonian Chronicle have Berdi Beg convinced by a cunning emir to strangle his father himself after bringing numerous princes into an alliance with him. The widespread impression seems to have been that he organized his father's murder, even if the most contemporary sources do not place Berdi Beg there himself. After Berdi Beg left Azerbaijan, the region was lost, seized by the Jalayirids of Baghdad.    Berdi Beg in quick order, with the backing of his grandmother Taydula, was proclaimed Khan of the Golden Horde. But feeling he faced threats, real or imagined, the new khan's first actions were violence. Echoing his father and grandfather, Berdi Beg had his brothers murdered: 12 of them, by one count. For one infant brother, Berdi Beg is alleged to have done the deed with his own bare hands, despite the pleadings of grandmother Taydula Khatun. A number of other high ranking princes and officials too met their deaths on Berdi Beg's order.   Berdi Beg's actions did little to engender love to the new monarch, for whom Heaven seemed to show little favour. The Horde's trade had declined tremendously in these years. Cities starved and shrunk, as they lost access to international trade, were depopulated by the Black Death and local farmland suffered. The mid-fourteenth century saw the Little Ice Age strike  and undo the system built up by the Jochids over the last century. Decreased rainfall over much of the steppe, and likely over-grazing from ever larger herds needed to support cities, when combined resulted in the rapid aridisation across the region. Much of the grassland simply could not sustain the great herds any longer. Almost paradoxically, the Caspian Sea was rising and causing increased flooding along the lower reaches of the Volga, which inundated cities and farmland in the Horde's most densely populated region.    The great cities of the Horde saw their population drop rapidly, and the material wealth evaporated without the trade or population to sustain it. The Horde's elites who had enriched themselves off it were frightened, angered and uncertain. Berdi Beg's efforts did little to improve things; he is known, for instance, to have raised trade duties on imports to their highest level ever recorded in the Golden Horde: 5%. And an especially virulent wave of the plague in 1359 really topped things off.    His legitimacy already in doubt due to widespread rumours of having murdered his own father, the generally respected Jani Beg, it should not be a surprise that Berdi Beg's rule was on thin ice. After only two years on the throne, Berdi Beg, grandson of mighty Özbeg, was murdered. The exact circumstances are unclear; the Nikonian Chronicle puts the blame on the same beg  who had urged Berdi Beg to kill his father. The murder of Berdi Beg Khan in 1359 did not, however, improve things very much.    On Berdi Beg's death, the throne was taken by Qulpa, a fellow who is variously identified as a brother or cousin of Berdi Beg. Qulpa was not long to enjoy the throne. After six months, Qulpa and his two sons, curiously with the very Rus' Christian names of Ivan and Mikhail, were all in turn murdered, this time by Nawruz, a brother of Qulpa. Still, the Rus' princes came to pay homage to Nawruz, and momentarily things looked like they might settle. That is, until Khidr came. Khidr ruled an appanage east of the Ural River, and was no descendant of Batu, but of another son of Jochi, named Shiban. In some accounts, he was invited by Taydula Khatun. But he simply may have seen a chance to throw his hat in the ring. Only months after he took the throne, Nawruz and his son were killed by Khidr, who became the new khan of the Golden Horde. So ended the line of Batu Khan, having ruled the western steppes for a century. The purging of the Batuid lineage with every succession since Toqta and Nogai's coup in 1291 had reached its final outcome, with Nawruz and his sons the final known male descendants. With the exception of Berke, all the khans of the Golden Horde until that time had been a descendent of Batu. Now, Khidr Khan's actions had essentially opened the succession to any possible claimant. And boy, did it.   Within a year Khidr was dead, and over the next twenty years the Jochid throne effectively became the most violent game of musical chairs. Over this period, some 25 khans, possibly more, were declared in Sarai, of varying lineages. Some ruled for two or three years, while many ruled only months.  Most of these figures are known only by their names. Some are known only by coinage; in one year, 6 different khans minted coins in Sarai.   The consequences were legion. The economic woes worsened as cities were now sacked by opposing forces. For the first time, we see archaeological evidence for fortifications around the Horde's cities in the steppe. A number of cities were outright abandoned. In the west, the condominium with Lithuania was abandoned as the Lithuanian dukes immediately seized the western lands, and in short order the Lithuanian principality extended to the Black Sea coast line. In 1362 under Duke Ol'gerd the Lithuanians won a battle over a Mongol army at the Battle of Blue Waters. In the aftermath, everything between the Dnieper and Dniester came under Lithuanian control, although at least for Podolia, in south-western Ukraine, the Lithuanians continued to pay the tribute to the Mongols well into the fifteenth century. Moldova and other Balkan regions declared independence, while the local nomadic leaders seem to have also stopped heeding the word of Sarai.   East of the Ural River, the Blue Horde, ruled by the line of Batu's older brother Orda, too faced its own troubles. The lineage of Orda became extinct in the 1360s and saw its own succession troubles. The khans in the Blue Horde, by the end of the decade, stopped minting coins with the name of the Sarai khans, and started doing so in their own names. The Blue Horde was thus independent once again.     The princes of the Rus' stopped making the trips to the Horde to declare their allegiance, for it simply became too dangerous. Rus' princes were now being robbed and held captive by the rival Jochid powers when they made the trip through the steppe. And with the khans  being overturned every few months it was now far too dangerous a trip to make so regularly.  However the Rus' lands were not to be ignored, as certain Jochid princes and contenders for power, having lost access to the trade they had one relied upon, were now turning evermore to the Rus' as a source of income and loot.    The khan's authority decreased further, as many khans did not rule themselves, but were puppets for non-Chinggisid powerbrokers. And the chief of these was Mamai, a powerful military commander based in the steppes near Crimea. As he was no descendant of Chinggis, Mamai had no right to claim the title of khan himself, though he held prestige as beylerbeyi and  married a daughter of Berdi Beg. But that didn't mean he could not put someone amenable to his interests on the throne. The first of these fellows was Abdullah, who was alleged to be a son of either Özbeg Khan or his son Tini Beg. He simply may have come from another corollary branch of the lineage, who Mamai had found convenient to play up. That was hardly unusual, as supposed lost sons of Özbeg, Tini Beg and Jani Beg continued to pop up, such as another claimant, Kildi Beg, in 1361.    Abdullah Khan was enthroned in Sarai in 1361, and Mamai returned to his Crimean pastures soon after.  But Abdullah was quickly ousted by rivals in Sarai and fled back to Mamai. This was to be a regular pattern over the 1360s. Every few years Mamai would march with an army, enthrone Abdullah and return, only for Abdullah to be tossed out or flee when another claimant came a-knockin', or the nobles in Sarai declared someone else khan. The final attempt resulted in Abdullah's death in 1370, upon which Mamai empowered a princess in Sarai, named Tulun Bey. Her exact identity is uncertain. It is commonly assumed that she was the Chinggisid princess who Mamai had also married, a daughter of Berdi Beg Khan. If this is the case, then she was the last to rule from the line of Batu. But she was quickly switched out by Mamai, and replaced with another of Mamai's puppet. And so this pattern continued until 1380, with Mamai's candidates thrown out every few years, and then installed a year or two later. It's caused an endless amount of work for historians to try and determine the order and lengths of reigns of all these khans.    It was well known at large that the Khan was a figurehead for Mamai. As the Rus' Nikon Chronicle states,  “At that time in Mamai's Horde there was a khan, but he had no power by comparison with Mamai, and was khan in nothing but the title. Even this title, however, was meaningless because all glory and all action were Mamai's. There was much trouble in the Horde and many Tatar lords had killed each other, lost their heads and died at sword's points. Thus, little by little, the Horde's great power was wasted away.”   Mamai's intrigues did not merely extend to Sarai, but to the Rus' lands as well, as the Sarai Khans sought revenue from Rus' taxes, and Mamai intervened to earn them himself. In one of these conspiracies, Mamai granted the yarliq, or patent, to the Grand Principality of Vladimir, the chief of the Rus' princes, to the young Prince of Moscow Dmitri Ivanovich. Or as he's better known to posterity, Dmitri Donskoi.   Dmitri was a grandson of Ivan I Kalita, the grandson of Alexander Nevsky who had worked so well with Özbeg Khan and began Moscow's rise to prominence. Ivan Kalita had monopolized the position of Grand Prince, the chief tax collector of the Rus', until his death. Upon that, it went to his son Simeon, who died of plague, and then to Dmitri's father, Ivan II Ivanovich, who died in 1359 as the Horde's troubles began. Only 9 years old when his father died, Dmitri could not rely on the Khans' support as his fathers had.    We've discussed this matter over previous episodes, but it bears reiterating here. The top title in the Rus' lands was the Grand Prince of Vladimir. Whoever held this was the #1 prince in the Rus', and collected taxes for the khans— skimming off the top for himself, of course, but also giving him great influence among the Rus'. While initially the khans had just appointed whoever the Rus' princes elected as Grand Prince, during Özbeg's reign the khans assumed the right to rescind and appoint the Grand Prince at will.  And the Princes of Moscow, a lesser branch of the Riurikid lineage, quite desired it but held no right to the title without the khan's backing. And so a relationship was formed, wherein the Princes of Moscow became the most scrupulous  enactors of the khan's will, in order to retain the titles to both Moscow and the Grand Principality, as well as the khan's military support as protection. And correspondingly, from the 1320s onwards Moscow grew in wealth and power, to the displeasure of the other Rus' princes, who saw the Moscow line as upstarts with no right to the Grand title.    Flashing forward to 1360, Khan Nawruz took both the Moscow title and the Grand Principality away from young Dmitri, only for it to be returned in 1362 when the new Khan in Sarai granted both back to him. Mamai saw his opportunity here, and also granted Dmitri the patent for the Grand Principality. The rival in Sarai quickly rescinded his support for Dmitri.  Without support from either the Khan or other Rus' princes the young Prince of Moscow could only seek the assistance of Mamai.    Mamai gained himself an excellent source of revenue in the young Dmitri, who turned out to be a very capable hand, while for Dmitri Mamai's armies gave him security he would not have otherwise as a youth on the throne. With the loss of the overland trade, the income from the Rus' was more important than ever, and Mamai was happy to earn it, and Dmitri did his best to deliver on time. But Dmitri was not passive, and wanted to secure his own base lest the whims of Mamai shift. Through diplomacy, marriage alliances and military threats, Dmitri steadily built his support among the Rus' princes, and incorporated other smaller principalities under Moscow's rule. For the first time, the city of Moscow itself received stone walls on Dmitri's order, which proved their worth in repelling an attack by Lithuania and the rival city of Tver' in 1368.    Mamai had use for Dmitri only as long as he provided tribute, so when the Hanseatic League disrupted trade to Dmitri's territories in the late 1360s, thereby preventing Dmitri from collecting the silver for Mamai, Mamai rescinded the patent to the Grand Principality and gave it to Dmitri's rival Mikhail Aleksandrovich of Tver' in 1370. Yet Mikhail proved even worse at sending tribute, and when Dmitri personally presented himself to Mamai to pay homage, accompanied by a great many gifts, Mamai returned him the Grand Princely title.  The situation repeated in late 1374 when the Hanseatic League cut the silver export to Novgorod. Mamai once again gave the Grand Princely title to Mikhail of Tver', but due to plague and Mamai's failed attempt to control the Volga trade routes, he was unable to support Mikhail militarily. Dmitri in the meantime had built up Moscow's military and alliances, and in Mamai's absence forced Mikhail to surrender. Confident in his abilities, Dmitri then took his army to the Volga, asserting Moscow's authority as far as Bulghar in 1377.        Mamai was not pleased at this development, a threat to his income while an even greater threat loomed on the horizon. Far to the east in the Blue Horde lands, a powerful Chinggisid Prince named Toqtamish, backed by the Central Asian warlord Temür, was rapidly growing in power. The eye of Toqtamish was drifting to Sarai, and he dreamed of assuming leadership of the Golden Horde. Doing so was a threat of unification which would entail a collision with Mamai. Mamai thus needed to prepare for the inevitable battle, but to do this he needed the resources of the Rus' tribute. And to that, he needed Dmitri to play nice with him.  In August 1378 a force in Mamai's service was sent to collect the tribute. Dmitri set out, nervously, to meet it head on, intercepting it near the Vozha River. Dmitri's force held firm under their attack, and succeeded in flanking the Mongols. In an attempt to withdraw across the Vozha River, many of the Mongols were killed, and Dmitri looted their abandoned camp.    Such was the first real victory an army of the Rus' had ever had over a force of the Golden Horde in battle, though Dmitri gained little from this victory and neither force was large. But Mamai was furious. The next year he ordered a larger, retaliatory attack on the Ryazan' land, causing great destruction, burning several cities. Oleg, Prince of Ryazan' fled before him. The Rus' paid dearly for their effort.   In 1378, the same year as the defeat on the Vozha, more alarming news came from the east. Toqtamish had now taken Sarai, and proclaimed himself Khan. Confrontation was imminent, and Mamai could not face Toqtamish with Dmitri rebelling in his rear. If Toqtamish and Dmitri allied, then Mamai would be surrounded by foes. Mamai needed resources to face Toqtamish, and  he needed revenue to do that, and Dmitri, as chief tax collector of the Russian principalities and controlling much of the Volga trade, was directly undermining that. It was time for Mamai to confront Dmitri himself. Over the next year, Mamai organized an alliance with Grand Duke Jagailo of Lithuania and Prince Oleg of Ryazan. He called up troops from the Alans, the Circassians, and the Genoese as mercenaries. We are told in the Nikon Chronicle that Mamai furiously studied Batu's conquest of the Rus', trying to learn his tactics and strategy. It got to the point that allegedly, Mamai began to see himself as a second Batu, feeling superior to all others and his own men calling him “Great Khan.”   In 1380, Mamai was ready. He ordered Dmitri to deliver a higher amount of tribute than ever, even greater than what had been paid during the times of Özbeg and Jani Beg. The message was a stalling tactic, as Mamai made preparations to march on Moscow with Jagailo and Oleg, hoping to crush Dmitri of Moscow between the three of them.         In Moscow, Dmitri quickly organized all the military forces of the Principalities that he could. Surprisingly, most principalities, except Tver', Novgorod or those aiding Mamai, answered Dmitri's call for aid. Dmitri's efforts to build Moscow's influence now bore fruit, as for the first time in their history, the Rus' offered something of a united front against the Mongols. The ascendency of Moscow over the other cities had begun, but first they had to stand against Mamai.       In September 1380 in a field on the upper Don River called Kulikovo, Mamai and the Ryazan forces waited for the Lithuanians. In a sign of poor scouting, on the 9th of September Mamai's army was shocked to see the arrival of Dmitri and the Rus' host crossing the Don. Dmitri's goal was simple; defeat Mamai in the field, before the Lithuanians could arrive and overwhelm him. One of the most famous battles in Russian history was about to begin.    Numbers for the two armies are uncertain, with Dmitri leading perhaps as many as 30,000 Rus' troops from across the principalities, while Mamai likely had a slightly larger force, consisting of Mongol-Turkic, that is Tatar, cavalry, Circassians, Rus' from Ryazan and Genoese mercenaries. Battle began with a clash of champions; the Rus' monk Peresvet, and a Tatar named variously Chelübei or Temür Mirza. They charged one another on horseback, lances before them. At the collision both were run through and killed, though Perevet's body is supposed to have stayed in the saddle the longer.   Battle then commenced. It was across a wide front, extending the Rus' lines thin but ravines and streams hampered the full deployment of Mamai's cavalry. Fighting went on for hours, with Mamai's troops holding the upper hand. Skilled Tatar cavalry and arrows took their toll on the Rus' and both sides tired over the course of the day. Dmitri had given his standard to another to hold, and when that man fell, the Rus' wavered. Dmitri himself disappeared in the clash, supposedly wounded and knocked unconscious. Mamai appeared on the verge of victory and kept his forces engaged. Yet one final trick was left to be put in play. Dmitri's cousin, Vladimir of Serpukhov, was kept in reserve with the Rus' princely cavalry. As both sides were at exhaustion, the freshly deployed Rus' cavalry charged from their hiding place in the trees and into the flank of Mamai's army. Mamai could only watch as his overworked, exhausted army routed, and he too fled. Learning of Mamai's defeat, the Lithuanians rapidly withdrew before ever making contact. So ended the battle on the Kulikovo field.   Dmitri had led the Rus' to defeat a major Mongol army in the field, and for his victory he was given the epithet Donskoi, meaning “of the Don.” While today this battle stands tall in Russian popular memory as a struggle for independence, in reality it led to little immediate change for the Rus' or to Moscow's standing. Our main sources come decades after the event and reflect how the battle's stature had grown with retellings. While the more heroic and famous elements of the battle may have little basis in reality, such as the duel before the battle, the general course of events is probably accurate enough. Whether it was as great a defeat for Mamai as popularly imagined is unknown, nor can we know Mamai for certain was even present. Mamai's losses are likely greatly overstated, since the next year he was able to raise another army rapidly, suggesting a small clash may have been turned into a grand duel. Arguments that Kulikovo never actually happened due to a lack of archaeological evidence cannot be sustained, as it is rare indeed for archaeological evidence to survive of a medieval battle. Little of the valuable metal equipment was ever left on site, usually quickly scavenged, while bodies were taken away for respectful burials or disintegrated before they could be preserved in the earth. The slightly earlier battle of Bannockburn in Scotland, for instance, though tracked to a relatively small area, has left almost no presence archaeologically speaking.    The real victor at Kulikovo was not Dmitri, but Toqtamish. After Kulikovo Mamai had strength enough to raise another army, and fought Toqtamish on the Kalka River. There Mamai was defeated for the final time. He was soon captured and executed by Toqtamish or by Genoese in Crimea when he fled there. Either way, Dmitri had succeeded in weakening Toqtamish's main rival for rule of the Golden Horde, and the new Khan was ready to assert his authority. So ended the Tale of Mamai.        Our next episode takes you through the reign of Toqtamish, as we enter the final period of the Golden Horde, so be sure to subscribe to the Kings and Generals Podcast to follow. If you enjoyed this and would like to help us continue bringing you great content, consider supporting us on patreon at www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. This episode was researched and written by our series historian, Jack Wilson. I'm your host David, and we'll catch you on the next one. 

The death of Özbeg, Khan of the Golden Horde, in 1341 marked the end of an era for the Jochid Khanate. The thirty year reign of Özbeg had been one of relative internal stability; a stability his successors were not to enjoy. Bloody succession struggles, plague and economic woe were now to be the news of the day within the Horde. And it was Özbeg's sons Tini Beg and Jani Beg Khan who were to face the front of it. Today we take you through the reigns of Özbeg's sons, the eve of the great anarchy which would rip asunder at the very foundation of the Golden Horde. I'm your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.   Özbeg Khan, during his long life, seems to have initially desired his eldest son Temür to succeed him. Having violently purged the Jochid lineage upon his own accession in 1313, Özbeg had the luxury to decide on a successor. But Temür's death around 1330 left Özbeg bereaved, and forced him to make due with his other two sons, Tini Beg and Jani Beg. Born to his wife Taydula Khatun, Tini Beg and Jani Beg were well educated princes. Ibn Battuta noted numerous islamic advisors for both princes, and Jani Beg is specifically described as knowledgeable in Islamic laws. Their names both came from Turkic and Persian words for “spirit,” making them “lords of the spirit.” Tini Beg, as the elder, was preferred by Özbeg to succeed him. During his trip to the Golden Horde, Ibn Battuta describes Özbeg showering Tini Beg in preferences and honours for this purpose. Additionally, Ibn Battuta describes Tini Beg as one of the most handsome of men. There is slight indication that Özbeg and Tini Beg fell out towards the end of his life, when Jani Beg's name begins to appear alongside Özbeg's on coinage, suggesting perhaps the second son was being groomed to be heir.   On Özbeg's death in late 1341, Tini Beg still maneuvered his way onto the throne, likely to the displeasure of Jani Beg. We know little of his reign. There is some suggestion that he was not a Muslim, and had some close links with Franciscans, whom he sent as his envoys to the Pope. One of the earliest pieces of surviving Golden Horde literature dates to his reign, too; a Turkic language poem by the Horde poet Qutb, adapting the Persian language “Khosrow and Shirin” by Nizami. Dedicated to Tini Beg and his wife, it remains a fascinating, if brief, look at the courtly life and social structure of the Horde in the mid-fourteenth century.   We can tell you little else of Tini Beg's reign with any certainty. Jani Beg never took kindly to Tini Beg's ascension; we may suspect he felt that Tini Beg had stolen the throne from him. The order of events is conflicting in the sources; potentially their mother, Taydula, preferred Jani Beg and whispered into his ear while Jani Beg's Islamic advisers may have encouraged him, in reaction to the possibly non-Muslim Tini Beg's enthronement. In some versions, Jani Beg first kills one of their brothers, Khidr Beg, in very uncertain circumstances. In Tini Beg's anger, he raises an army to confront his brother Jani Beg, only to be defeated in battle, taken captive and executed. In other versions, Jani Beg only kills Khidr Beg after Tini Beg's death. The fact of the fratricide of two of his brothers though, is well attested.   So, Jani Beg became Khan in 1342. There can be little doubt of Jani Beg's islam. We are told he even set out orders for his troops to all don turbans and cloaks. Neither could there be any hesitation among the Rus' princes about recognizing Jani Beg's rule; one of Jani Beg's first orders was sending an army to install a new prince in Pereiaslavl'. The meaning was clear. Jani Beg was going to continue his father's policy of firm mastery over the Rus'. In quick order the Rus' princes all travelled to the Horde to recognize Jani Beg's overlordship; the Grand Prince, now Simeon Ivanovich, too made clear his subservience to Jani Beg Khan. Simeon was a close ally to the Khan, and over his reign made regular trips to the Horde, always returning with gifts, honours and Jani Beg's favour. A smart move, lest the Khan remove him from his post. In doing so, they continued the slow if steady consolidation of Moscow's influence regarding the other Rus' cities.        There is also indication that Jani Beg held loftier pretensions. By the start of Jani Beg's reign, he was essentially the last remaining Chinggisid khan with authority. The Blue Horde khans were his vassals, and the Chagatai Khanate and Ilkhanate were either divided or dissolved. In the Yuan Dynasty, with whom contact was infrequent, the Great Khan Töghön Temür was  a figurehead in comparison to his Chancellors. In reaction, it seems to an extent Jani Beg went about presenting himself not just as successors to Özbeg, but the rightful heir to Chinggis Khan. Not Jani Beg was not just the Jochid Khan, but the supreme Khan. Özbeg himself seems to have used in some instances the title of “khan of khans,” as did Jani Beg. In letters to the Ilkhanid successors in the Caucasus, Jani Beg calls himself the “khan of the three ulusus,” and references to “great Khan,” as a Jochid title continued among his successors for centuries. A subtle shift in ideology, but one indicating a recognition, perhaps, that the Mongol Empire was dead, and now the Jochid Khan was supreme monarch by the grace of Eternal Heaven.    Jani Beg did not quite share Özbeg's tolerance to other religions.  While he mellowed later in his reign, initially Jani Beg seemed rather set on reducing privileges enjoyed by Franciscans and the Orthodox Church in Rus', normally a strong supporter of Mongol rule. “Idol temples,” —that is, Buddhist or shamanist sites— were specified for destruction. And as we will see shortly, Jani Beg reacted with particular ire when Christians within his empire caused trouble. But even this animosity should not be too overstated; there is no recorded attempt by Jani Beg, or other Jochid khans, to try and convert the Rus' and other Christian populations to Islam. In the 1350s a Rus' Metropolitan, Alexii, healed the eyes of Jani Beg's mother, Taydula, for which he earned great reward. On Jani Beg's death in 1357 the Rus' Nikonian Chronicle describes the late Jani Beg as a friend to Christians, a  monarch who had given the Rus' many privileges. We might suspect that Jani Beg took the throne with a zealousness to prove his Islamic bona fides, and cooled in this fervour as the years passed.   Unfortunately for the Italian merchants in the Horde, in 1343 Jani Beg was still very much full of zeal.  That year, the second of Jani Beg's reign, news came to him of a murder of a Mongol notable in Tana. Tana was the Italian name for Azov, a trading community Özbeg had granted to the Venetians on the mouth of the Don River, nestled on the edge of the Azov Sea east of the Crimea. In September of 1343, an argument between an Italian and a Mongol, Hajji ‘Umar, resulted in the Italians murdering him in the street.  Jani Beg was white hot with rage directed at the Italians. His father Özbeg had generally handled the Italian traders relatively well, playing them off each other and making the Golden Horde a good deal of money. Initially, Jani Beg had reconfirmed the privileges of the Italians. However, Jani Beg took umbrage with the autonomy of the port cities, and felt they had too much control over the Jochid state's trade. The Italians' continued dealing in nomadic slaves may also have frustrated the Khan. After the poor relationship between Özbeg  and the Mamluk Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad, Jani Beg basically let the relationship with the Mamluks die. With the disintegration of the Ilkhanate, there was little need for such worthless allies, as far as Jani Beg was concerned. He only sent two embassies to the Mamluks; one alerting them of his enthronement, and one informing them of his conquest of Tabriz. There was no interest or desire to allow the Mamluks their continued access to Qipchap troops, and little patience for Italians selling perfectly good potential warriors to distant Egypt. Not surprisingly, it is about this time that Circassians were gaining prominence as the source of Mamluks in Egypt.    The murder of the Mongol in Tana was either the final straw, or simply a good pretence to rid himself of the Italians, and perhaps put his own men in charge of the trade. No more could the Italians enrich themselves at the expense of the Horde! In quick order Jani Beg had the westerners in the Black Sea trade cities of  Tana and Solkhat expelled or killed, and an army bearing down on Caffa in 1343. As the chief of the port cities, and the primary Geneose settlement, Caffa was the prize of the campaign. But it would be no easy nut to crack. Caffa's harbour allowed it to be resupplied by sea no matter how strong the land blockade. Caffa had also learned lessons from sieges suffered during the reign of Toqta Khan thirty years prior. The city walls were stout, its supplies well stocked. Khan Jani Beg found the city withstood his initial assaults over 1343 and 1344. On one occasion a night foray resulted in the Genoese burning down Jani Beg's siege machines. All Jani Beg could do was cut it off by land, for the Genoese could continue to bring in provisions.    A further issue had developed too. While the Venetian-Genoese rivalry was normally strong, in the midst of this emergency they had put aside their differences, the Venetians seeking shelter in Caffa and the city-states putting a trade embargo on the Golden Horde. Recall in our previous episodes, how we described the ways in which the economy of the Golden Horde relied on the overland Asian trade. Much of this funneled through the Golden Horde's Black Sea coastline, and booned with the relative stability of inner-Asian travel. But by the 1340s, this economic system was already reeling with the collapse of the Ilkhanate and Chagatai Khanate, and now with this embargo due to the war with Genoa and Venice, the Horde was effectively cut out of the international trade routes. As early as 1344, a Franciscan observer remarked in a letter that protests were breaking out in the Horde's city with the unintended economic strangulation. The consequences were felt across Europe, with the doubling of the prices of silk and spices. The Horde was a major grain exporter for much of the Black Sea region, and the war was now resulting in famine in Constantinople, as Jani Beg prevented Italian access to the grain harvests.   In an effort to bring about a resolution, Jani Beg needed a new ploy. He found just the ticket. In an unusual for any Mongol khan, with the exception of Khubilai, Jani Beg decided to build a navy. Harbouring it in the Sea of Azov, Jani Beg was going to attack Caffa land and sea, or at least choke it out. Unfortunately for Jani Beg, such an effort could not go unnoticed as sailors, labourers and materials were called into the region. Once the Genoese learned of it in 1345, a specialty raiding fleet was organized in Genoa, sailed across the Mediterranean and literally dashed Jani Beg's dreams to pieces; the Golden Horde's fledgling navy was nipped in the bud, burnt and sunk.    Jani Beg was denied his swift victory. In 1346 he maintained siege lines but undertook no assaults, and in 1347 concluded separate treaties with Genoa and Venice. Once more the Genoese were able to sail their cargo out of Caffa's harbour, and the Venetians returned to their colony at Tana. The entire campaign in the end was nought but an expensive failure, returning to status quo ante bellum. The situation remained tense, particularly when Genoese and Venetian rivalry reasserted itself, and not until the late 1350s do things appear to have normalized, and Caffa remained the preeminent trade center of the northern Black Sea coast. But by then, a much more significant crisis now faced the international market, in the form of that intolerable little bugaboo, Yersinia pestis. Or as you may know it by its more colloquial name, the Black Death.    Wherever its origins were, the Black Death had reached the Golden Horde's cities by 1346, travelling along the Central Asian trade lines.  It likely began ravaging Jani Beg's army outside of Caffa in 1346, and it is here that we get one of the most infamous cases of biological warfare ever recorded, wherein Jani Beg ordered his troops to catapult the plague bodies of their fallen men into Caffa, causing it to spread among the defenders. Fleeing Genoese thus took it back to Europe with them. The rest, as they say, is history.   Except maybe it's not. There's a number of issues with this popular story. Firstly, it's described in only a single, by Gabriele de Mussi, who was not an eyewitness. At the time of the siege, de Mussi was in northern Italy, and may have only learned of the information, at-best secondhand, but perhaps only after it passed through multiple informants. The manuscript itself is a matter of question: not only do no other medieval accounts reference Jani Beg launching corpses like this, but no other source mentions de Mussi's account in particular. In fact, it was unknown until it was discovered in the mid-19th century in what is now Poland! The document itself shows a poor understanding of the chronology, which is suspect for a supposedly educated lawyer like de Mussi. Caffa appears depopulated and abandoned by the end of the siege, though this was far from the case; it also portrays ships coming directly to Genoa from Caffa and spreading the plague thusly. But we know this to be false: the siege ended in 1346, but plague did not come to Genoa until early 1348, and from ships which had come from Sicily. As you probably know, not a lot of plague victims managed two years with it.    Further issues come from the logic presented in the text. The Mongols' deep reverence for their own dead, compounded by their conversion to Islam means that launching the bodies of their own fellows into Caffa seems an extraordinary taboo in their culture to break. In fact, there are effectively no historical anecdotes of an army tossing bodies of its own men into a city in order to spread plague; you'll find very few cultures in history in which soldiers would be willing to disrespect the bodies of their fallen comrades in such a manner. It's one thing to do it to bodies of the enemy, but the desecration of friends and allies is another matter entirely. The Mongols had a very well established reaction to disease outbreaks; leaving a site entirely, rather than stopping to continually handle the plague bodies. This makes a prolonged proximity to plague victims in order to load them into trebuchets even more unlikely. There have also been arguments that this would be a very ineffective means to actually spread plague!  We can even comment on the fact that, had Caffa been so decimated, why did the Mongols not simply overrun it?    Suffice to say, very few modern scholars accept de Mussi's version of events, if the manuscript is even authentic. At best, we might wonder if the Mongols had thrown bodies of prisoners, or even animals, into the city at some point during the siege, which through a game of telephone turned into lobbing thousands of Mongol cadavers into Caffa, as de Mussi suggests. An accidental conflation of timelines and events in the midst of monumental horror of the Black Death is an understandable mistake to make.    The more likely explanation is that the citizens of Caffa picked up the plague after the siege ended. Either looting the abandoned Mongol siege camp, or when the blockade was lifted and trade restarted with the Golden Horde. With the plague already running rampant in the Horde's cities, it was only a matter of time before it entered Caffa through  normal means. The port of Caffa began sending ships out for trade again in spring 1347; by the late summer, the plague was in Constantinople, and by early 1348 in Genoa.  Caffa may very well have been the launching point for the plague into the Mediterranean, but the launching point for plague into Caffa was probably not a Mongol siege weapon.       We have very little information on the effect the Black Death had on the Golden Horde. It seems to have had, just as it did everywhere, a devastating impact on urban centres. As we already established, there were a number of great cities in the steppes which had grown rich on the trans-continental trade. They had already been hurting in previous years with the fall of the other khanates and the Black Sea embargo; now the plague seemed a mortal blow.  The only references we have are vague mentions of thousands upon thousands of losses in these cities. The Rus' Nikonian Chronicle states that so many died in the Horde's cities, that there was noone left to bury them.    For the nomadic population, plague seems to have had a lesser impact. Steppe nomads essentially had a cultural system of quarantine for sick persons; gers would be marked off, and none allowed to enter which a sick person was inside. Those who had been in the presence of a person who died in a ger were forbidden from the khan's presence entirely. Areas where infected animals or persons were seen were strictly avoided. Such systems remain in place even in modern Mongolia, where Yersinis pestis occurs normally in some animal populations. There, the normally sparse population allows the disease to be avoided like the plague. And it seems it proved beneficial for the Mongols; while Jani Beg had around a dozen children alive by the time of his death, at the same time in the Rus' principalities numerous princes, notables and even the Grand Prince, Simeon, succumbed to the plague.        Yet most assuredly, the 1340s and 50s marked a downward path for the Horde. While occupied with the Crimean venture, Jani Beg's western bordering was further slipping from his grasp. In 1345 a Mongol army was defeated by the Hungarian King, Louis the Great. Lithuania continued its expansion into Galicia-Volhynia in competition with the Polish King Casimir III. Jani Beg was frustrated by them, and his mood proved fickle. Initially he granted consent for Casimir's campaigning in Galicia against the Lithaunains, but then in the early 1350s Mongol troops raided as far as Lublin.  In the end, Jani Beg ceded control of Galicia to Poland, and Volhynia to the Lithuanians, in exchange for the continuation of tribute for rights to both lands. While raids by Tatar troops would follow irregularly, Jani Beg's reign marks the surrendering of the western frontier of the Golden Horde.       Sinking the resources and men of his empire into Crimea, meant Jani Beg had been unable to take advantage of the disintegration of the Ilkhanate. Though we might wonder if this was in part a reluctance to press that frontier, given the troubles his father had faced attempting to do so. It was not until the end of the 1350s that Jani Beg finally threw his weight against the Ilkhanate's successors. For years, individuals had fled the Chobanid state to the Golden Horde, bringing news of the poor rulership of Malik Ashraf. For a bit more context, check out episode 58 of this podcast for these post-Ilkhanid states. But in short, the Chobanids were a non-Chinggisid dynasty based in what is now Azerbaijan. Their final ruler was Malik Ashraf, a cruel and violent man who alienated essentially everyone he could. Jani Beg must have felt that the greatly weakened Malik Ashraf would be a pushover. His intentions were clear in the letter he sent to Malik Ashraf in Tabriz:       “I am coming to take possession of the ulus of Hülagü. You are the son of Choban whose name was in the yarligh  of the four uluses. Today three uluses are under my command and I also wish to appoint you emir of the ulus; get up and come to meet me.” At best, as a non-Chinggisid, Malik Ashraf could rule as a governor on behalf of a khan. Malik Ashraf asserted in his response that this is what he was doing, ruling on behalf of Hülagü's line. The fact that Malik Ashraf by that point had no Ilkhanid puppet khan was glossed over. Additionally, Malik Ashraf sought to ease worries among his men by stating that as the ruler of the lands of Berke, Jani Beg had no right to the lands of Hülegü. Such an argument did little good as Jani Beg's host entered the Caucasus in 1357. After a single battle the Chobanid army disintegrated, and the fleeing Malik Ashraf was caught and executed. After almost a century of on and off warfare, Tabriz finally came under Jochid rule. Jani Beg was victorious as none of his ancestors had been. After years of reverses, difficulties and other trials, Jani Beg finally had his great victory. He appointed his son Berdi Beg as governor of the region, and returned triumphant to the Golden Horde… only to die two months later. The blame is usually attributed to Berdi Beg, who in various sources was convinced into the action by poison-tongued emirs. In one account, Berdi Beg strangles his father himself.  Berdi Beg quickly followed this up with murdering many of his brothers, including one who was only eight months old. He is alleged to have killed this one with his own hands. This, as we will see next week, was very far from being the end of the killing.        So ended the reign of Jani Beg Khan, and with it, the golden age of the Horde. Jani Beg appears as an almost pale imitation of Öz Beg, ambitious enough for the throne, but not the man to steer the ship in a time of crisis. He wasted men and resources on his effort to expel the Italians, and achieved nothing for the outburst, preventing him from sooner seizing opportunity in the Caucasus. The Black Death and unraveling of the overland trade was of course outside of his power, but Jani Beg's clumsy hand did nothing to assuage the situation. The fact that he did not face a real threat to his power until 1357 though, speaks to the strength of the Jochid political system that it could essentially coast through these years without major disaster. Such a thing could not be said of Berdi Beg's reign, or those who were soon to follow him, as the Golden Horde entered its period of bulqhaq: anarchy. Our next episodes will detail the steady collapse of the Golden Horde, so be sure to subscribe to the Kings and Generals Podcast to follow. If you enjoyed this and would like to help us continue bringing you great content, consider supporting us on patreon at www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. This episode was researched and written by our series historian, Jack Wilson. I'm your host David, and we'll catch you on the next one. 

“Account of the exalted Sultan Muhammad Uzbak Khan.  His name is Muhammad Uzbak, and Khan in their language means ‘sultan.' This sultan is mighty in sovereignty, exceedingly powerful, great in dignity, lofty in station, victor over the enemies of God, the people of Constantinople the Great, and diligent in the jihad against them. His territories are vast and his cities great; they include al-Kafa, al-Kirim, al-Machar, Azaq, Sudaq and Khwarezm, and his capital is al-Sara. He is one of the seven kings who are the great and mighty kings of the world. [...] this sultan when he is on the march, travels in a separate mahalla, accompanied by his mamluks and his officers of state, and each one of his khatuns travels separately in her own mahalla. When he wishes to be with any one of them, he sends to her to inform her of this, and she prepares to receive him.”   So the great traveller Ibn Battuta describes Özbeg, Khan on the Golden Horde, during his visit to that khan's camp. From 1313 until his death in 1341, Özbeg enjoyed the lengthiest of reigns of a Mongol ruler, second only to his distant cousin Khubilai Khaan. The powerful Özbeg would be long remembered as the mightiest of Jochid rulers, and his life was  a watershed for the Horde. After him, all khans were Muslims, and his life would be a model, the marker of the Horde's Golden Age. Yet, despite the proclamations of his excellence, tensions bubbled under the surface, and Özbeg's great power did not translate into great success. In today's episode, we take you through the transformation of the Golden Horde under Özbeg, looking specifically at islamization and urbanization. I'm your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.   Özbeg was a son of To'rilcha, a grandson of Möngke-Temür Khan, a great-great-grandson of Batu, a great-great-great-grandson of Jochi, and thereby a descendant of Chinggis Khan. Özbeg's father To'rilcha had been a part of the four-wary princely junta that ruled the Horde from 1287 to 1291 under Tele-Buqa Khan. As one of the top princes of this union, and one of the sons of the prestigious Möngke-Temür Khan, To'rilcha had certainly been a powerful prince within the horde. It seems Özbeg drew much of his initial legitimacy from this, and retained a great distaste for his uncle Toqta Khan, who had To'rilcha and the other princes  killed in the 1291 coup with the aid of Nogai. Toqta then married Özbeg's stepmother, To'rilcha's chief wife Bayalun Khatun, and apparently exiled Özbeg to Khwarezm, which cemented Özbeg's hatred for his uncle. It's not surprising then that Özbeg is often accused of being behind Toqta's somewhat mysterious death in 1312. As we covered in our episode last week, the sources are contradictory over what immediately followed. Though Mamluk sources tend to have Toqta's sons predecease him, a number of other accounts have Özbeg battle one of Toqta's surviving sons. Regardless, by the start of 1313 Özbeg was duly enthroned as Khan of the Golden Horde, and if he had not done so already, made public his conversion to Islam.    Özbeg had a particular view on how to hold onto power, which involved executing a great number of potential rivals to the throne. At least one hundred princes and members of the military elite were killed in perhaps the largest princely massacre of the Mongol Empire and its successor khanates. The justification for many of the deaths was the failure of the given princes to convert to Islam, but this was almost certainly little more than an excuse to substantially trim the branches of the aristocracy. Özbeg wanted to ensure that there would be not only no rivals to his own position, but that only his own sons would be able to succeed him.   Certainly, islamization was a key part of Özbeg's reign. There can be no doubt over its spread amongst the Jochid elite from these years onwards, and accounts like Ibn Battuta not only stress the piety of Özbeg and his court, but how islamic institutions were now seeped into the actual administration of the Golden Horde. This ranged from readers of the quran accompanying the royal family everywhere, to Islamic qadi courts now operating alongside the initial justice system established by the dynasty, the jarquchi courts. From Özbeg's coinage, we know he took the Islamic title and name of Sultan Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad, and in his contacts with the Mamluk Sultanate he expressed loudly the notice of his conversion, and his success in converting the nomads of his empire to Islam. The specific mentions of him killing shamans and Buddhist lamas also indicates an effort to actively uproot the old ways.   Yet there remains considerable evidence to continued religious plurality within the Golden Horde and for Özbeg himself. For example, at the very start of his reign he wedded his step-mother, Bayalun Khatun, a widow of both Toqta and his father To'rilcha. An experienced political player with many contacts, her support was important in Özbeg's ascension. Yet wedding his own step-mother was quite against Islamic law and practice. Here Özbeg's qadis conveniently found a loophole; as neither of her previous husbands had  been Muslims, neither marriage was thus legal, and hence technically Özbeg was not marrying his own step-mother. We can't know if that convinced anyone, but noone had the power to tell Özbeg “no.”    Moreover, we know that Özbeg did not seek to convert the Christian populations of his realm to Islam. The Rus' chronicles mention no effort on the part of Özbeg to do so, and only rarely do they even remark on his status as a Muslim. One of his earliest actions as khan, even in the midst of the most zealous period after his conversion, was going out of his way to welcome the Genoese back to Caffa, and in 1332 granted the Venetians right to build a quarter at Tana, on the mouth of the Don River. In quick order he confirmed tax exemptions for the local Franciscan community and gave them permission to build a cathedral in Caffa. Even when a nominal order went out banning the ringing of church bells, it seems there was little enforcement of it, given that this Franciscan cathedral continued to ring them according to other sources. These were not the only privileges they were granted, for the Franciscans were also given freedom to perform missionary activities deep within Horde lands. A Franciscan letter from 1320 indicates that their missionaries had reached as far as Bashkiria, only six years into Özbeg's reign.  A number of extant Franciscan letters survive speaking of the success of their missions due not just to Özbeg's tolerance, but of even his family. Özbeg's chief khatun after Bayalun's death was Taydula, who was specifically noted for her patronage of Christian communities. In fact, letters remain from Pope John XXII and Pope Benedict XII thanking Özbeg and Taydula for their favourable treatment of Christians in the Horde.   Though Christians received privileges from Özbeg, there is also references to his treatment of other religious groups. During his trip to the Golden Horde, Ibn Battuta met a Jewish person from Spain. Buddhist Uyghurs remained a part of Özbeg's court. And from other evidence too we know of the continued practice of non-Islamic beliefs well after Özbeg. The Golden Horde's powerful beylerbeyi, Edigü, who took power some fifty years after Özbeg's death, also made a name for himself having to stamp out Buddhism and shamanism. And in the fifteenth century a few eye witness reports, such as Johann Schiltberger, indicate a limited presence of traditional folk religions. In other lands of the former Golden Horde, such as in what is now Kazakhstan, the advance of Islam among the Kazakhs remains a topic of debate, with some arguing that it was not until late in the nineteenth century that the islamization was really complete among the nomads there. Özbeg, much like his predecessors Berke and Töde-Möngke, could make a show of the islamization of their states in diplomacy with the Mamluks, but nomads clung, often quite stubbornly, to their old ways.   Yet no mistake should be made; for Özbeg and his successors, their government was now Islamic, and there was no question about that. Özbeg's active promotion of Islam, and invitation of Islamic administrators to his cities and government did a considerable amount to promote the religion and bring more converts. Moreover, Özbeg actively had much of his support come from Islamic beys within the Horde, such as his powerful ally Qutlugh-Temür, the governor of Khwarezm. And the effort stuck. Every khan to succeed Özbeg seems to have been a Muslim. According to the Mamluk chroniclers ibn Taghriberdi and al-Safadi, Özbeg ceased to wear his hair in traditional Mongol fashion or to Mongolian hats. Contemporary accounts from the Ilkhanate written before the 1330s such as Wassaf and Qashani portray Özbeg as a pious Muslim, who strictly punished soldiers who harassed sufis. Özbeg's first embassy to the Mamluks arrived in Cairo in April 1314 and loudly proclaimed their lord's conversion to Islam. And of course Ibn Battuta, traveling and meeting Özbeg in the 1330s, present Özbeg unambiguously as a Muslim, albeit one who enjoyed large feasts and drinking during ramadan.  The image that comes across then, is a relatively adaptable monarch when it came to religion, who knew how to press hard when he could and thus promote Islam, but when necessary to remain flexible to local custom, and keep his empire running smoothly.  The fact that Özbeg would sit on the Jochid throne for thirty years speaks much to his success in these matters, compared to the very short reigns of many contemporary khans.    Of course, nothing can be said about Özbeg's islam without mentioning Baba Tükles. This famous sufi became, in legend, the man who converted Özbeg to Islam. The story goes that he and Özbeg's shamans were to hold a competition to prove whose religion was true by seeing who could survive inside a hot oven. The shaman, as most humans would, burnt to death, but when they checked on Baba Tükles, he was sitting comfortably in the oven wearing nothing but a suit of maille and reciting prayers. Seeing that they had opened the oven's entrance, Baba Tükles asked what the hurry was. Thus was everyone amazed at this miracle, and converted happily to Islam, mashallah.  This conversion narrative, masterfully explored in an excellent monograph by Devin DeWeese, became hugely popular in Turkic and Tatar accounts from the sixteenth century onwards. However, Baba Tükles is a mythic figure, not appearing until centuries after Özbeg's death. Sources contemporary to Özbeg name several other individuals, such as a Bukharan sufi named Ibn ‘Abd-ul-Hamid, as the leading men who converted Özbeg. Perhaps one of them became the inspiration for Baba Tükles, though no fourteenth century account references men burnt inside ovens.   After the massacres of the Jochid princes, Özbeg set about reorganizing the Jochid administration.  In short, the power of the princes was broken, and Özbeg ruled through the non-Chinggisid noyad. For Özbeg, these were the four ulus emirs, called also qarachu begs or ulus begs. Essentially, the four most powerful clan leaders within the Golden Horde not of the dynasty of Chinggis Khan. The head of these four was the beylerbeyi,  who acted like the viceroy of the khan. Essentially, these four men discussed and carried out policy with the khan, and their stamp or signature was necessary on all official documents. The origins of the institution are unclear. Similar institutions are recorded in the other khanates; in the Ilkhanate, we know that chancellery documents had to be signed off by the heads of the keshig day guards, powerful, prestigious and hereditary positions. There is some argument that the positions actually were always a part of the Mongol Empire, while others see it as an innovation of Khubilai Khaan, and during the detente between the various khanates after 1304, it spread to other khanates. In the Golden Horde though, the qarachu begs appear distinct from the keshig, and appears as a formal institution throughout all of its successor khanates. For Özbeg, his first beylerberyi was Qutlugh-Temür, the skilled governor of Khwarezm who had been such a stalwart ally of Özbeg in his rise to power. Until his death in the 1330s, Qutlugh-Temür was the number two man in the Golden Horde. Together they led an administrative transformation, redistributing lands, islamicizing parts of government and greatly strengthening the central might of the khan.  The Blue Horde, the khanate of the line of Orda east of the Ural River, was nearly totally subsumed in this period and lost its autonomy.    Özbeg's new government also fostered the growth of cities within the steppe. The urbanisation of the Horde in the Volga Steppes had been ongoing steadily for years. In a trade network based along the major rivers of the steppe, important camps of the khans and princes, or those few-existing steppe settlements, had flourished under the stability wrought by the Jochids. It should be noted that the nomads of the Golden Horde did not aimlessly wander from one side of the khanate to another. Instead, the entire empire was divided into appanages, and allotted to minghaans. A given minghaan, meaning a thousand men and their families, was given access to pastures and natural resources within that appanage to provide for themselves. When nomadizing, they travelled between these allotted pastures, and were forbidden from accessing those of another minghaan without permission or paying a fee. These minghaans were placed under the control of princes and the military elite, essentially like a feudal estate. What this meant was that the lands of the Eurasian steppe were kept remarkably stable, and no longer divided between warring factions where each sought to claim more land from another.   No longer concerned about raiding by Qipchaps, and rivers now marked by permanent ferries sponsored by the khans, merchants moved relatively freely across the steppes, paying taxes and tribute but able to make a tidy profit for a bit of work. With then came either imports from Europe, Mediterranean, Central Asia or China, to exports, such as grains, horses, glass, beads, pottery Siberian furs, honeys, horses and slaves, which travelled to the Rus', Ilkhanate, Mamluk Egypt and as far as India. Indeed, as the Horde's cities grew, so did its ability to manufacture goods for both internal and external trade. And industries grew around them to support these networks, either by importing the materials needed for manufacture, to feeding the employees and housing the merchants who transported it. A wetter climate in the early fourteenth century coupled with the careful control the Jochids kept of land allowances also allowed for a wider cultivation of farmland within the steppes to better feed growing settlements. Then these people's spiritual and entertainment needs had to be met, requiring the construction of mosques and other places of worship, market places, bath houses, manors for the elite and more, which made steady work for builders and stone masons.   Altogether this fostered a veritable explosion in the growth of the Horde's major cities during the reign of Özbeg, recorded both in written sources and the extensive archaeological work in the former Horde lands.  Well over a hundred such Golden Horde settlements are now known. The most important of these were along the lower reaches of the Volga River, towards the Delta where it meets the Caspian Sea. Here lay the Horde's capitals; the first of these was Sarai, founded by Batu after the withdrawal from Europe. Berke had apparently founded a settlement further upstream, and Özbeg moved the capital there. It is assumed it was to better lay out his desired city, and avoid the flooding which plagued old Sarai, for the Caspian Sea was rising every year of the 1320s. Hence, the new capital was called Berke's Sarai, or Sarai al-Jadid, “New Sarai.” While originally made up of a few hundred felt gers and a handful of permanent structures, these cities rapidly transformed. Felt gers were replaced with immobile homes, originally maintaining the same shape before over time becoming polygonal, then square. Most of the Horde's major cities followed a similar layout as evidenced by archaeological study; one or more main squares surrounded by large buildings, with streets radiating out from it in rectangular districts. They contained great complex manor houses for the nobility; numerous craft workshops, from bone carving, pottery, iron works, glass-blowing, brick making, bronze casting, and jewellery production, as well as bathhouses, mosques, madrassas, necropolises, and orchards.    The largest of the ruins is the site known as Selitrennoe, which scholarship currently associates with Sarai al-Jadid, the second capital of the Golden Horde. Its remains stretch over 7 kilometres along the Akhtuba River, a minor branch off the Volga, and 2 kilometres into the steppe, and at its height in the mid-fourteenth century some estimates give it a population of 75,000. Ibn Battuta visited the city in the 1330s, and his description is as follows:   “The city of [Sarai] is one of the finest of cities, of boundless size, situated in a plain, choked with the throng of its inhabitants, and possessing good bazaars and broad streets. We rode out one day with one of its principal men, intending to make a circuit of the city and find out its extent. Our lodging place was at one end of it and we set out from it in the early morning, and it was after midday when we reached the other end. We then prayed the noon prayer and ate some food, and we did not get back to our lodging until the hour of the sunset prayer. One day we went on foot across the breadth of the town, going and returning, in half a day, this too through a continuous line of houses, where there were no ruins and no gardens. The city has thirteen mosques for the holding of Friday prayers, [...]; as for the other mosques, they are exceedingly numerous. There are various groups of people among its inhabitants; these include the [Mongols], who are the dwellers in this country and its Sultans, and some of whom are Muslims, then the [Alans], the [Qipchaqs], the [Circassians], the Rus' and [Greeks]. Each group lives in a separate quarter with its own bazaars. Merchants and strangers from the two ‘Iraqs, Egypt, Syria and elsewhere, live in a quarter which is surrounded by a wall for the protection of the properties of the merchants. The sultan's palace in it is called Altun Tash, altun meaning ‘gold,' and tash ‘head.'”   The remains of the palace of Altan Tash have likely been identified, and what a magnificent structure it was. As the largest building found within the Golden Horde, the palace in its glory must have been over 32 metres long and over 40 metres wide. Made of fired brick and timber, its great hall alone was 5.8 by 9.4 metres across, with tiled floors and elegant, gilded polychromatic mosaics along the walls. Some 35 rooms have been identified, including a child's room where children's drawings were found carved into the plastered walls. Unlike the palaces of Qaraqorum or Khubilai's capitals at Shangdu or Dadu, the palace of Sarai was not influenced by Chinese design, but Islamic. Seljuq, Khwarezmian and Iranian influences are detected throughout the remains. Similar layouts and designs, albeit on smaller scale, are found in both Sarai itself and the other cities of the Horde.   While Özbeg continued to live in nomadic encampments travelling hither and yon across the Horde, he certainly stopped in Sarai when business demanded it, and he sought to ensure he lived in style. The lower Volga from New Sarai down to Hajji Tarkhan on the Volga Delta became the densest part of a  new urban network, with these major centres each surrounded by dozens and dozens of smaller settlements, pitted with orchards, farmland and surrounded by the endless grass sea where herds of the nomads still roamed. Typical of these settlements, is that before 1360 they were built without fortifications; no enemy would march across the steppe, and if he did he would have to face the Khan's horsemen. Only when the Horde fragmented, were there foes who could march on Sarai.   The growth of the Horde's cities was not caused by Özbeg Khan. Rather, it was a long running process which evolved out of several developments laid down by his predecessors. But Özbeg took advantage of it, and cultivated it. Or at least, his knowledgeable ministers did, and Özbeg supported them, happy to see goods and coins fill up his warehouses while leaving the trouble of collecting it to others. He actively encouraged settlement and trade, welcoming craftsmen, merchants and administrators from across the Middle East and Central Asia to bring their knowledge and wares to his cities. As already mentioned, he granted quarters in cities along the Black Sea to Italian merchants. On their ships the goods of the Golden Horde, particularly grains and slaves, could be sold across the Mediterranean, while desired imports were brought into his empire. From those port cities merchant caravans could travel east to the Volga cities like Sarai al-Jadid; there a merchant could exchange his wares and rest, before returning home, or travelling south to the Ilkhanate, or even eastwards into Khwarezm. Here Gurganj, once destroyed by Özbeg's ancestor Jochi, was restored to prominence and was the Jochid's chief city in the east, a staging point for those travellers going deeper into Central Asia, or perhaps even to Yuan China. Özbeg certainly maintained contacts with the Great Khans, and routinely requested the delivery of the tribute owed him from the Jochid's injü lands in China. Özbeg could take advantage of, and capitalize on, the development of the Jochid lands and the normalization of contacts with the other Chinggisid states. In short, he enjoyed the fruits of a tree grown generations before.  And at each ferry crossing, in each city, and each border, every passing merchant paid tax to the Khan of the Golden Horde, in coins minted in Jochid cities and bearing the names of the Jochid Khan. In this manner,  Özbeg became a wealthy man indeed.   It was a system reliant extensively on wider Eurasian trade networks; thus the Jochid economy would face a terrible consequence were something to happen to that network. But that's a matter for another episode. Having looked at the transformation of the Golden Horde, our next episode will look at the politics and campaigns of Özbeg Khan, so be sure to subscribe to the Kings and Generals Podcast to follow. If you enjoyed this and would like to help us continue bringing you great content, consider supporting us on patreon at www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. This episode was researched and written by our series historian, Jack Wilson. I'm your host David, and we'll catch you on the next one. 

The beautiful daughters of the Circassians were in demand for the seraglios of the Turkish Sultan. Voltaire tells how these beauties were protected from smallpox centuries before modern vaccination. (Volume 34, Harvard Classics) Voltaire ill with smallpox, Nov., 1723.

This episode we're talking about Flash Fiction (aka: microfiction, sudden fiction, micro-stories, & short-short stories)! We discuss poetry hating barbarians, SEO for formats, Twitterature, intentionality, and how academic journals are Cosmopolitan for scientists! You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast delivery system. In this episode Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray | RJ Edwards Things We Read (or tried to…) Flash Fiction International: Very Short Stories from Around the World edited by James Thomas, Robert Shapard, & Christopher Merrill Further Up the Path by Daniel Oz Palm-of-the-Hand Stories by Yasunari Kawabata Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Stories of Horror edited by Lincoln Michel & Nadxieli Nieto “Machine Love” by Joy Kennedy-O'Neill “Ice” by Lotte van der Krol The 4th Annual Weird Christmas Flash Fiction Contest Dans l'antre d'Aoï garden by Hye-Young Pyun  Insignia: Asian Flash Fiction & Poetry Other Media We Mentioned “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn” (Wikipedia) “El Dinosaurio” by Augusto Monterroso “El Emigrante” by Luis Felipe Lomelí Every Book Its Reader by @marccold It's lunchtime, which means it's time for a very sad story in which love is found, love is lost, he does her wrong, and she gets her revenge by @marccold Nart Sagas from the Caucasus: Myths and Legends from the Circassians, Abazas, Abkhaz, and Ubykhs edited and translated by John Colarusso New Yorker Flash Fiction Tiny Crimes: Very Short Tales of Mystery and Murder edited by Lincoln Michel Two-Minute Mysteries by Donald J. Sobol  Encyclopedia Brown by Donald J. Sobol (Wikipedia) “Human Intelligence” by Kurt Anderson Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (Wikipedia) Links, Articles, and Things Episode 108 - Visual Novels Episode 074 - Short Story Collections Episode 027 - Non-Fiction Audiobooks Book Club for Masochists: Land Acknowledgements Drabble (Wikipedia) Cell phone novel (Wikipedia) Twitterature (Wikipedia) The Short Story Dispenser Storm Crow Beermat microfiction contest (archive.org) Episode 069 - Bizarro Fiction Lydia Davis (Wikipedia) Poetry in Transit (Vancouver) Deny Everything - Circle Jerks (Spotify) YouTube 15 Flash Fiction Books & 15 Flash Fiction Stories by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) Authors Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers' Advisory Podcasts chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here. Collections The Teeth of the Comb & Other Stories by Osama Alomar How to Wrestle a Girl: Stories by Venita Blackburn People of Colo(u)r Destroy Flash Fiction! edited by Berit Ellingsen States of Grace by Stephen Graham Jones Palm-of-the-Hand Stories by Yasunari Kawabata People From My Neighbourhood by Hiromi Kawakami Complete Works & Other Stories by Augusto Monterroso Forward by Shabnam Piryaei The Pearl Jacket and Other Stories: Flash Fiction From Contemporary China edited & translated by Shouhua Qi Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America edited by by Robert Shapard & James Thomas Microfictions by Ana María Shua Quick Fix: Sudden Fiction by Ana María Shua Two Hundred and One Miniature Tales by Alejandro Córdoba Sosa The Censors: A Bilingual Selection of Stories by Luisa Valenzuela Work-In-Progress by Ran Walker Stories “Riddle” by Ogbewe Amadin “lil miss jackson” by Nefertiti Asanti “Smoothies” by Venita Blackburn “Gloria” by K-Ming Chang “After 'While” by Cherie Dimaline “Before the Haze Devours You” by Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas “As the North Wind Howled” by Yu Hua “A Sailor” by Randa Jarrar “Moonboys” by Stephen Graham Jones “Roe Soup Dance” by Tammy Heejae Lee “Time, Like Water” by Amal El-Mohtar “As Above” by Amal El-Mohtar “Niqqak” by Sedna Qaġaq “More than Nothing” by Nisi Shawl “God Product” by Alyssa Wong Give us feedback! Fill out the form to ask for a recommendation or suggest a genre or title for us to read! Check out our Tumblr, follow us on Twitter or Instagram, join our Facebook Group, or send us an email! Join us again on Tuesday, September 21st when we'll be discussing Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Then on Tuesday, October 5th we'll be getting spooky in preparation for Halloween as we discuss the genre of Erotica!

Today, August 1, 2021 marks the 98 years of the first Circassians migrating to the United States. 

May 21st is known as the Circassian Day of Mourning. Circassians within the diaspora come together in observance and pay tribe to the lives that were lost throughout the Russo-Circassian War leading to genocide and exile.

This episode we’re discussing the dreaded Did Not Finish! We talk about why we don’t finish books, specific titles we didn’t finish, why not finishing books can be good, what “finishing” a book even means, how you “finish” a cross-media property, and returning to books we stopped reading. Plus: Speedrunning books! You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast delivery system. In this episode Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray | RJ Edwards Books We Did Not Finish Reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand Little Women by Louisa May Alcott The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien Rivendale (Wikipedia) Shelob (Wikipedia) A Walking Song The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.” American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, translated by Reg Keeland Moby-Dick or, the Whale by Herman Melville Other Media We Mentioned (and may have finished!) The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling Highlander (film) (Wikipedia) Nart Sagas from the Caucasus: Myths and Legends from the Circassians, Abazas, Abkhaz, and Ubykhs by John Colarusso Overwatch (video game) (Wikipedia) Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Wikipedia) Spyro the Dragon (Wikipedia) Later Alligator Final Fantasy VII (Wikipedia) Grand Theft Auto (Wikipedia) World of Warcraft (Wikipedia) Steven Universe (Wikipedia) Some of the pilot episode Vinyl soundtrack Other Friends Song Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Wikipedia) Once More, with Feeling (musical episode) (Wikipedia) Buffering the Vampire Slayer Watchmen by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (Wikipedia) Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love by Lisa Appignanesi  Nightrunner Series by Lynn Flewelling Tamír Triad Series by Lynn Flewelling Fables, Vol. 2: Animal Farm by Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, Steve Leialoha, and James Jean RJ’s review Links, Articles, and Things Matthew made the spreadsheet of the least finished books for Episode 095 - Ratings, Reviews, and Tags (you can find more info in the show notes to that episode) Retro Hugo Awards (Wikipedia) Smart Bitches, Trashy Books - Reviews by Grade  Goodreads tags Put Aside Set Aside BC4M Bookclub4m Mangasplaining What do they mean by "tricks/strats/splits?" “Strats are strategies used to save time.” Questions Have you ever read a Highlander novel? Will you join us in reading “book twos” in 2022? 20 Religious Fiction by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) Authors Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers’ Advisory Podcasts chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here. This retroactive genre list is for our episode on Religious Fiction. As discussed in that episode, Religious Fiction may mean something very different to different readers. The books in this list are fiction with prominent religious or spiritual themes, but vary quite a bit in tone and include a wide range of perspectives. Black Sunday by Tola Rotimi Abraham Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe American Dervish by Ayad Akhtar The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin Church Folk by Michele Andrea Bowen Once on a Moonless Night by Dai Sijie, translated by by Adriana Hunter Bring on the Blessings by Beverly Jenkins Silence by Shūsaku Endō, translated by William Johnston Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane, translated by Katherine Woods Ariel Samson: Freelance Rabbi by MaNishtana Deacon King Kong by James McBride Saint Young Men by Hikaru Nakamura, translated by Alethea & Athena Nibley God in Pink by Hasan Namir Foreign Gods, Inc. by Okey Ndibe  A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki Sleeping on Jupiter by Anuradha Roy Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese Give us feedback! Fill out the form to ask for a recommendation or suggest a genre or title for us to read! Check out our Tumblr, follow us on Twitter or Instagram, join our Facebook Group, or send us an email! No book speedruns on our YouTube channel, but you can watch Matthew (and others) playthrough visual novels! Join us again on Tuesday, June 1st we’ll be discussing the genre of Crime Fiction! Then it’s almost time for our annual “We all read the same book” episode. So on Tuesday, June 15th we’ll each suggest and talk about one title and you’ll get to vote for which one we’ll read.

Kadir Natho, a distinguished author, Circassian activist and one of the founders of the Circassian Benevolent Association, takes us back in time to when the first Circassians arrived to the United States in 1923. This episode was recorded in his Manhattan apartment just 8 days before his passing. We would like to thank Amo Kadir for his tireless efforts of encouraging all generations to continue preserving the Circassian culture. Check out "Circassian History" for additional information on our past and "Memoirs," an autobiography by Kadir Natho. Podcast logo graphic by: Yara Abaza Circassian Music by: Tamer Mamkej & Amer Bazoqa

A podcast created by two Circassian women capturing stories from the past, discussing present day challenges and what the future holds.

This episode we’re Receiving Book Recommendations! Last episode we asked each other for books in specific areas and this week we’re back with our suggestions for table top role playing games, folklore, healthcare, poetry, urban fantasy and more. You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast delivery system. In this episode Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray | RJ Edwards Things We Recommend An Indie Tabletop Game The Queen of Cups  TTRPG Safety Toolkit by Kienna Shaw & Lauren Bryant-Monk The Skeletons Slavic/Eastern European Folklore Slavic Folklore: A Handbook by Natalie Kononenko Natalie Kononenko (Wikipedia) Nart Sagas from the Caucasus: Myths and Legends from the Circassians, Abazas, Abkhaz, and Ubykhs by John Colarusso Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales Baba Yaga cross stitch Matthew’s working on Humanism in/of Healthcare 2020 Summer Reading for Compassionate Clinicians - The Gold foundation The Finest Traditions of My Calling: One Physician's Search for the Renewal of Medicine by Abraham M. Nussbaum Journal of Applied Hermeneutics - Canadian Hermeneutic Institute  Fiction that Surprises Bunny by Mona Awad Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah Sci-fi/Fantasy set in the Contemporary World The Scapegracers by Hannah Abigail Clarke Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker and Wendy Xu Spellhacker by M.K England The Lost Coast by A.R. Capetta Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor The Nobody People by Bob Proehl Urban Fantasy Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Minimum Wage Magic by Rachel Aaron Horror Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear Parasite Eve by Hideaki Sena Parasite Eve (video game) (Wikipedia) The Fog Knows Your Name Poetry Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media by Heid E. Erdrich Ledger by Jane Hirshfield Catrachos by Roy G. Guzmán Dub: Finding Ceremony by Alexis Pauline Gumbs Queer Poets Write About Nature by edited by Dylan Ce Feminist Essay Collection Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano Fiction set at Christmastime/Non-Fiction about Christmas Christmas Inn Maine by Chelsea M. Cameron Glass Tidings by Amy Jo Cousins The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum Russian Language Learning Materials Learn to Read and Write Russian - Russian Alphabet Made Easy Sputnik: An Introductory Russian Language Course, Part I by by Julia Rochtchina Space Opera Binti by Nnedi Okorafor To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers Suggestions from our Listeners! An Indie Tabletop Game Bluebeard's Bride from Magpie Games Slavic/Eastern European Folklore Slavic Folklore: A Handbook by Natalie Kononenko On the Banks of the Yaryn by Aleksandr Kondratiev Humanism in/of Healthcare The Language of Kindness: A Nurse’s Story by Christie Watson Fiction that Surprises Slade House by David Mitchell Sci-fi/Fantasy set in the Contemporary World Empire State by Adam Christopher The Abyss Surrounds Us by Emily Skrutskie Finna by Nino Cipri Urban Fantasy God Save the Queen by Kate Locke Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone Horror And the Trees Crept In by Dawn Kurtagich Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng Poetry The Octopus Museum by Brenda Shaughnessy Feminist Essay Collection Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism edited by Bushra Rehman and Daisy Hernández Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture by Nora Samaran Fiction set at Christmastime/Non-Fiction about Christmas Whiteout by Elyse Springer Glad Tidings of Struggle and Strife by Llew Smith Mangos & Mistletoe by Adriana Herrera Better Not Pout by Annabeth Albert Russian Language Learning Materials We Read These Tales by Syllables by Vladimir Suteev Space Opera Alien People by John Coon Dreamships by Melissa Scott A Matter of Oaths by Helen S. Wright Other Media We Mentioned Fiasco Ring by Kōji Suzuki Tomie by Junji Ito Spirit of the Season The Coldest City by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart Atomic Blonde (Wikipedia) Saga, Vol. 1 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden House of Reeds by Thomas Harlan Links, Articles, and Things Eisner Award for Best Lettering (Wikipedia) Lambda Literary Award (Wikipedia) Episode 078 - Supernatural Thrillers Shadowrun (Wikipedia) Give us feedback! Fill out the form to ask for a recommendation or suggest a genre or title for us to read! Check out our Tumblr, follow us on Twitter or Instagram, join our Facebook Group, or send us an email! Join us again on Tuesday, December 1st we’ll be discussing the genre that you chose for us to read, New Weird Fiction! Then on Tuesday, December 15th it’ll be our Best of 2020 episode!

The beautiful daughters of the Circassians were in demand for the seraglios of the Turkish Sultan. Voltaire tells how these beauties were protected from smallpox centuries before modern vaccination. (Volume 34, Harvard Classics)Voltaire ill with smallpox, Nov., 1723.

Last week, I shared briefly on the plight of the Ethiopian People. I will continue to share their narrative along with the Bedouins of Shibli. I'll also introduce you to the Circassians who came to our rescue. These are all peoples who make up an integral part of Israel’s Mosaic. Music: The Cinematic Middle EasternPhoto: The Circassian Heritage Center in Kfar Kama, Israel by T.Terroade

“And from thence they proceeded to the land of the Rus and conquered that country as far as the city of Magas, in the inhabitants of which were as numerous as ants or locusts, while its environs were entangled with woods and forests, such that even a serpent could not penetrate them. The princes all halted on the outskirts of the town, and on every side they built roads wide enough for three or four wagons to pass abreast. And they set up catapults opposite the walls, and after a space of several days left nothing of the city but its name, and took great booty. And they gave orders to cut off the right ears of the people, and two thousand seven hundred ears were counted. And from thence the princes returned homewards.”   So the Persian writer Juvaini describes the siege of the Alanian capital of Magas in winter 1239, a lesser known corner of the famous Mongol western campaign. In our previous episode, we covered the years 1236-1238, the first years of the great campaign wherein Batu and Subutai wrecked havoc across the northern Rus’ principalities and Volga Bulghars. When we left off, Batu and Subutai were withdrawing from the ashes of the northern Rus’ in spring 1238 to spend the summer resting men and horses and preparing their next moves. In today’s episode, we follow their continued movements, securing the remainder of the Volga and south Russian steppes, down to Crimea and the Northern Caucasus, to the resumption of hostilities against the southern Rus’ and the fall of Kiev, mother of cities, at the end of 1240. I’m your host David, and this is….   As we’ve stated already, Batu and Subutai pulled their forces back from the northern Rus’ to rest their men, fattening their horses on the grasslands of the steppe over summer 1238. The campaign had so far been a great success, marred by only a few difficult sieges and the loss of a son of Chinggis Khan, Kolgen. The northern Rus’ principalities had been subjugated, leaving only a collection of Rus’ states in the west still independent. For a time though, the Rus’ would have a respite. The Mongols were loathe to advance too far without securing their rear, and Subutai knew well from his own experience how tough the steppe’s inhabitants could be. Were you to place the conquests at that point onto a map of modern Russia, you would have seen a huge strip of land from the northernmost point of the Caspian Sea to where Moscow sits today as under Mongol rule. The steppes of southern Russia, Ukraine, Crimea and between the Black and Caspians seas north of the Caucasus were still unconquered, where several nomadic, semi-nomadic and other independent powers continued to reside. Many Cuman-Qipchaq tribes had fled deeper into that region, having avoided the initial Mongol advance. Leaving them unattended would allow them to move back into their original territory once the Mongols moved on, or even strike their rear while the Mongols focused on the Rus’ settlements. So the decision was made, once man and horse was rested by the end of summer 1238, to subdue these peoples.   You may recall our episode covering Chormaqun Noyan’s conquest of the Caucasus and Georgian Kingdom. That was happening essentially at the same time as this. As the Qipchaqs and Georgians were known to have had contacts and alliances in the past, it may have been a conscious decision to coordinate these offenses, ensuring no help would come from the steppe to the Caucasus while ensuring the Caucasus could not be a haven for fleeing nomads. Securing the region also provided another lane of contact for Mongol forces, rather than all messages being forced to circumnavigate the vast Caspian Sea. An interesting thing to note in regards to the scale of the Mongol Conquests, which often happened simultaneously: it’s easy to forget, since by necessity most discussions have to pick only a narrow window to discuss.    In autumn 1238, several Mongol armies shot across the southern steppe, beginning at the Black Sea coastline and moving east. Batu’s brother Shiban, Chagatai’s grandson Buri and Tolui’s son Bojek marched into the Crimean Peninsula, defeating the Cuman tribes who inhabited the peninsula’s fertile steppe, and its Armenian, Greek and even Gothic population. On December 26th 1238, the famed Crimean trade port of Sudak, also called Soldaia, fell to the Mongols, leaving them the masters of this great trade entrepot. Another of Batu’s brothers, Berke, later to be the famous Muslim ruler of the Golden Horde, at the same time campaigned against the Cuman-Qipchaqs north of the Black Sea. Those not subjugated by Berke were dislodged and likely among their number, or soon to be at least, was an important Cuman leader called Kuthen in Latin sources, though more commonly known as Kotjen or Kötöny. We’ve met him before, as he was present at the battle of the Kalka River back in 1223. With a marriage alliance to the Rus’ prince Mstislav the Bold, it was on Kotjen’s urging that the Rus’ came to assist him against Jebe and Subutai. Kotjen escaped the battle, remaining in the steppe north of the Black Sea until the return of the Mongols. With 40,000 warriors and their families, he fled before the Mongol advance, making his way to Hungary in 1239, where we will pick up with him in our next episode. Many Cumans were also sold into slavery. The slave trade was a big deal in the Black Sea, with captured nomadic Turks prized goods alongside the furs collected from the Finno-Ugric peoples to the north. Defeat in steppe warfare often resulted in the victors capturing the vanquished and taking them to the cities of the Crimea to be sold across the Meditteranean and Islamic world. The Mongol incursions caused a glut of slaves on the market- nomadic Turkics for their hardiness and horsemanship, not to mention skill with a bow even at a young age, made ideal soldiers once they received the training and funds of a state. The dying Ayyubid state in Egypt bought up a number of these, forming an important body of slave soldiers- Mamluks, who would soon overthrow their heirs of Saladin and establish their own dynasty, to the Mongols’ later chagrin. Slaves were sold further afield, as far as India, where Qipchaq slaves such as Balban eventually rose through the ranks to become Sultans of Delhi- again, to the Mongols’ later chagrin. Everything has consequences in Eurasia!   While Crimea was secured and the Cuman-Qipchaqs subdued, Mongol forces marched towards the Caucasus. The first group to feel their wrath were the Circassians along the eastern Black Sea, where the Olympic destination of Sochi stands today, attacked by Tolui’s son Mongke, the later Great Khan, and Ogedai’s son Qadan. We are told only that a Circassian King, ‘Buqan,’ was killed in the process. The Circassians, called Cherkes by the Russians, are a member of the northwestern Caucasian peoples, who like the Qipchaqs, also found themselves sold into slavery extensively and transported across the Mongol Empire and Meditteranean. In the late 14th century, the Qipchaq Mamluk dynasty in Egypt was succeeded by a Circassian one, commonly called the Burji dynasty.   With much of the central steppe and Black Sea coast secured by the end of 1238- though the northern Caucasus still untaken- Batu and Subutai recalled their forces. It was time to look to the Rus’ again, this time the mostly hitherto untouched southern principalities. On March 3rd, 1239 Pereyaslavl, downstream along the Dnieper from Kiev, fell to Mongol forces. It seems to have been something of a test to see the mettle of these southern principalities, especially that of Kiev. Kiev had been the great capital of the unified Rus’, and still must have held something of a reputation as the Mongols approached it cautiously. The reality of Kiev’s strength by this point was quite different. Despite the proximity of the Mongols and devastation of the northern principalities, fighting over Kiev had continued unabated by the Rus’ themselves. Kiev’s Prince Vladimir Riurukiovch was ousted by Prince Mikhail Vsevolodovich of Chernigov basically as the Mongols arrived on the doorstep of the principalities.    For summer 1239 the Mongols rested men and horses, once again picking up the sword in the fall. In October, the struck Chernigov, northeast of Kiev. An attempt was made by Prince Mstislav Glebovich, cousin to Mikhail of Chernigov, with his army to repulse the Mongols in the field. The army was crushed and Msitslav disappears from the sources. Stones so large four men could barely lift them were hurled by catapults into Chernigov’s walls, and by October 18th the city had fallen, its population like so many others subjected to fire, rapine and massacre.  From Chernigov, envoys were sent to demand Kiev’s submission, and Mongke, who in about a decade would become Great Khan of the Mongols, traveled to see the city himself, having heard of its splendour. He stood on the opposite bank of the Dnieper, and though his personal thoughts on the city are not recorded, Rus’ sources insist he marvelled at its beauty. Prince Mikhail refused to surrender, though he soon abandoned Kiev and fled to Hungary. Mongke’s presence was only reconnaissance and he to departed. Perhaps he had wished to gleam if Kiev had any offensive potential, and deeming this not the case, it was decided the city could sit for the time being. Mongke travelled back east across the steppe, joining with forces which were securing the remaining independent territory of the north Caucasus and steppe.   Here, the notable remaining independent force, other than those few Qipchaq and other Turkic tribes which had escaped Mongol armies, was the Alans and their ‘kingdom’ in the valleys of the north side of the Caucasus. The Alans were an Iranic people -ancestors of today's Ossetians- who had inhabited the steppe since the time of Attila the Hun. Their polity in 1239, insomuch as we can call it that, had emerged after the collapse of the Khazar Khaganate in the 9th and 10th century.  Sometimes called ‘Alania,’ its kings were notable for converting to Christianity and at times acting as a formidable military force, though by the start of the 13th century the Alans were a collection of local powers rather than a unified state, and sadly we are lacking much information on this kingdom. Back in the 1220s they had, alongside the Qipchaqs, fought Jebe and Subutai upon their exit from the Caucasus mountains, and as I’m sure you know by now, the Mongols were rather slow to forget such grievances. Their continued independence posed the final threat, no matter how slight, to the Mongol rear.   As a result of this decentralization, it seems the local Alanian leaders made their own decisions on how to respond to the Mongol advance. We are told of one individual, Ajis, who led a resistance against them until his capture and execution, while another, Arslan, quickly submitted and was made overlord of the Alans only to be replaced soon after by another Alan prince who provided his troops to the Mongols. The capital of the Alanian Kings was Magas, a strongly fortified site which remained influential among them, perhaps a symbolic capital as much as anything, and therefore a prime target. The Mongols arrived outside the fortress in November 1239, where they met their most difficult battle of the campaign yet. The very name of the settlement was disputed until recent decades, when it was finally reconstructed as Magas, the Persian word for ‘flies,’ as in the insects. This conclusion was reached in part as it explained why so many Medieval Muslim writers made puns involving these bugs when discussing it. The location of the settlement is also a long subject of debate, but an exciting possibility has been identified by Dr. John Latham-Sprinkle, who has proposed the massive hillfort Il’ichevsk gorodischche on the borders of Russia’s Krasnodar Krai and Karachai-Cherkess Republic, in the valley of the River Urup. Our medieval sources indicate that Magas was highly fortified and in a strong position, surrounded by dense forests, taking the Mongols months to subdue to. Few of the possibilities have matched the basic facts we know about Magas, but Latham-Sprinkle has found Il’ichevsk to meet the criteria,: for the time it was inhabited, for being a royal residence of the Alans, a strong fortress and destroyed in the mid 13th century.    Il’ichevsk is a long, high ridge, approachable only from the south, it;s other sides protected by cliffs and rivers. Seven lines of defenses, thick walls, wide ditches and embankments, protected the city and its inner layers- a veritable Minas Tirith, if you will. The site was massive: the whole fortified area from north to south was 15 kilometres, covering some 600 hectares. That’s larger than 14th century London or Milan! The outermost walls covered fields and small, scattered villages, becoming more densely populated as one proceeded up the ridge to the royal residence. With evidence of imported craftsmen to construct the walls, of stone 4 metre thick held with a lime mortar, it’s clear this was the home of  powerful lords, and thus a very reasonable choice to identify as the Alan capital.   For the Mongols, it was a difficult siege. Arriving outside the walls in November or December 1239, it was not until February 1240 when the city fell. Roads had to be cut through the forest around the fortress to even approach it. The length of the fortifications made it impossible for the Alans, well past their prime, to man the full distance, thinning their defense. We are told from the Yuan Shih, compiled from the Mongols’ successors in China in the 1370s, that the Mongols relied heavily on allied and subject forces for this assault. A Tangut officer is mentioned leading squads, and it seems many Alans fought for the Mongols against their capital. When it fell, it was destroyed. Archaeological evidence indicates the city was abandoned immediately afterwards: a church’s roof which collapsed from fire was never cleared from the floor. A child’s body was found unburied outside the church where it had fallen, a Mongol arrowhead embedded in the church’s walls.   While Magas fell, Mongol contingents ranged across the northern Caucasus, taking settlements and forts: by November 1239, when the siege of Magas began, Mongol forces were already within kilometres of the great fortress of Derband, which fell to them in spring 1240.  Lacking an existing overarching political structure to incorporate, the Mongols found it difficult to impose their rule on the ground outside of periodic military actions. The fact that sites in Dagestan began rebuilding their fortifications within a few years of the Mongol invasion was telling. In China, for instance, many cities taken in the early 13th century had their walls unrepaired until the 1350s and 60s.  The many valleys of the region made it a nightmare to bring every local tribe to heel. Perhaps because of this, the Mongols saw fit to transport thousands of Alans and others across the empire, as slaves and military units. From the Balkans to China we have Alans showing up in entire regiments over the 13th century, indicating their useful military prowess, and perhaps the frustration the Mongol governors felt dealing with them in the Caucasus.    In summer 1240 the princes were called back, holding a quriltai to celebrate the gains and decide the next steps. During this feasting we are provided an interesting episode from the Secret History of the Mongols. In this account, Batu sends a messenger to Great Khan Ogedai, informing him that during the feast Batu drank from the ceremonial wine first, which angered Ogedai’s son Guyuk and Chagatai’s grandson Buri who took offense at Batu taking this ceremonial position ahead of them. In the Secret History’s account, Guyuk and Buri leave the tent, calling Batu an old woman with a beard  and shouting insults. When Batu’s message reached Ogedai with the news, he sobered up long enough to become furious at his son and recall him. The whole episode has been torn over by historians repeatedly. It seems to have been the climax of long simmering tensions among the princes ,having until then been kept at bay by continually separating them over the campaign. There were likely several factors at play: Guyuk was haughty, being the son of the Great Khan though not his heir; likely a few continued the slander of Jochi not being Chinggis’ son, and hence Batu, the senior prince, not really a Chinggisid. Other concerns were more material. Historian Stephen Pow has noted that some regions were left to members of one branch of the family to attack, in theory making those conquests their territory. However, since the majority of the vast territory seemed destined for the Jochids, many of the princes grumbled as to what they were getting for their efforts. The timing is suspect as well, as the time needed for Batu’s messengers to reach Ogedai, and then Ogedai’s messengers to return to recall Guyuk, is too great for this is have occurred after the fall of Magas but before the fall of Kiev in December, which we know Guyuk to have been absent for.   Perhaps this was a compression of a series of events, or coordinated ahead of time, their troops required for the front with Song Dynasty, with later editing to the Secret History of the Mongols using this as an opportunity to discredit Guyuk, but multiple sources indicate the departure of both Guyuk and Mongke, along with their troops, around late summer 1240. So Batu and Subutai’s army lost as many as 20,000 men, on top of casualties they had already suffered and those stationed behind to keep their rear secure and prevent uprisings. This was not an end to the campaigning by any means, and Batu turned his sights to Kiev and the western Rus’ principalities. Once the Dnieper had frozen in November 1240, Batu marched onto Kiev, investing it on November 28th.  Batu set up his catapults in a great line and fired upon the city walls day and night until they crumpled before them. Kievan efforts to defend the breaches were met with hails of arrows, and the Mongols mounted the walls, forcing back the Keivans. Retreating to the Church of the Blessed Virgin, the Rus’ fortified it’s approaches. As the Mongols began to overcome the impromptu defenses, frightened townsfolk and defenders climbed with their possessions on top of the church, only to have to collapse under their weight. By the 6th of December 1240, Kiev was in Mongol hands.    Though Halych of Galicia-Volhynia soon fell as well, on the whole the campaign in southern Rus’ was considerably less destructive. In northern Rus’, essentially all major and many secondary cities had been sacked in quick succession, but we see in the south sieges of only major settlements, capitals like Chernigov, Kiev, and Halych, or undefended settlements without walls. At secondary cities which showed stiff resistance like Kremenents and Danilov, the Mongols moved past. Much of Galicia-Volhynia, the westernmost extent of the Rus’, was left untouched, it’s ruler Danilo not submitting to Batu until 1245, and even then, retained enough strength to declare his independence until a Mongol campaign at the end of the 1250s.  What was the cause of this comparative reduction of Mongol devastation? One factor is certainly the departure of Mongke and Guyuk with their troops, perhaps causing a loss in morale alongside the numbers of available men. Another aspect is that while the many sieges in Rus’ were successful and relatively quick, it does not mean they did not result in Mongol casualties. Indeed, evidence suggests the western campaign was a bloody affair for the Mongols, resulting in the losses of many elites and commanders- Chinggis Khan’s son Kolgen most notably. We are told of a large cemetery in Mongolia built for prominent Mongols killed in the campaign, and we learn from Chinese references to rich rewards for those who shipped the bodies of Mongols back to their homeland, something which apparently happened with some regularity.    While in field battles, Mongol commanders stayed behind the lines in order to properly assess the situation and give orders for troops movements, generally staying out of the battle itself, this was not the case for sieges. Rather, it seems officers, captains and even generals had to command from the front to help encourage the men over the walls. Sons of the elite aspiring to build their reputation as brave warriors, fought from the front as well. In the confined spaces and narrow streets of a city and fortress, the Mongols could not rely on their mobility, and it seems losses ran high. The Rus’ cities fell in quick succession but not without taking Mongols with them; we may likewise assume the difficult siege of Magas and other Caucasian fortresses had brought losses as well. By the time Batu and Subutai reached southwestern Rus’, Mongol casualties, both those killed and those injured in the many battles, were beginning to become an issue. In addition, units were left across the region to hold it and stop the newly conquered tribes from rising up and keep contact routes open with the rest of the empire.  Coupled with the departure of Guyuk and Mongke’s armies, it’s possible that Batu and Subutai’s army was as much as half its original size, maybe down to 50-60,000 men. Mongol actions thus were limited to major settlements where they could bring their full force or locations where defense was weak and a prolonged siege could be avoided. If not, the settlement was bypassed, preferring soft targets or to hit enemy field armies.    Still, Batu and Subutai controlled an experienced and battle hardened army, and had effectively conquered the principalities of the Rus’. As 1240 turned to 1241, they now sat on the borders of Europe, having conquered up to the edge of what is now western Ukraine. Many Cumans, and the odd Rus’ prince, had fled to the Kingdom of Hungary. The housing of Mongol enemies was an act of waragainst the Mongol Empire, and Batu was determined to punish the Hungarian Monarch for this. Europe was about to hear the hoofbeats of Mongol horses. Our next episode will take us to the famous battles of Liegnitz and Mohi, so be sure to subscribe to the Kings and Generals podcast and to continue helping us bring you more outstanding content, please visit our patreon at www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. Thank you for listening, I am your host David and we will catch you on the next one!

Caner Yelbaşı on “The Circassians in Turkey: War, Violence and Nationalism from the Ottomans to Atatürk” (IB Tauris/Bloomsbury). The book describes the course of Circassians in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey after they were driven from their north Caucasus homeland by the Russian Empire in the 19th century. Become a Turkey Book Talk member to support the podcast and get English and Turkish transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the archive, access to a 35% discount on over 400 Turkey/Ottoman history books published by IB Tauris, and an archive of over 200 reviews covering Turkish and international fiction, history, journalism and politics.

Clifford Smith, Director of the Middle East Forum’s Washington Project Cliff Smith is MEF's liaison to decision makers and opinion leaders in Washington, D.C. He holds a B.A. from Washington State University, an M.P.P. with a focus on international relations from Pepperdine University, and a law degree from the Catholic University of America. He is a member of the Maryland Bar. An experienced political operative, he is the veteran of numerous campaigns and has held several positions in Congress, most recently communications director for U.S. Rep. Gary Palmer. Oren Litwin, Senior Islamist Watch Research Fellow at the Middle East Forum Oren Litwin is a research fellow for MEF’s Islamist Watch and does extensive research for the Forum’s Islamist Money in Politics project. He is also an associate fellow for the R Street Institute and has previously served as the political risk fellow for the Young Professionals in Foreign Policy and as an adjunct professor of political science at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. MK Oded Forer, Member of the Israeli Knesset Oded Forer is an Israeli politician who currently serves as a member of the Knesset for Yisrael Beiteinu. Prior to his time in the Knesset, MK Forer enlisted in the Navy, completed naval officers course, and served in a variety of command positions. In the 20th Knesset, Oded Forer is a member of the Finance Committee; the Education, Culture and Sports Committee; and the Special Committee to Discuss the Motion for the Agenda on Difficulties in Reforming the Civil Service. Forer chairs the Lobby for the Promotion of Trade in Israel and Overseas and is member of the Lobby for Relations between Israel and African Countries, the Lobby for the Promotion of the Rights of Druze and Circassians in Israel, and more.

March 27, 2018 The dispossession and forced migration of nearly 50 percent of Syria's population has produced the greatest refugee crisis since World War II. This talk places the current displacement within the context of the widespread migrations that have indelibly marked the region throughout the last 150 years. Syria itself has harbored millions from its neighboring lands, and Syrian society has been shaped by these diasporas. Dawn Chatty explores how modern Syria came to be a refuge state, focusing first on the major forced migrations into Syria of Circassians, Armenians, Kurds, Palestinians, and Iraqis. Drawing heavily on individual narratives and stories of integration, adaptation, and compromise, she shows that a local cosmopolitanism came to be seen as intrinsic to Syrian society. Speakers Dawn Chatty, Professor of Anthropology and Forced Migration, Former Director of the Refugee Studies Centre and Emeritus Fellow, St Cross College, University of Oxford

Over the last three decades, migrants from the Russian North Caucasus have participated in local and global armed conflicts of different varieties. In many cases, they have done so as groups, or networks, representing one or more community. In the 1990s, Circassians fought in the Abkhazian war (1992) and in the first Chechen war (1995), though they withdrew from these conflicts when the struggle for a free Ichkeria turned into an al-Qaeda-branded jihadist movement. More recently, Chechens, Dagestanis and members of other North Caucasian Islamic communities have left in large numbers to fight in Syria—including with the pro-ISIS group Al-Baghdadi and with other anti-Assad forces. Meanwhile, other migrants from the North Caucasus have made many European and Russian cities their homes, while maintaining strong links to their place of origin. What relationship, if any, exists between the networks of Muslims from the North Caucasus that have built peaceful lives around the world and the networks that have facilitated and taken part in armed extremism? What makes some migrants seek violent solutions while others integrate into modern democratic societies? Denis Sokolov, a long-time student of communities and networks from the North Caucasus, will lead a discussion to help understand how these questions might be answered today and in the future. This event is made possible by the generous support of Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Jacob Shapiro and Kamran Bokhari discuss the geopolitical importance of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and whether the realities it created will define the future. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0 TRANSCRIPT: JS: Hello everyone and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. My name is Jacob Shapiro, I am the director of analysis for Geopolitical Futures and I am joined again this week by Kamran Bokhari, who is our senior analyst, welcome Kamran. KB: Thanks for having me, Jacob. JS: I just want to apologize to our listeners, I know that we didn't manage to get a podcast out last week, so we're going to try and get two out this week. In general, we are going to try to stick to one a week, so we appreciate you guys bearing with us as we go along. Last time we talked, Kamran, we talked about the Islamic State and we talked about the Islamic State's origins and its futures. And one of the things I think is interesting right now is that the Middle East is really in a state of flux. The balance of power in the Middle East is changing. We can see it changing all the time. One of the things we are chronicling in our writing is how the balance of power in the Middle East is changing all the time. You brought up to us when we were thinking about what to talk about today, that we're coming up on the 50th anniversary of the 1967 war between Israel and Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and also Lebanon and Iraq had some token forces in there, but really it was between Israel and Jordan, Syria and Egypt. The 50th anniversary is coming up in June. How about you lay out for our readers why you think this is such an important anniversary to note? KB: I think 50 years is a good point in time to go back and review and measure just how things have unfolded in the region. And 1967 is particularly important because it really shaped the way the region has unfolded. It was a pivotal moment. Israel, as a result of that war, its massive victory over three Arab states, really established it as a military power in the region. And it was only 19 years old, Israel was only 19 years old when that war happened. And at the time, no one could've foreseen that Israel would be able to defend itself against three major Arab powers, at least they were perceived as major Arab powers. And the whole perception of Arab strength was essentially laid bare. The image of the Arabs was tarnished. I mean the fact that in the collective Arab memory, June 5, 1967, is seen as Yawm al-Naksa, which is loosely defined or translated as the day of setback, although ‘naksa' in Arabic is far more, if you will, stronger than just the word ‘setback' as we know it in English, but nonetheless, it left a deep imprint on the Arab world and established that the Arab world was very much hollow and it could not impose a military solution on Israel. JS: Kamran, I think this was one of the things you brought up last week that was interesting, which was when we were talking about the Islamic State and we were talking about the rise of radical jihadist Islam as a major ideology in the region, you pointed towards this moment as the moment at which the political ideology of the time, which was secular nationalism, Arab nationalism – in 1967 Egypt was still known as the United Arab Republic technically, right, which is an ode to the short-lived entity that existed when Egypt and Syria were part of the same republic from 1958 to 1961. So you sort of pointed out last week just how important this moment was in history and how it really defined how the Arab world was going to move forward. It amounted to the failure of Nasserism and in some ways, it was the moment that Egypt abdicated leadership in the Arab world, wouldn't you say? KB: Absolutely, and I think that it was forced to do that. I think that nobody could argue and nobody could sustain the image of this leadership role that Egypt had projected, that it was the leader of Arab nationalism, the Arab soul, the Arab world. When the Egyptian Air Force was destroyed in a matter of hours on the fifth of June, you couldn't make that argument anymore. And it was essentially the beginning of the end of the Nasser regime, at least Nasserite Egypt – though some would argue that we are still living in the legacy of Nasserite Egypt – but Nasser himself didn't live too long after that. He died in 1970, and that really closed that chapter of Arab nationalism, but it also demonstrated that the Arab states, and here we are talking about Egypt, I mean Egypt is the heart of the Arab world given it is the largest Arab state by population, any type of cultural renaissance, new ideologies that take shape in Egypt, in Cairo particularly, and then disseminate to the rest of the Arab world. So that was the status of Egypt. That war really, really demonstrated the impotence of the Egyptian military in the face of Israel, which was seen as a weak state at that point, and it really established many of the boundaries that we are currently dealing with and the relationships that Israel has with many of its Arab neighbors. So we know that in 1978, Israel and Egypt made peace and in many ways the outcome of 1967, really laid the foundation for that eventual rapprochement and the diplomatic relationship, the uneasy diplomatic relationship that has existed since then. Likewise, the relationship with Jordan, even though the formal peace treaty between Jordan and Israel did not emerge until 1994, but it is well known that Israelis and Jordanians have had a very close security relationship, especially as it pertains to the Palestinians and those living in the West Bank. The Israeli-Syrian relationship was also established. The hostilities that exist till this day, the state of war as many would refer to it, was established in 1967 when Israel conquered the Golan Heights and was able to seize that territory from the Syrians and the Syrians have not been able to take that back. So the entire geopolitical landscape that we now know as sort of the defining borders and the boundaries that established the Arab-Israeli dynamic were set in the aftermath of the 1967 war with a little bit of modification within the case of the Sinai, which Egypt was able to take back in the form of the peace treaty. JS: Well you are right to an extent, I will say that you are overlooking a little bit just how important 1973 was. So Israel and Egypt again fight another war in '73, and as much as 1967 was a success for the Israeli Defense Forces and for the strategy of preemptive attack, I mean Israel was in a weak position in some sense and it was forced to attack Egypt preemptively if it was going to be able to achieve its objectives. This led to a certain amount of arrogance on the part of the Israelis and in '73, there was a massive intelligence failure where they dismissed Egyptian mobilization in the Sinai. Israel ended up winning that war with U.S. support and then that sort of is what led to the peace treaty in the end. But I think you are right in the sense that a lot of the geopolitical realities that have defined this part of the world, which is the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty, the sort of frozen state of conflict between Syria and Israel as I would call it, Israel obviously went into Lebanon a couple more times after that. But another thing that I think we need to point out here is that before '67, there really wasn't a very strong relationship between the United States and Israel, at least not the way that people think about that relationship now. Israel's success in the '67 war was really the moment the United States realized two things, first of all that most of the Arab states were in the Soviet Union's camp and that there was no getting them back, and second of all, that Israel could be a meaningful partner in balancing power against the Soviet Union in the Middle East. And I bring this up because I think it raises an interesting point, because you're right that a lot of the seeds of how things developed after '67 were laid in the results of that war. But at the same time, if we look 50 years later, a lot of those things are beginning to fall apart, right? The Soviet Union has collapsed, people are making a lot of Russia's involvement in the Middle East, but it's very miniscule compared to the chest pumping that everybody talks about. You know the Russians are not funding or massively arming states that are thinking about attacking Israel or other U.S. allies in the region. Egypt is an economic basket case, it just went through a pretty massive political transition, which began you know with the Arab Spring around 2010-2011, and they have issues of their own. Jordan is sort of the miracle of the region, how Jordan hasn't been affected by the stuff that's going on in the region is pretty incredible. Syria, I mean Syria is basically half a state right now. The Assad regime has been able to consolidate itself, but Syria, which really was one of the biggest vulnerabilities Israel faced from a military point of view, Syria is completely involved with its own fight against its own anti-regime rebels, and the Islamic State is there and they are having to rely on Hezbollah and all this other stuff. So when Israel looks out at its current strategic landscape, it doesn't see Egypt and Syria and Jordan as these major problems anymore. In '67 the major concern was, well what if Israel gets attacked by three entities at the same time. Those three entities aren't there. When you think about Israel's strategic position right now, the sort of first, most immediate thing that comes to mind is Hezbollah. We had those reports recently of Israel just a couple days ago striking a weapons convoy, an alleged weapons convoy of Hezbollah in Palmyra, which is pretty far in for the Israelis to go into Syria. So that's sort of the first thing. But Hezbollah is also completely distracted by the Syrian civil war. But then you take a step back and the challenges for Israel really aren't set by 1967, they are set by different things. So the first thing I would say is that, you know, what is going to happen with the Islamic State? Maybe the Islamic State is going to get defeated and maybe it's going to collapse but the real concern for Israel is the state of disrepair that is in the Arab world won't reign forever. Is there any potential for some kind of radical Sunni entity to rise in the Arab world and unite the factions and once again treat Israel as a common enemy? Taking a further step back, you look at Iran which was dealt a setback with the Syrian civil war and with the degradation of the Assad regime, but still maintains a lot of influence in Iraq and is still aggressively trying to push its influence in the region. And then farther back is Turkey. Turkey is rising, one of George Friedman's most identifiable forecasts and one of the things we write about a lot and that we get a lot of attention for, is our position that Turkey is going to rise and it's going to be the major power in the Middle East. Right now, there are decent relations between Israel and Turkey, but I think Israel's long-term thinking is about what a strategic landscape looks like, it has to think about Turkey as this major power reasserting itself in the region. So I agree with you in the sense that it's important, and '67 really did set the chain for a lot of different events, but in some ways, it's become obsolete. Would you agree with that characterization or do you want to argue with any of that? KB: No, I think you are right. I think we are still dealing with the post-1967 architecture but with the caveat that that architecture is in a meltdown mode. Defeating three of its neighbors at the same time established Israel's superiority in a military sense and really consolidated the state of Israel, and since that time, what's become clear, even though we had the 1973 war, it became clear to Egypt that there was no military solution. This almost romantic view of being able to establish Arab hegemony over all of historic Palestine through military means was shattered. That perception was completely shattered. And even though 1973 happened and was a surprise and intelligence failure for Israel, nonetheless the Egyptians I would argue did not think when they launched that war that they would be able to militarily defeat Israel. There's always the possibility you could do that, but deep down you know and if you have been dealt a blow like 1967, that really weighs heavily on your national psyche and your military strategy moving forward. And if you look at the way the negotiations panned out after that, with the moderation or the intercession of the United States, it becomes clear that really 1973 from the Egyptian point of view was enhancing your bargaining power. Improving your position to achieve some sort of, if you will, win-win scenario in which the Egyptians can come back and say yes, we were able to retake the Sinai from Israel and we restored national dignity. But 1967 really showed that the military option was no longer there for the Arabs. And moving forward from the Israeli point of view, those very states that were threatening them in 1967, Israel really relied on their behavior to not wage war against Israel as part of its natural security doctrine. Keep in mind that these are autocratic regimes that may view Israel in a certain way because they believe in it or maybe because it's pragmatic and because they are in power and have to balance pressures from all sides. But the sentiment in many of these countries until this day is one of hostility towards Israel. Israel relied on these capitols: Damascus, Cairo and Amman, to make sure that that national sentiment did not alter the national behavior of those countries, and Israel would not be threatened again. Now if you fast forward to the Arab Spring, that whole strategy seems to be falling apart, because if these countries, if these regimes cannot maintain order within their own country, then that is a problem. And if you have a power vacuum, we just recently published a couple of articles on how Jordan is weakening, and the implications particularly for Israel are massive, if the regime were to weaken much and God forbid fall, that could create a vacuum in which Israel faces a new kind of threat, an uncertainty. Clearly this is not a threat from a state, but non-state actors create a new dynamic. If we look at what is happening in Syria and how the Israelis have been trying to balance between the hostile forces on the Sunni side of the conflict, which includes ISIS, which includes al-Qaida and all those whom we call the moderate Sunni Arab rebel forces. They're not friends of Israel. Given a chance, they would wage war against Israel. On the other side is Syria, Iran and Hezbollah – again enemies of Israel. And Israel has to do this careful balancing act. At the moment, the Sunni side is not in a position to threaten Israel and therefore Israel is trying to make sure that Hezbollah does not gain more power than it already has and pose a bigger threat than it already does to Israel. Should those circumstances be replicated in Jordan and Egypt, then that's a tough balancing act for Israel to maintain. Because we're talking three different countries on the entire periphery of the Jewish state. JS: Well let's dig into that a little bit then. We know that Syria is in a state of civil war, the Assad regime seems to have been able to consolidate control there. For the most part that situation is actually ok with Israel because it's weakened an enemy, but not so much that there is just chaos reigning everywhere. But you've brought up Jordan and you've brought up Egypt. You said that Jordan is weakening. How about we dig a little more into that? What do you mean when you said Jordan is weakening? KB: Well if you look at Jordan geographically, it is sitting at the crossroads of major areas of conflict. It borders both the countries in which ISIS is operating i.e. Syria and Iraq. It has the second largest refugee population coming from Syria after Turkey. We're talking somewhere around 680,000 people. That's a huge strain on an already poor country. The economy really historically hasn't done well, it's gotten by with assistance from both the West, the United States and the U.K., and of course assistance from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. But with the price of oil declining, and we know that Saudi Arabia is in trouble on the home front, it has less and less financial bandwidth to come to the aid of Jordan. We also see the situation in the West Bank evolving towards a crisis where President Mahmoud Abbas is at an advanced age. He's not ill or anything, at least apparently. But when you reach, go beyond 80, you are operating on borrowed time. So what will happen to the Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority, especially in the wake of Israeli policies that are now aggressively pushing more settlements? That creates a large pressure on the Jordanians whose population is somewhere a little above 50 percent of Palestinian origin. Many of those people came in the aftermath of the 1948 war, a lot of them came after the 1967 one. But there's already an existing Palestinian population, which has been to one degree or another, if you will, assimilated into Jordanian mainstream political life. We recently had protests because of the cutting of subsidies by the government. There are no shortage of Islamist forces, from the Muslim Brotherhood, it has at least two major factions. You have a large Salafi population. You have al-Qaida there. The founder of ISIS, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is from Jordan and the town of Zarqa. And you have Hizb ut-Tahrir. And then you have the spillover effect from Syria. So these are circumstances, to expect Jordan that it will continue to behave the way it has since the '67 war or over the decades, I think that would be a mistake. I don't think that the Israelis are looking at it that way. Recall the recent report in which the Jordanian ambassador to Amman told the IDF chief that he is worried about stability and security in the Jordanian kingdom. We've not had these kind of statements coming from Israel. So if the Israelis are worried, I would say that is a good barometer of how the situation is deteriorating in Jordan. JS: Yeah although, I would challenge you to go a little bit deeper, which is to say that you've just laid out a pretty scary laundry list of challenges for any country let alone one like Jordan that really doesn't have a lot of natural resources of its own, which like you say, has an incredibly diverse population. There's a lot of Palestinians in Jordan. Really Jordanians are Hashemites right, there are actually very small numbers of people who can actually claim to be Jordanian, so many of them are Bedouins and Circassians and this, that and the other thing. How do you explain the fact that Jordan hasn't succumbed to all this stuff? Because unlike Syria or unlike Egypt or unlike even Lebanon it has for the most part avoided a lot of the domestic political instability and a lot of the violence that a lot of the Arab states around it haven't avoided and with much fewer resources. KB: So I would say that there are three aspects to that in terms of how the Jordanian regime has maintained stability and security. So the first and foremost is that the Jordanian security establishment has been very competent. Particularly the General Intelligence Department, its main intelligence agency, it has a very good handle in pre-empting and not being on the reactive side that things happen and then the Jordanians act. They've been ahead of the curve in terms of making sure that any radical elements, be they ISIS or others, that they are kept under lock and key and so that's one aspect. The other aspect I mentioned earlier is that there has been this historic relationship between Israel and Jordan, a quiet one that is not really talked about much and understandably so from the Jordanian point of view, and that has helped quite a bit. Then it is a very close ally of the West, the United States and prior to that, the U.K., and the U.K. continues to be an ally of the Hashemite monarchy. They also have had assistance from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states to the extent that they have been able to do that. So I think a mix of forces has allowed Jordan to continue to maintain stability even though we're six years out from the Arab Spring. But I think that the pressures are building and this is not a sustainable situation. Should there be a, we talk about the southern provinces of Syria where the government and different rebel factions and ISIS is in the mix as well. There's sort of this lack of clarity over who has the upper hand, its sort of a balance of weakness in southern Syria when it comes to the civil war, it has not been a major theater compared to Aleppo or Palmyra or ISIS-land up near Raqqa or Damascus. These are the things that have maintained order and these are the factors that enabled the regime. But to assume that this will continue, especially at a time when the established states, I mean Saudi Arabia is the largest state in that region and it also shares a large border with Jordan, although historically a quiet one. But nonetheless, if Saudi Arabia is having less and less financial bandwidth to assist countries around its periphery, then we are looking at a situation that is not something that the Jordanians will be able to handle on their own. There's a lot of hope that goes into this idea that Jordan will continue to manage its domestic politics and of course the wider geopolitics, it's a balancing act. But I think we need to get out of this assumption that things will continue and nothing will go wrong and there's a need for out-of-the-box thinking. JS: Although I just want to drive home for our listeners that a lot of people when they think about geopolitics, they think about geographical determinism, and what I mean by that is they think that it's as easy as looking at a map. And a map is going to be able to tell you exactly what's wrong with a country and what is going to happen to a particular country. Jordan is a really good example of where just the basics of a map or just the basics of geography or a layout of resources isn't enough to tell you everything. I think there is a conservative element in Jordanian society and an element that has always had to fight an uphill battle against a real lack of resources. I mean Jordan, its borders were not drawn in any logical way when you are thinking in terms of nationality or economic production or just about anything. So I agree with you that Jordan faces many challenges, but one of the things about Jordan is this intangible thing that has kept the kingdom together so far, and I think will serve it in good stead. But leaving Jordan aside for now, it's a relatively small country. One of the things that people brought up from the last podcast and I think it fits in exactly with this conversation, because we started by talking about 1967 and as you mentioned, in a lot of ways 1967 was one of the moments where Israel and the United States realized that they had interests in common. Those interests really were about blocking the Soviet Union and about Israel becoming a U.S. ally in a region that was becoming dominated by Arab states that were allied with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union obviously is no longer there, and the strategic basis of the relationship between Israel and the United States is not as strong as it once was. I know that there was a lot of talk about how special the relationship is and how close it is. But that strategic reason for the relationship has gone away and I think you've seen the United States and Israel pull away from each other a little bit. That's both because Israel has a lot more freedom of action than it did before and also because from a U.S. perspective the interests don't line up quite as well as they used to. But the question that I am circling around here is, so we've talked about how we're in this 50 years since 1967, but we're also in a Middle East that is changing rapidly, how does the U.S. respond to the things were talking about here, how does the U.S. respond to the hollowing out of the Arab world, how does the U.S. respond to Jordan and the serious challenges that Jordan is facing and what is the U.S.-Israel relationship going to look like going forward? I know that a lot of people were thinking that Donald Trump was going to make that relationship much different than the relationship with Obama, but as with so many things with President Trump, he said one thing before getting into office and continues to say things all the time, but the things that he's actually doing don't always line up with what he says. He has not moved the embassy to Jerusalem, he has criticized the Netanyahu administration for settlements at some level, all things that Trump said he was going to do, but when we look in practice, it looks remarkably similar to before and it also seems like Trump is willing to throw his hat in the ring and to be yet another U.S. president who wants to try and solve the eternal conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, so I just threw some things at you but I think the main thing is so what does the U.S. do, how does the U.S. deal with all these dynamics we've brought up? KB: We've written about how the United States is pursuing a balance of power strategy. A balance of power strategy doesn't mean that there is a nice balance, that you can essentially create this system that's going to work for a while. It's a constant act of balancing, it doesn't end at one point, it doesn't begin at one point. You just have to continue to play with it, tweak it, to make sure that it is working and the U.S. balance of power strategy relies on working with the major powers of the region, we've identified them as Turkey, Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Now if you go into each one of them, we've talked about the historic relationship with Israel, and there is this disconnect between Israeli and American interests, but I still think that despite that divergence in interests, the United States and Israel aren't really that far apart if you look at it from a strategic point of view. Yes, tactically there can be many differences, you know, we can say that the United States does not want Israel to build new settlements but I think that that's sort of a minor issue in the larger regional geopolitical scheme of things. I don't think that the United States does not want Israel to assume a posture or an aggressive interventionist posture in its neighborhood and I don't think that the Israelis want to do that either. So if you look at the airstrikes in Syria, they do not demonstrate any desire on the part of the Israelis to intervene in the way they did in Lebanon, and that's great from an American perspective, because the United States is already dealing with a whole lot. The United States under the Obama administration was able to end that hostility that erupted between Turkey and Israel over the Mavi Marmara flotilla incident in 2010, and there was the re-establishment of full diplomatic relations and a sort of normalization. So I think that there again is another example of the United States trying to balance. The United States needs Turkey to manage Syria, and it has made it very clear to the Israelis that we need your cooperation. If the Israelis and the Turks are going after each other, then that undermines the United States' interests. You flip over to Iran's nuclear program and the way the nuclear agreement was forged, yes there was a lot of huffing and puffing on the part of the Israelis, there was a lot of bellicose rhetoric and unhappiness, and the media was all about how Netanyahu's personality clashes with that of Obama, but at the end of the day, Israel didn't do anything substantive to block that agreement from taking place. Israel maintains that it has very little faith in that agreement to produce the desired outcome, but that's a different story than saying we will go and actively work against American interests. JS: I am going to jump in and disagree with you a little bit in the sense that I think you are understating just how much the Netanyahu administration opposed the Iran deal. Israel didn't do anything in terms of Iran's nuclear program and won't do anything in terms of Iran's nuclear program, at least anything overt, because it doesn't have the capability. It simply does not have the military capability to go in and knock out the Iranian nuclear program. If it did, I would submit that it probably already would have done it. It did that with Iraq, it did that with Syria. If it felt like it had the capability, I think it would have gone and done it already. And I don't think it was a small thing what Netanyahu did when he came and addressed the U.S. Senate and gave that very flowery speech about how it was a bad deal and how the Obama administration had committed a catastrophic mistake. I don't think that Israel had much of a choice in the end though. At the end of the day, Israel knows where its bread is buttered and knows that it needs the United States as a key strategic ally. If this was the path that the United States would go down and this was the path that the United States thought was most in U.S. interests, Israel wasn't going to be able to thwart that. But I think that Israel in general is very intimidated by Iran, especially by Iran's rhetoric, and they would've preferred a much stronger U.S. reaction to Iran. I think that's one of the areas where you see that there's not going to be a break in relations between the United States and Israel but I think there you see a very, very different set of priorities. Israel is still a small country in a very hostile neighborhood that looks at things one way and the United States is the most powerful country in the world with a lot of different challenges in a lot of different regions. You've got everything going on with Russia, you've got everything going on with China, you've got allies all over the place, you've got a NATO alliance that isn't working the way the United States wants it to, the United States does not have time to get involved in every little thing inside the Middle East. The United States really can use Iran, not necessarily as an ally, I am not saying the United States and Iran are going to become best friends or anything, but the United States needs an Iran it can work with on a pragmatic basis, because there are bigger fish to fry. You've got ISIS sitting there right smack dab in the Middle East, you've got whatever is going to come after ISIS, you've got this huge jostling and competition for what's going to come after the hulking carcasses of Syria and Iraq going on there, so I think that's actually one of the areas where you see a little bit of the divergence and where you see that the challenges of '67 and the challenges that have really defined relations in the region since '67 are beginning to change. KB: Yes they are changing, but what I was pointing towards or trying to make the case for is that there is the divergence, and yes it is a function of capability that Israel did not opt for a military solution to the Iranian nuclear issue and went along with the U.S. diplomatic option, but at the end of the day, this is that difficult balancing act we've been talking about. The difficulty in maintaining a balance of power strategy whether it's between Turkey and Israel or Israel and Iran, I mean even between Turkey and Iran, although this is one of those relations that has yet to really emerge in terms of where it's going at this point. Even though they are at odds with one another over the outcome of Syria, Tehran and Ankara are not going to be seeing eye-to-eye, but for now they have both decided that it's not in their interests to go head-to-head with one another. I mean similarly if you look at how the U.S. is sort of caught. On one hand, there is an Iran that can be useful in the fight against ISIS in making sure that Iraq functions in some kind of semi-coherent way. But at the same time, the more that the Americans appear to be working with the Iranians – that deeply upsets the Saudis and the other Arab states, and therefore yet again you have a balancing act. We saw a lot of this balancing, it's not as if the United States can just say okay, Saudi Arabia has very little to offer and Iran has a little more to offer, therefore we're going to sort of swing that pendulum in the direction of Tehran. I don't think that would sort of undermine the entire thesis of a balance of power strategy, but once you immerse yourself into that, you put yourself in the shoes of Washington, it's a difficult balancing act. How do you make sure that the enmity between the Iranians and the Saudis does not upset your interests in the region. On one hand, the United States does not like the Saudis sponsoring militias in Syria that are not very different honestly from al-Qaida and ISIS. But at the same time, the United States needs the Saudis to make sure that the Iranians don't jump out of their box and become disproportionately powerful. So I guess, I am talking about a very complex balance of power strategy that will continue to twist and turn whether it involves the U.S.-Israeli relationship, the U.S.-Iranian tensions, the tensions that currently exist between Turkey, which we have identified as being the key to the American strategy for the long haul in Syria and in the wider region. We see great tensions, at least in the short term, there's a divergence of interests especially over the Kurds and the extent to which Turkey wants to commit forces in the fight against ISIS. But nonetheless the two sides have to work with each other, so Washington has been caught in between these four powers. JS: It's funny as you were talking, it's really striking to me when you think in terms of, you know, if you think about the 1960s and '70s, it was punctuated by these very intense wars. We call them wars in the full sense of the term. But overall it was a much more stable situation in the Middle East. You know, there were the people that were in the U.S. camp, there were the states that were in the Soviet camp and the states themselves were fairly stable. Egypt was a fairly stable state, Syria you know, there was the coup d'etat in ‘61 that brought the Baath party to power, but once the Assads eventually came to power, Syria also was very stable, the Hashemite kingdom has also been there since the 1940s. Right now, it's not so simple. The Arab world, as you said, really has been hollowed out. And there's a great deal of instability and there's a great deal of uncertainty about what is going to emerge out of it. I would suggest that if we are looking forward another 50 years, if we are talking about 100 years from 1967, I think that what we might see is we might see the pendulum swing back to the stability that we saw in '67. I just think the actors are going to be very different. I don't think that Egypt and Syria and war between Arabs and the Israelis is going to be the thing animating the region. I think the thing to really focus on is the rise of Turkey, how Iran is going to respond to that, how the Arab world is going to deal both with its own problems with radical Islam and then how Israel is going to try to navigate through all this and who the U.S. is going to use and how. I want to close, I just want to hit one more topic while we're here Kamran. It's one we've sort of danced around and it's the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it feels like the eternal conflict. And in some ways, it's strange to go to this issue after talking about such large weighty things, because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in strategic terms really does not matter that much. And I wonder how you are going to answer this question, because it's something that I ask people all the time. Why do you think there is such a degree of fascination and attention with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East? The attention that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that it gets, really I don't think lines up with the strategic importance that it has overall, and I think it's appropriate to talk about it in this conversation, because as you said 1967 is when Israel takes over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and it hasn't relinquished them since. And the Palestinians, which used to be – the West Bank was a Jordanian problem and the Gaza Strip was an Egyptian problem. Since '67 it became an Israeli problem. So why do you think that there is such a level of focus such that even the Trump administration is sending out envoys talking about solution to this conflict that has eluded every single president. KB: I think there are two reasons for that. I think the first reason has to do with the fact that the Palestinian issue remains unresolved. In many ways there is, as time has gone by and as we move forward, the situation becomes more and more complex and resolution appears more and more elusive. But the fact is that the question of Palestine, the Palestinian issue, has not been resolved in some shape or form to where we can move beyond this idea of an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even though successive American administrations have failed to really tackle this issue. I think the closest that we ever came was in the Clinton administration when there were final status talks between Yasser Arafat and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in the late '90s. But we've drifted far from that and we've come to a point where the entire Palestinian landscape has become so incoherent that even before we talk about an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, there has to be some form of intra-Palestinian settlement and nothing tells me when I look at the Gaza Strip, when I look at the West Bank, when I look at Hamas, and when I look at Fatah and I look at the other Palestinian factions and the disunity and the incoherence, I look at it and I say we are moving even further away from anything called a Palestinian national entity. And therefore it becomes even less and less possible for a serious Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. But I think that there is another assumption built into the way we in the West look at this problem. Which is that if we were to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict then somehow the Middle East becomes far more manageable. I don't believe that. But that is the way I think that many within the various governments in the West, whether it's the British government or the French or the German or the American. And in many ways, this narrative has been peddled by the Arab regimes and the wider Muslim world, you know Turkey has been pushing this as well on its end, that you need to solve this problem, if you solve this problem then we won't have radicalism. Radicalism and al-Qaida, ISIS exist largely because of what has happened to the Palestinians and the wider fallout of that. I think there's the failure to recognize that it's not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Arab Muslim world faces a deep malaise. We talked about this in our first podcast a couple of weeks ago. And that is at the heart of this issue, but I think that there is this obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as being central to the wider problems of the Middle East. I will argue that even assuming somehow we can miraculously solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and we have this quote-unquote two-state solution before us, the problems of Syria, Egypt and Iraq and the rest of that region are not going to go away. But nonetheless because it's a historic continuing unfinished business, there is this tendency to sort of organically link it to the other problems, and if you look at every administration, the Bush administration, the Obama administration and even now the Trump administration, there's always this effort, this new effort to say let's get the Israelis and the Palestinians to start talking in a serious way. But at the end, we haven't seen any breakthrough, because the fundamentals have not changed, they've actually become worse. You have two Palestines, effectively there are two Palestinian Territories, not just geographically separated, they are ideologically separated, they are politically separated. Right now, the Israelis don't occupy Gaza, that is a Palestinian sort of self-ruled territory spinning on its own axis controlled by Hamas. That will continue, I don't think the Israelis are going to go in anytime soon or in the foreseeable future and reoccupy Gaza. So what can happen in the form of some negotiation is that there may be another Palestinian territory that emerges as a semi-quasi-sovereign in the West Bank. You will effectively have two Palestines. Does that solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? I would argue no, it just makes it much, much more complex. JS: And I think just the way I always talk about the Middle East when people ask me about it is my favorite metaphor to describe it basically as a chess board, that really for over a century now the Middle East has been a chess board for major powers outside the region to try and make moves against each other. And for the most part since the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, it's been mostly pawns on the chess board with mostly people moving back less valuable pieces as they challenge each other. And I think the most important thing to think about going forward when we think about the next 50 years and where we are going to be 50 years from now is to watch the powers in the Middle East itself that are beginning to come up. I think really that means keeping a very close eye on Turkey, keeping a very close eye on Iran, keeping a very close eye on Saudi Arabia and whether and how it's able to tackle many of the issues facing it. I know that here at GPF, we're fairly bearish on Saudi Arabia's ability to do that, they are just facing too much. And then Israel, as it always has been, you know smaller country in a very messy neighborhood trying to figure out its right place in it all and trying to build the right level of strategic relationships that allow it to exist with a maximum amount of independence. All right, thanks Kamran. Thank you for joining me. Thank you everybody for listening. If you want to send us questions or comments, you can comment on our website or on SoundCloud. You can also send comments to comments@geopoliticalfutures.com. Again, I am Jacob Shapiro, I'm the Director of Analysis for GPF and this is Kamran Bokhari, and we will see you next time.

Good Deeds Radio presents International Author Tina Hassan. She shares wisdom that was passed down to her. Sharing with others help to nuture the world.Tina resides Paterson, NJ. At the age of 9 months I made front cover of Hollywood SpotLite Magazine. I'm a single mother with a 10 year old son, Adam. he is my pride and joy.  I am an author of two books: 1st book a tribute to my dad (R.I.P) "A Great Man Who Once Lived & Will Always Be remembered by Many" and my 2nd book is a cookbook: "Middle Eastern Cookbook" by Tina Hassan. the reason I like to be aired is because there are alot of cookbooks out there especially middle eastern ones but this is the first middle eastern cookbook that has a variety of all nationalities from circassian which is what Iam, Circassian are people from Russia, we are muslims but non-Arab however, most Circassians do understand and speak Arabic as well as can read and write in Arabic. We pray same way 5 times a day and fast month of Ramadan, believe there is only 1 God. So getting back to my cookbook, all other middle easterns cookbook also may have varieties from other nationalities but none of them have any recipe of Circassian food or even desserts. For example: Ships Wa Basta Circassian food, or Haliva Circassian dessert/snack just as an example. So my middle eastern cookbook is a little different and even tho have different varieties of other middle eastern foods but we all make it our way and thats what makes it uique. For example I love adding herbs and spices and while some places like it plain or simple. Everyone has their own way but again noone has made a middle eastern cookbook with circassian food in it especially the ships wa basta that's famous food and special and well known for Circassians.

Seminar given on 28 January 2015 by Professor Dawn Chatty (RSC), part of the RSC Hilary term 2015 Public Seminar Series Refugee studies rarely address historical matters; yet understanding ideas about sanctuary, refuge and asylum have long roots in both Western and Eastern history and philosophy. Occasionally the Nansen era of the 1920s is examined or the opening years of, say, the Palestinian refugee crisis are addressed. But by and large the circumstances, experiences and influences of refugees and exiles in modern history are ignored. This seminar attempts to contribute to an exploration of the past and to examine the responses of one State – the late Ottoman Empire – to the forced migration of millions of largely Muslim refugees and exiles from its contested borderland shared with Tsarist Russia into its southern provinces. The seminar focuses on one particular meta-ethnic group, the Circassians, and explores the humanitarian response to their movement both nationally and locally as well as their concerted drive for assisted self-settlement. The Circassians are one of many groups that were on the move at the end of the 19th century and their reception and eventual integration without assimilation in the region provide important lessons for contemporary humanitarianism.

Good Deeds Radio presents International Author Tina Hassan. She shares wisdom that was passed down to her. Sharing with others help to nuture the world.Tina resides Paterson, NJ. At the age of 9 months I made front cover of Hollywood SpotLite Magazine. I'm a single mother with a 10 year old son, Adam. he is my pride and joy.  I am an author of two books: 1st book a tribute to my dad (R.I.P) "A Great Man Who Once Lived & Will Always Be remembered by Many" and my 2nd book is a cookbook: "Middle Eastern Cookbook" by Tina Hassan. the reason I like to be aired is because there are alot of cookbooks out there especially middle eastern ones but this is the first middle eastern cookbook that has a variety of all nationalities from circassian which is what Iam, Circassian are people from Russia, we are muslims but non-Arab however, most Circassians do understand and speak Arabic as well as can read and write in Arabic. We pray same way 5 times a day and fast month of Ramadan, believe there is only 1 God. So getting back to my cookbook, all other middle easterns cookbook also may have varieties from other nationalities but none of them have any recipe of Circassian food or even desserts. For example: Ships Wa Basta Circassian food, or Haliva Circassian dessert/snack just as an example. So my middle eastern cookbook is a little different and even tho have different varieties of other middle eastern foods but we all make it our way and thats what makes it uique. For example I love adding herbs and spices and while some places like it plain or simple. Everyone has their own way but again noone has made a middle eastern cookbook with circassian food in it especially the ships wa basta that's famous food and special and well known for Circassians.