Podcasts about mamluks

The Dead Sea is a place of many contradictions. Hot springs around the lake are famed for their healing properties, though its own waters are deadly to most lifeforms—even so, civilizations have built ancient cities and hilltop fortresses around its shores for centuries. The protagonists in its story are not only Jews and Arabs, but also Greeks, Nabataeans, Romans, Crusaders and Mamluks. Today it has become a tourist hotspot, but its drying basin is increasingly under threat. In this panoramic account, Nir Arielli explores the history of the Dead Sea from the first Neolithic settlements to the present day. Moving through the ages, Arielli reveals the religious, economic, military, and scientific importance of the lake, which has been both a source of great wealth and a site of war. The Dead Sea weaves together a tapestry of the lake's human stories—and amidst environmental degradation and renewed conflict, makes a powerful case for why it should be saved.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/jerusalemunplugged. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Find out more about the legendary Mamluks in our bonus episode. Subscribe for weekly episodes and ad-free listening. Musa clashes with the fearsome Mamluks as he enters Cairo and must find a way to placate the sultan of Egypt, Al-Nasir Muhammad, one of the toughest rulers in history, or face certain death. A Sony Music Entertainment production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email podcastadsales@sonymusic.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Written and presented by Luke Pepera Producer - Dominic Tyerman Story editing – Georgia Mills Executive Producer - Louisa Field Production Manager - Jen Mistri Marketing - Kieran Lancini Sound Design and Mixing - Amber Devereux Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Dead Sea is a place of many contradictions. Hot springs around the lake are famed for their healing properties, though its own waters are deadly to most lifeforms—even so, civilizations have built ancient cities and hilltop fortresses around its shores for centuries. The protagonists in its story are not only Jews and Arabs, but also Greeks, Nabataeans, Romans, Crusaders and Mamluks. Today it has become a tourist hotspot, but its drying basin is increasingly under threat. In this panoramic account, Nir Arielli explores the history of the Dead Sea from the first Neolithic settlements to the present day. Moving through the ages, Arielli reveals the religious, economic, military, and scientific importance of the lake, which has been both a source of great wealth and a site of war. The Dead Sea weaves together a tapestry of the lake's human stories—and amidst environmental degradation and renewed conflict, makes a powerful case for why it should be saved. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref 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

The Dead Sea is a place of many contradictions. Hot springs around the lake are famed for their healing properties, though its own waters are deadly to most lifeforms—even so, civilizations have built ancient cities and hilltop fortresses around its shores for centuries. The protagonists in its story are not only Jews and Arabs, but also Greeks, Nabataeans, Romans, Crusaders and Mamluks. Today it has become a tourist hotspot, but its drying basin is increasingly under threat. In this panoramic account, Nir Arielli explores the history of the Dead Sea from the first Neolithic settlements to the present day. Moving through the ages, Arielli reveals the religious, economic, military, and scientific importance of the lake, which has been both a source of great wealth and a site of war. The Dead Sea weaves together a tapestry of the lake's human stories—and amidst environmental degradation and renewed conflict, makes a powerful case for why it should be saved. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Dead Sea is a place of many contradictions. Hot springs around the lake are famed for their healing properties, though its own waters are deadly to most lifeforms—even so, civilizations have built ancient cities and hilltop fortresses around its shores for centuries. The protagonists in its story are not only Jews and Arabs, but also Greeks, Nabataeans, Romans, Crusaders and Mamluks. Today it has become a tourist hotspot, but its drying basin is increasingly under threat. In this panoramic account, Nir Arielli explores the history of the Dead Sea from the first Neolithic settlements to the present day. Moving through the ages, Arielli reveals the religious, economic, military, and scientific importance of the lake, which has been both a source of great wealth and a site of war. The Dead Sea weaves together a tapestry of the lake's human stories—and amidst environmental degradation and renewed conflict, makes a powerful case for why it should be saved. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref 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

The Dead Sea is a place of many contradictions. Hot springs around the lake are famed for their healing properties, though its own waters are deadly to most lifeforms—even so, civilizations have built ancient cities and hilltop fortresses around its shores for centuries. The protagonists in its story are not only Jews and Arabs, but also Greeks, Nabataeans, Romans, Crusaders and Mamluks. Today it has become a tourist hotspot, but its drying basin is increasingly under threat. In this panoramic account, Nir Arielli explores the history of the Dead Sea from the first Neolithic settlements to the present day. Moving through the ages, Arielli reveals the religious, economic, military, and scientific importance of the lake, which has been both a source of great wealth and a site of war. The Dead Sea weaves together a tapestry of the lake's human stories—and amidst environmental degradation and renewed conflict, makes a powerful case for why it should be saved. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The Dead Sea is a place of many contradictions. Hot springs around the lake are famed for their healing properties, though its own waters are deadly to most lifeforms—even so, civilizations have built ancient cities and hilltop fortresses around its shores for centuries. The protagonists in its story are not only Jews and Arabs, but also Greeks, Nabataeans, Romans, Crusaders and Mamluks. Today it has become a tourist hotspot, but its drying basin is increasingly under threat. In this panoramic account, Nir Arielli explores the history of the Dead Sea from the first Neolithic settlements to the present day. Moving through the ages, Arielli reveals the religious, economic, military, and scientific importance of the lake, which has been both a source of great wealth and a site of war. The Dead Sea weaves together a tapestry of the lake's human stories—and amidst environmental degradation and renewed conflict, makes a powerful case for why it should be saved. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/israel-studies

The Dead Sea is a place of many contradictions. Hot springs around the lake are famed for their healing properties, though its own waters are deadly to most lifeforms—even so, civilizations have built ancient cities and hilltop fortresses around its shores for centuries. The protagonists in its story are not only Jews and Arabs, but also Greeks, Nabataeans, Romans, Crusaders and Mamluks. Today it has become a tourist hotspot, but its drying basin is increasingly under threat. In this panoramic account, Nir Arielli explores the history of the Dead Sea from the first Neolithic settlements to the present day. Moving through the ages, Arielli reveals the religious, economic, military, and scientific importance of the lake, which has been both a source of great wealth and a site of war. The Dead Sea weaves together a tapestry of the lake's human stories—and amidst environmental degradation and renewed conflict, makes a powerful case for why it should be saved. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

This week we talk about arabica, robusta, and profit margins.We also discuss colonialism, coffee houses, and religious uppers.Recommended Book: On Writing and Worldbuilding by Timothy HicksonTranscriptLike many foods and beverages that contain body- or mind-altering substances, coffee was originally used, on scale at least, by people of faith, leveraging it as an aid for religious rituals. Sufis in what is today Yemen, back in the early 15th century, consumed it as a stimulant which allowed them to more thoroughly commit themselves to their worship, and it was being used by the Muslim faithful in Mecca around the same time.By the following century, it spread to the Levant, and from there it was funneled into larger trade routes and adopted by civilizations throughout the Mediterranean world, including the Ottomans, the Mamluks, groups in Italy and Northern Africa, and a few hundred years later, all the way over to India and the East Indies.Western Europeans got their hands on this beverage by the late 1600s, and it really took off in Germany and Holland, where coffee houses, which replicated an establishment type that was popularized across the Muslim world the previous century, started to pop up all over the place; folks would visit these hubs in lieu of alehouses, subbing in stimulants for depressants, and they were spaces in which it was appropriate for people across the social and economic strata to interact with each other, playing board games like chess and backgammon, and cross-pollinating their knowledge and beliefs.According to some scholars, this is part of why coffee houses were banned in many countries, including England, where they also became popular, because those up top, including but not limited to royalty, considered them to be hotbeds of reformatory thought, political instability, and potentially even revolution. Let the people hang out with each other and allow them to discuss whatever they like, and you end up with a bunch of potential enemies, and potential threats to the existing power structures.It's also been claimed, and this of course would be difficult to definitively prove, though the timing does seem to line up, that the introduction of coffee to Europe is what led to the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and eventually, the Industrial Revolution. The theory being that swapping out alcohol, at least during the day, and creating these spaces in which ideas and understandings and experiences could be swapped, without as much concern about social strata as in other popular third places, spots beyond the home and work, that allowed all sorts of political ideas to flourish, it helped inventions become realized—in part because there were coffee houses that catered to investors, one of which eventually became the London Stock Exchange—but also because it helped people organize, and do so in a context in which they were hyper-alert and aware, and more likely to engage in serious conversation; which is a stark contrast to the sorts of conversations you might have when half- or fully-drunk at an alehouse, exclusively amongst a bunch of your social and economic peers.If it did play a role in those movements, coffee was almost certainly just one ingredient in a larger recipe; lots of variables were swirling in these areas that seem to have contributed to those cultural, technological, economic, and government shifts.The impact of such beverages on the human body and mind, and human society aside, though, coffee has become globally popular and thus, economically vital. And that's what I'd like to talk about today; coffee's role in the global economy, and recent numbers that show coffee prices are ballooning, and are expected to balloon still further, perhaps substantially, in the coming years.—For a long while, coffee was a bit of a novelty outside of the Muslim world, even in European locales that had decently well-established coffeehouses.That changed when the Dutch East India Company started importing the beans to the Netherlands in the early 17th century. By the mid-1600s they were bringing commercial-scale shipments of the stuff to Amsterdam, which led to the expansion of the beverage's trade-range throughout Europe.The Dutch then started cultivating their own coffee crops in colonial territories, including Ceylon, which today is called Sri Lanka, and the island of Java. The British East India Company took a similar approach around the same time, and that eventually led to coffee bean cultivation in North America; though it didn't do terribly well there, initially, as tea and alcoholic beverages were more popular with the locals. In the late 18th century, though, North Americans were boycotting British tea and that led to an uptick in coffee consumption thereabouts, though this paralleled a resurgence in tea-drinking back in Britain, in part because they weren't shipping as much tea to their North American colonies, and in part because they conquered India, and were thus able to import a whole lot more tea from the thriving Indian tea industry.The Americas became more important to the burgeoning coffee trade in the mid-1700s after a French naval officer brought a coffee plant to Martinique, in the Caribbean, and that plant flourished, serving as the source of almost all of today's arabica coffee beans, as it was soon spread to what is today Haiti, and by 1788, Haiti's coffee plantations provided half the world's coffee.It's worth remembering that this whole industry, the portion of it run by the Europeans, at least, was built on the back of slaves. These Caribbean plantations, in particular, were famously abusive, and that abuse eventually resulted in the Haitian revolution of 1791, which five years later led to the territory's independence.That said, coffee plantations elsewhere, like in Brazil and across other parts of South and Central America, continued to flourish throughout this period, colonialists basically popping into an area, conquering it, and then enslaving the locals, putting them to work on whatever plantations made the most sense for the local climate.Many of these conquered areas and their enslaved locals were eventually able to free themselves, though in some cases it took a long time—about a century, in Brazil's case.Some plantations ended up being maintained even after the locals gained their freedom from their European conquerers, though. Brazil's coffee industry, for instance, began with some small amount of cultivation in the 1720s, but really started to flourish after independence was won in 1822, and the new, non-colonialist government decided to start clearing large expanses of rainforest to make room for more, and more intensive plantations. By the early 1900s, Brazil was producing about 70% of the world's coffee exports, with their neighbors—Colombia and Guatemala, in particular—making up most of the rest. Eurasian producers, formerly the only places where coffee was grown, remember, only made up about 5% of global exports by that time.The global market changed dramatically in the lead-up to WWII, as Europe was a primary consumer of these beans, and about 40% of the market disappeared, basically overnight, because the continent was spending all their resources on other things; mostly war-related things.An agreement between South and Central American coffee producing countries and the US helped shore-up production during this period, and those agreements allowed other Latin American nations to develop their own production infrastructure, as well, giving Brazil more hemispheric competition.And in the wake of WWII, when colonies were gaining their independence left and right, Ivory Coast and Ethiopia also became major players in this space. Some burgeoning Southeast Asian countries, most especially Vietnam, entered the global coffee market in the post-war years, and as of the 2020s, Brazil is still the top producer, followed by Vietnam, Indonesia, Colombia, and Ethiopia—though a few newer entrants, like India, are also gaining market share pretty quickly.As of 2023, the global coffee market has a value of around $224 billion; that figure can vary quite a lot based on who's numbers you use, but it's in the hundreds of billions range, whether you're looking just at beans, or including the ready-to-drink market, as well, and the growth rate numbers are fairly consistent, even if what's measured and the value placed on it differs depending on the stats aggregator you use.Some estimates suggest the market will grow to around $324 billion, an increase of around $100 billion, by 2030, which would give the coffee industry a compound annual growth rate that's larger than that of the total global caffeinated beverage market; and as of 2023, coffee accounts for something like 87% of the global caffeinated beverage market, so it's already the dominant player in this space, and is currently, at least, expected to become even more dominant by 2030.There's concern within this industry, however, that a collection of variables might disrupt that positive-seeming trajectory; which wouldn't be great for the big corporations that sell a lot of these beans, but would also be really bad, beyond shareholder value, for the estimated 25 million people, globally, who produce the beans and thus rely on the industry to feed their families, and the 100-110 million more who process, distribute, and import coffee products, and who thus rely on a stable market for their paychecks.Of those producers, an estimated 12.5 million work on smaller farms of 50 acres or less, and 60% of the world's coffee is made by people working on such smallholdings. About 44% of those people live below the World Bank's poverty metric; so it's already a fairly precarious economic situation for many of the people at the base-level of the production system, and any disruptions to what's going on at any level of the coffee industry could ripple across that system pretty quickly; disrupting a lot of markets and local economies, alongside the human suffering such disruptions could cause.This is why recent upsets to the climate that have messed with coffee crops are causing so much anxiety. Rising average temperatures, bizarre cold snaps, droughts, heavy and unseasonable rainfalls—in some cases all of these things, one after another—combined with outbreaks of plant diseases like coffee rust, have been putting a lot of pressure on this industry, including in Brazil and Vietnam, the world's two largest producers, as of the mid-2020s.In the past year alone, because of these and other externalities, the price of standard-model coffee beans has more than doubled, and the specialty stuff has seen prices grow even more than that.Higher prices can sometimes be a positive for those who make the now-more-expensive goods, if they're able to charge more but keep their expenses stable.In this case, though, the cost of doing business is going up, because coffee makers have to spend more on protecting their crops from diseases, losing crops because of those climate issues, and because of disruptions to global shipping channels. That means profit margins have remained fairly consistent rather than going up: higher cost to make, higher prices for consumers, about the same amount of money being made by those who work in this industry and that own the brands that put coffee goods on shelves.The issue, though, is that the cost of operation is still going up, and a lot of smallholders in particular, which again, produce about 60% of all the coffee made, worldwide, are having trouble staying solvent. Their costs of operation are still going up, and it's not a guarantee that consumers will be willing to continue spending more and more and more money on what's basically a commodity product; there are a lot of caffeinated beverages, and a lot of other types of beverage they could buy instead, if coffee becomes too pricy.And at this point, in the US, for instance, the retail price of ground roast coffee has surpassed an average of $7 per pound, up 15% in the past year. Everyone's expecting that to keep climbing, and at some point these price increases will lose the industry customers, which in turn could create a cascading effect that kills off some of these smaller producers, which then raises prices even more, and that could create a spiral that's difficult to stop or even slow.Already, this increase in prices, even for the traditionally cheaper and less desirable robusta coffee bean, has led some producers to leave coffee behind and shift to more consistently profitable goods; many plantations in Vietnam, for instance, have converted some of their facilities over to durian fruit, instead of robusta, and that's limited the supply of robusta, raising the prices of that bean, which in turn is causing some producers of robusta to shift to arabica, which is typically more expensive, and that's meant more coffee on the market is of the more expensive variety, adding to those existing price increases.The futures markets on which coffee beans are traded are also being upended by these pricing issues, resulting in margin calls on increasingly unprofitable trades that, in short, have necessitated that more coffee traders front money for their bets instead of just relying on short positions that have functioned something like insurance paid with credit based on further earnings, and this has put many of them out of business—and that, you guessed it, has also resulted in higher prices, and more margin calls, which could put even more of them out of business in the coming years.There are ongoing efforts to reorganize how the farms at the base on this industry are set up, both in terms of how they produce their beans, and in terms of who owns what, and who profits, how. This model typically costs more to run, and results in less coffee production: in some cases 25% less. But it also results in more savings because trees last up to twice as long, the folks who work the farms are much better compensated, and less likely to suffer serious negative health impacts from their labor, and the resultant coffee is of a much higher quality; kind of a win win win situation for everyone, though again, it's less efficient, so up till now the model hasn't really worked beyond some limited implementations, mostly in Central America.That could change, though, as these larger disruptions in the market could also make room for this type of segue, and indeed, there has apparently been more interest in it, because if the beans are going to cost more, anyway, and the current way of doing things doesn't seem to work consistently anymore, and might even collapse over the next decade if something doesn't change, it may make sense, even to the soulless accounting books of major global conglomerates, to reset the industry so that it's more resilient, and so that the people holding the whole sprawling industry up with their labor are less likely to disappear some day, due to more favorable conditions offered by other markets, or because they're simply worked to death under the auspices of an uncaring, fairly brutal economic and climatic reality.Show Noteshttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/22/business/coffee-prices-climate-change.htmlhttps://web.archive.org/web/20100905180219/https://www.web-books.com/Classics/ON/B0/B701/12MB701.htmlhttps://www.jstor.org/stable/1246099?origin=crossrefhttps://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jan/07/coffee-prices-australia-going-up-cafe-flat-white-costhttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y37dvlr70ohttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/28/business/coffee-prices-climate-change.htmlhttps://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/coffee-prices-food-inflation-climate-change-eggs-bank-of-america-2025-2https://www.statista.com/statistics/675807/average-prices-arabica-and-robusta-coffee-worldwide/https://www.ft.com/content/9934a851-c673-4c16-86eb-86e30bbbaef3https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/01/business/your-coffees-about-to-get-more-expensive-heres-why/index.htmlhttps://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/caffeinated-beverage-market-38053https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/caffeinated-beverage-markethttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffeehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17th_and_18th_centurieshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffeehousehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coffeehttps://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/the-coffeehouse-culture/https://www.openculture.com/2021/08/how-caffeine-fueled-the-enlightenment-industrial-revolution-the-modern-world.html This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

fWotD Episode 2665: Turabay dynasty Welcome to Featured Wiki of the Day, your daily dose of knowledge from Wikipedia’s finest articles.The featured article for Wednesday, 21 August 2024 is Turabay dynasty.The Turabay dynasty (Arabic: آل طرباي, romanized: Āl Ṭurabāy) was a family of Bedouin emirs in northern Palestine who served as the multazims (tax farmers) and sanjak-beys (district governors) of Lajjun Sanjak during Ottoman rule in the 16th–17th centuries. The sanjak (district) spanned the towns of Lajjun, Jenin and Haifa, and the surrounding countryside. The progenitors of the family had served as chiefs of Marj Bani Amir (the Plain of Esdraelon or Jezreel Valley) under the Egypt-based Mamluks in the late 15th century.During the conquest of the Levant and Egypt by the Ottoman Empire in 1516–1517, the Turabay chief Qaraja and his son Turabay aided the forces of Ottoman Sultan Selim I. The Ottomans kept them in their Mamluk-era role as guardians of the strategic Via Maris and Damascus–Jerusalem highways and rewarded them with tax farms in northern Palestine. Their territory became a sanjak in 1559 and Turabay's son Ali became its first governor. His brother Assaf was appointed in 1573, serving for ten years before being dismissed and exiled to Rhodes for involvement in a rebellion. His nephew Turabay was appointed in 1589 and remained in office until his death in 1601. His son and successor Ahmad, the most prominent chief of the dynasty, ruled Lajjun for nearly a half-century and repulsed attempts by the powerful Druze chief and Ottoman governor of Sidon-Beirut and Safed, Fakhr al-Din Ma'n, to take over Lajjun and Nablus in the 1620s. He consolidated the family's alliance with the Ridwan and Farrukh governing dynasties of Gaza and Nablus, which remained intact until the dynasties' demise toward the end of the century.As multazims and sanjak-beys the Turabays were entrusted with collecting taxes for the Ottomans, quelling local rebellions, acting as judges, and securing roads. They were largely successful in these duties, while keeping good relations with the peasantry and the village chiefs of the sanjak. Although in the 17th century several of their emirs lived in the towns of Lajjun and Jenin, the Turabays largely preserved their nomadic way of life, pitching camp with their Banu Haritha tribesmen near Caesarea in the winters and the plain of Acre in the summers. The eastward migration of the Banu Haritha to the Jordan Valley, Ottoman centralization drives, and diminishing tax revenues brought about their political decline and they were permanently stripped of office in 1677. Members of the family remained in Jenin at the close of the century, and descendants continue to live in present-day northern Israel and Palestine.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:59 UTC on Wednesday, 21 August 2024.For the full current version of the article, see Turabay dynasty on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm standard Joey.

rWotD Episode 2600: Roger of San Severino Welcome to random Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of a random Wikipedia page every day.The random article for Sunday, 16 June 2024 is Roger of San Severino.Roger of San Severino was the bailiff of the Kingdom of Jerusalem from 1277 to 1282. He was sent to Acre, then the capital of the kingdom, with a small force by the new king Charles I of Anjou, also King of Sicily, to act as regent.Charles, an Angevin and brother of King Louis IX of France, had purchased the rights to the kingdom from Mary of Antioch, one of the claimants after the death of Conradin in 1268. The succession, however, was disputed between Mary and Hugh III of Cyprus.Roger had the support of the Knights Templar and the Republic of Venice when he landed at Acre. The bailiff at the time was Balian of Ibelin, Lord of Arsuf, who initially refused to admit him into the citadel until papers signed by Charles, Mary, and Pope John XXI were produced and the Knights Hospitallers and Patriarch of Jerusalem John of Versailles had refused to intervene. The state of the kingdom became anarchy as Roger raised Charles' standards and demanded oaths of homage from the barons, who in turn refused to accept the transferral of the royal rights without a decision of the Haute Cour. The barons requested Hugh of Cyprus to release them from their oaths, but he refused. Roger then threatened all the barons with confiscation if they did not do him homage. They did. Even Bohemond VII of Tripoli recognised him as regent in Acre.Roger governed the remnant of the Latin kingdom in the East in peace. He continued the alliance with the Mamluk sultan of Egypt, Qalawun, at the request of Charles and extended it for another ten years in May 1281. He also refused to aid the Mongol ilkhan of Persia, Abaqa, against the Mamluks at the Second Battle of Homs. He even personally congratulated Qalawun on his victory. In 1281, following the Sicilian Vespers of 30 March, Roger was recalled with his troops to Italy and he left Odo Poilechien behind as his deputy.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:10 UTC on Sunday, 16 June 2024.For the full current version of the article, see Roger of San Severino on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm Kendra Standard.

With war continuing to rage in the Middle East, it would be wise to go back and trace the roots of this war and the long-standing antipathy and confrontation between the Muslims, Arabs, Jews and even Christians. We all know this isn't the first time that fighting has broken out in the region; there is unfortunately an ongoing history of deep tensions between nations and religions over the millennia. Countless battles being waged for control of the land of Israel and particularly Jerusalem. Going back to Biblical times and spanning throughout the ages we are witness to empire after empire trying to conquer this ancient land. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Crusaders, the Mamluks, the Ottomans -- all vying for control of the promised land. What lies at the root of all of these conflicts? The only way to ultimately find a permanent solution is by understanding what we are actually fighting about. Is this a battle over land? Is it a battle over power and control? Or is it a religious and ideological war? And if so, what is the ideology and what will finally create a situation where we establish a lasting peace, coexistence and harmony within the diversity? We can find our answer in an event that took place over three millennia ago -- the greatest event in all of history: the Sinai Revelation. Please join Rabbi Simon Jacobson in this important discussion and discover how the events at Sinai 3,336 years ago changed and transformed this planet. Learn how Sinai created a new paradigm, challenging the nations of the world to embrace their divine mission, paving the way and providing us with a formula for global transformation. However, the journey is a difficult one. Hence, the never-ending struggles. But the good news is that over time Sinai's power has infiltrated and slowly refined and elevated the world's values. And now, we are poised to enter a new stage of spiritual redemption, in which Sinai rises to its true prominence -- helping us end these battles once and for all. and establish permanent and sustainable peace between all nations of the world.

*We had some major connection gremlins during recording, but please stick with it. Lots of great information is incoming from Terry.*   This week we welcome back author and historian, Terry Boardman. A deep dive into the historical context of the foundation of the State Of Israel is on the menu. Geo-politics, spiritual warfare and the hidden esoteric hand are areas we hope to explore and elucidate.   Follow Terry's work here: Website - https://threeman.org/ From the web: The foundation of the State of Israel is a fascinating story that spans millennia. Here's a brief overview: Ancient Roots: The roots of modern Israel can be traced back to ancient times when the Israelites established a united kingdom under King Saul around 1020 BCE. However, internal strife and external pressures led to the division of this kingdom into two: Israel in the north and Judah in the south. Over the centuries, the region witnessed a series of conquerors, from the Persians to the Greeks under Alexander the Great, followed by the Seleucid Empire. Roman Period and Jewish-Roman Wars: By 63 BCE, the Romans had annexed Judea, making it a province of the Roman Empire. The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE by the Roman legions was a devastating blow. A subsequent revolt, the Bar Kokhba rebellion (132-136 CE), further diminished Jewish autonomy in the region. Spread of the Jewish Diaspora: Following these events, the Jewish diaspora spread across the Mediterranean and beyond, but a Jewish presence remained in Palestine throughout the subsequent centuries. Islamic Rule and Ottoman Empire: The rise of Islam in the 7th century CE brought new rulers to the region, including the Umayyad and later the Abbasid Caliphates. Over the next millennium, control of the region shifted among various empires, including the Crusaders, the Mamluks, and the Ottomans. Zionism and the Call for Return: In the late 19th century, the Zionist movement emerged, seeking to establish a national homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine. The term “Zionism” derives from “Zion,” symbolising the entire Promised Land. The Holocaust during World War II strengthened Jewish determination. Declaration of the State of Israel: On May 14, 1948, the Jewish People's Council gathered at the Tel Aviv Museum and proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Jewish National Council, read out the proclamation, declaring the first independent Jewish state in nineteen centuries of history. The infant state faced immediate challenges, including war with the Arab League and invasions by three Arab armies. And so, the long-cherished Zionist dream became a reality, marking a pivotal moment in Jewish history   #history #zionism #israel _______________________________ Follow us here: https://allmylinks.com/the-amish-inquisition Signup for the newsletter, join the community, follow us online, and most importantly share links!  Producer Credits for Ep 328:  Producers - Rhona Kesson, Ben Limmer, Mat Chinn, Aliyah, Helen, General Lee and last weeks artist - Lee. _______________________________ Leave us a voicemail: 07562245894 Message us here....follow, like, subscribe and share. (comments, corrections, future topics etc). We read out iTunes reviews if you leave them. 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If you find the podcast valuable, please consider returning some value to us and help keep the show free and honest.   Assets 326: Road Noise Risk: https://www.business-standard.com/health/traffic-noise-can-increase-risk-of-cardiovascular-disease-study-124042800125_1.html Monkey doctor: https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/may/02/orangutan-seen-treating-wound-with-medicinal-herb-in-first-for-wild-animals-max-planck-institute-sumatra Iso: Blew in my mouth https://open.spotify.com/episode/4mma612SsUE5SrUW7bcmIu?si=X3hx0SvtQJChA-TuD1QoDA&t=344 Iso: gay rap 26.30 remaining https://open.spotify.com/episode/1gc6CJkQuypicc0eTbRRSQ?si=WRVK7w-MQyuxzhjlKTPM-g&t=4573 Iso: eye balls NA1654 5.mins [No Agenda] 1654 - "e-Safety" 

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This week Beau and Carl discuss the early reign of King Edward I; from his adventures against the Mamluks in the Holy Land on the eighth crusade, to his wide ranging constitutional reforms, to his dealings with the endlessly rebellious Welsh Watch the full premium video: https://www.lotuseaters.com/premium-epochs-144-or-edward-i-part-i-4-2-24

Last May, I spoke with Professor Nicholas Morton about the Mongols and their impact upon the medieval Near East.  This episode digs deeper into that subject, focusing on the Mongol conquest and destruction of Baghdad in February of 1258.  The Mongol sack of Baghdad is notorious for its brutality. Estimates of the number killed range from 90,000 to the 200,000 claimed by the leader of the Mongol army, Hulegu Khan.  Much like Alaric's sack of Rome in 410, the Mongol conquest of Baghdad, the seat of the Abbasid caliphate, had a symbolic significance beyond its political and military importance. It signaled both the end of an independent Abbasid caliphate and announced the Mongol intent to dominate the entire Islamic Near East, a goal that was to be thwarted by the Mamluks of Egypt. In this episode, I interview Peter Konieczny, the co-founder and editor of Medievalists.net, about his research into the Mongol conquest of Baghdad. Peter explains the role played by non-Mongols in instigating the invasion of Iran and Iraq for their own profit, why the Mongols targeted Baghdad, what that city was on the eve of the Mongol assault, and the real historical significance of the event.  I hope you will join us.I've turned a number of the podcast episodes into YouTube videos using PowerPoint to add relevant images.  These can be found at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsLl5BdGBDlAlYULY1zeckOOdVPrSIN2XIf you have questions about this or any episode, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.comIf you are enjoying "'Tis But A Scratch" on a site that has reviews and ratings, please consider giving it a good review and high rating so that others interested in the Middle Ages might give it a try. Thanks!Listen on Podurama https://podurama.com Intro and exit music are by Alexander NakaradaIf you have questions, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com

Nicholas Morton, associate professor of history at Nottingham Trent University and author of The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East, joins the show to talk about the Mongol invasions. ▪️ Times      •    01:40 Introduction      •    02:15 Central Asia before the Mongols     •    04:15 Mongol methods     •    09:15 Sailing the Eurasian Steppe     •   13:54 Temujin     •    18:38 A dearth of sources     •    21:50 Khwarazmian Empire     •    26:40 The Mongol secret     •   32:03 Selective savagery      •    36:30 The Near East     •    40:15 Mamluks    •    42:03 Mongol rule     •    45:17 Lasting effects

I sat down with Julia Bender, a student and researcher of Islamic and medieval art, to discuss the relationship between the Venetian Republic and the Islamic powers that competed for mercantile control of the Mediterranean. Looking at the Mamluks and Ottomans, two major dynasties that coincide with the Renaissance period, we discuss what exchanges were being made, how Venice served as a transition point for Eastern goods into Europe, and the major influence of Islamic innovations in Venice. This episode also covers essential information about Aldus Manutius, his printing press, and the proliferation of printed goods as it relates to Venetian mercantilism. Further, we discuss the stylistic influences of Islamic lands on European art production, primarily through the oriental carpet trade. Instagram: @italian_renaissance_podcastGet additional content by becoming a Patron: patreon.com/TheItalianRenaissancePodcast Support the show

In this episode I interview my special guest Dr. Nicholas Morton, author of The Mongol Storm (Basic Books, 2022), about the Mongols and their invasion of and impact upon the thirteenth-century Near East. Our discussion covers who and what the Mongols were; why they were so effective militarily; Mongol religion and religious 'toleration'; their reputation for horrific brutality; why the Mamluks of Egypt were able to defeat them in battle; and the economic and cultural impact of the so-called Pax Mongolica.Suggested reading:Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-       1350  (Oxford University Press, 1989) Favereau, Marie. The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World (Belknap Press,      2021)Jackson, Peter. The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion       (Yale University Press, 2017)May, Timothy. The Mongols Empire (Edinburgh University Press, 2018)  Morton, Nicholas. The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval      Near East  (Basic Books, 2022)Morton, Nicholas. "Life Under the Mongols." BBC History Magazine. Vol. 24 (April      2023)Rossabi, Morris. The Mongols and Global History (Norton Documents Reader) (W.W.      Norton, 2010)This episode includes a sound clip from the theatrical trailer for the epically terrible 1956 movie "The Conqueror," starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan--yes the John Wayne as Genghis Khan!!!(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHt0Pb8rkXU)As always, we are grateful to the talented and generous composer Alexander Nakarada for the podcast's intro and exit music.

In this episode Elliot sits down with James Waterson, author of "The Knights of Islam: The Wars of the Mamluks." James provides an in-depth look into the history of the Mamluk Sultanate, with a special focus on the reign of Sultan Baybars.  Baybars, who ruled from 1260 to 1277, was one of the most powerful and influential Mamluk sultans. He led the Mamluks to victory against the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut, a significant turning point in the region's history. James delves into Baybars' military strategies, and the ways in which he left a lasting impact on the region.  He also discusses the conflicts and wars that defined Baybars' reign, including the ongoing struggle against the Crusaders.  Listen in for a captivating conversation that will give you a new understanding of the complexities of the Mamluk era and the powerful leader who shaped it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello Prestigeheads! We just wanted to share Derek's grand return to podcasting over at Foreign Exchanges in the form of this great discussion of the Mamluks. Be sure to subscribe to FX for content like this, the daily World Roundups, and more. Enjoy!Hello everybody! After a very extended hiatus we're back with a real, full blown Foreign Exchanges podcast (more on that at the end of the show)! I'm joined by Carl F. Petry, Hamad ibn Khalifa Al Thani Professor of Middle East Studies and Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern University and author of The Mamluk Sultanate: A History, a book that you can—nay, should—buy today. Professor Petry and I discuss who the Mamluks were, how they came to rule much of Egypt, Syria, and the Hejaz in the mid-13th century, and why it took until 2022 for the emergence of an accessible English language survey of their sultanate to emerge.Don't forget to pick up a copy of Professor Petry's book! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.americanprestigepod.com/subscribe

Hello everybody! After a very extended hiatus we're back with a real, full blown Foreign Exchanges podcast (more on that at the end of the show)! I'm joined by Carl F. Petry, Hamad ibn Khalifa Al Thani Professor of Middle East Studies and Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern University and author of The Mamluk Sultanate: A History, a book that you can—nay, should—buy today. Professor Petry and I discuss who the Mamluks were, how they came to rule much of Egypt, Syria, and the Hejaz in the mid-13th century, and why it took until 2022 for the emergence of an accessible English language survey of their sultanate to emerge.Don't forget to pick up a copy of Professor Petry's book, and if you're not already subscribed to Foreign Exchanges please do: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fx.substack.com/subscribe

Roger Crowley is one on the best (if not the best) narrative historians of the Middle Ages. Here is on great form talking about the Siege of Acre in 1291. The Crusaders have been pushed back and back with Acre the last meaningful holdout. They are up against the formidable Mamluks led by Sultan Khalil. Can they hold out? Roger's book The Accursed Tower (like all his books to be honest!) is a both rigorously researched and a fantastically exciting read. He covers the disastrous (for the Crusaders) Seventh Crusade, the rise of the remarkable Baibars and on the last significant battle of the Crusaders in the Holy Land. Roger is fantastic guest.

歡迎留言告訴我們你對這一集的想法： https://open.firstory.me/user/cl81kivnk00dn01wffhwxdg2s/comments 每日英語跟讀 Ep.K534: Earthquakes Destroy. People Rebuild. She wanted to retrieve her medicine, and if memory serves all these years later, also a hairbrush and a photograph from her apartment. 她想拿回她的藥，若經過這麼多年沒記錯的話，還想拿回一把梳子跟她公寓裡的一張照片。 It was in 2009, a couple of days after an earthquake flattened L'Aquila, the capital of Abruzzo, in central Italy. Authorities had closed the city to residents, but the woman and her sister had sneaked in. I found her leaning on a cane in a broken, empty plaza staring up at a midcentury building that the quake had somehow sheared horizontally so that it looked like a pot with its lid askew. 那是在2009年，義大利中部阿布魯佐大區首府拉奎拉遭地震夷成平地的幾天後。當局已禁止居民進入該城，但這位婦女跟她妹妹偷溜進去。我發現，她站在一個破敗、空曠的廣場上，拄著一根拐杖盯著一座上世紀中葉的建築物，地震不知以何種方式水平橫切該建築物，看起來就像一個蓋子歪掉的鍋子。 She asked for help. 她尋求援助。 From afar, we measure catastrophes like the calamity in Turkey and Syria by totaling the numbers of dead and buildings destroyed. Reports describe a spectacularly wide disaster zone, recovery efforts that are too slow, leaving untold hundreds and possibly thousands of victims still buried, alive and dead, under the rubble — and hundreds of thousands more in the cold without homes, food, drinking water or medical supplies. 從遠處看，我們透過罹難人數和建築物被摧毀總數，衡量像土耳其和敘利亞的災難。有報導描述一個驚人的廣大災區，復原工作過於緩慢，數百名甚至數千名受害者恐仍被埋在廢墟下，生死未卜，還有數十萬人在寒冷環境中生活，沒有房子、食物、飲用水或醫療用品。 It is too much to process, the loss of lives and history. The tiny Jewish community in Antakya, in central Turkey, dates back 2,500 years. The head of the community and his wife both died in the quake. The city's synagogue is now gone. 生命和歷史的逝去讓人難以接受。土耳其中部安塔基亞的小猶太社區可追溯至2500年前。社區負責人和他的妻子都在地震中喪生。這座城市的猶太教堂現已不復存在。 The Habibi Neccar Mosque collapsed, too. The earthquake's destruction was ecumenical. The mosque dates back to 638. It was a church and a mosque, depending on who ruled the city. Over the centuries, authority passed from the caliphs to the Byzantines, who succumbed to Seljuks, who were ousted by the Crusaders, who ceded to Mamluks, who were replaced by Ottomans, and eventually Antakya was annexed by Turkey. The quake erased whole swathes of history. 哈比卜內卡清真寺也倒塌了。地震造成廣泛破壞。這座清真寺的歷史可追溯至公元638年。它是一座教堂，也是座清真寺，取決於誰統治這座城市。數個世紀以來，權力從哈里發傳到屈服於塞爾柱人的拜占庭，十字軍驅逐塞爾柱人後將城市割讓給馬木留克人，馬木留克人則被鄂圖曼人取代，最終安塔基亞被土耳其併吞。地震則抹去了整個歷史。 The biblical city of Antioch, Antakya is also where the word “Christian” was supposedly first used. The Apostle Peter led the church there before establishing a church in Rome. Paul preached in Antioch. The quake collapsed the St. Paul Orthodox Church, as well. 安塔基亞是聖經中的安提阿城，據說也是「基督徒」一詞首次被使用的地方。使徒彼得建立羅馬教會以前，曾在當地帶領基督教。保羅也在安提阿傳道。地震也使得聖保羅東正教教堂倒塌。 L'Aquila, like Antakya, lies in a notorious earthquake zone. A quake in L'Aquila in 1349 killed 800 residents; another in 1703 killed more than 3,000, prompting Pope Clement XI to send priests and nuns freed of their celibacy to repopulate the city. 拉奎拉和安塔基亞一樣，位在惡名昭彰的地震帶上。拉奎拉1349年的一場地震，造成800個居民喪生，1703年的另一場地震導致3000多人死亡，促使教宗克勉十一世派遣不再守貞的神父和修女，提供這座城市新生命。 You may rightly ask about the logic of rebuilding time and again in these risky places. But logic is not the point. 你可能會問，在這些危險地方一次又一次重建的邏輯為何，但邏輯並不是重點。 Cities are only nominally bricks and mortar, after all. To residents they are repositories of a hairbrush and a photograph — collective threads of a social fabric that, over time, weave together a life, a family, a history, a neighborhood, a community. 城市畢竟只是表面上的實體建築。對居民來說，它們是一把梳子和一張照片的倉庫，一個社會結構的集體線索，將一個生活、一個家庭、一段歷史、一個鄰居和一個社區逐漸編織在一起。 The city was still a shambles. But it was home. 這座城市仍然一片狼藉，但它是家。Source article: https://udn.com/news/story/6904/6994223 Powered by Firstory Hosting

It's the event marking the end of the Crusader States in the Near East. In this episode of Bow & Blade, Michael and Kelly talk about how the Mamluks conquered the city of Acre in 1291.  You can support this podcast and Medievalists.net on Patreon - go to https://www.patreon.com/medievalists

Tom tells the history of the Crusades, the Mongol invasions, and the rise of the Mamluks in part 3 of a series on Muslim history. The full series is available on Patreon.

“The most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation." - David Hume The Crusades is one of the defining chapters in History, a showcase for ‘East meets West'. It was the era of great men, Saladin, Richard the Lionheart, St Bernard of Clairvaux. So who cocked up the Fourth Crusade? And how did it end up turning on fellow Christians? Comedian Mikey Robins and Historian Paul Wilson kick off their new series in style. Join Mikey and Paul as they take on Seljuks, Saracens, Mamluks and more. Facebook Twitter Instagram  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Mongols were an unstoppable force through the 12th and 13th centuries, with an empire that stretched across huge swathes of land, from China to Europe. But its territory also included much of the Near East, where one aggressive power – the Mamluks – finally put a halt to their never-ending progress. Nicholas Morton explores the clash of these two major empires with David Musgrove. (Ad) Nicholas Morton is the author of The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East (Basic Books, 2022). Buy it now from Amazon:https://go.skimresources.com?id=71026X1535947&xcust=historyextra-social-histboty&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FMongol-Storm-Breaking-Empires-Medieval%2Fdp%2F1541616308Subscribe to BBC History Magazine or BBC History Revealed this season and receive a book of your choice worth up to £30* at https://www.buysubscriptions.com/subscribe2022Listeners from outside the UK can also subscribe*Book promotion only available for UK residents Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In today's episode of the Thriving Authors Podcast, I'm sharing a fascinating conversation I had with Brad Graft, the author of the Brotherhood of the Mamluks trilogy. If you're interested in history, or in writing and plotting out a trilogy, I know you'll take a lot of gems from what he shares about: How his research led him to travel to remote places around the world His process of writing his trilogy How he felt called to write about this topic The mystery and the magic inherent in the creative process, along with the practical routines of writing a novel or a series And more! About Brad: Brad Graft is a businessman who runs a national chain with his partners. A former U.S. Marine officer who served in Somalia, he helped develop a military program that assists wounded servicemen and families of the fallen. He continues to steer fundraising for charities serving this cause. An avid fly fisherman and hunter, for decades he has pursued game fish in remote places around the world. Also a history buff, his research on the Brotherhood of the Mamluks series took him to the Middle and Far East, where he studied Medieval-era routes and fortresses and trekked the Mongolian steppe on horseback, learning the ways of native hunters and nomadic herders. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/dallas-woodburn/support

After two decades of anarchy, one man appeared from the darkness to restore the Golden Horde to its might: this was Toqtamish. Just as the candle may spark up just before it goes out,  Toqtamish seemed poised to right the wrongs of the previous decades, and reaffirm the power of the Golden Horde over its subjects, and thus bring about further centuries of greatness. But then came Temür, Toqtamish's former patron, turned greatest enemy. I'm your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Age of Conquest.   While our series on the Golden Horde has so far focused on the descendants of Batu Khan, the khans of the Golden Horde until the start of 1360s, the other descendants of Jochi's many other sons had their own appanages within the khanate. Of the fourteen named sons of Jochi,  by the late fourteenth century  there were two of these lineages left who held any might. These were the lines of Shiban, Jochi's fifth son, and Toqa-Temür, Jochi's youngest son. As the house of Batu and Orda went extinct in the middle of the fourteenth century, the torch of rulership was passed between these lineages. It seems both lineages were largely based in the eastern part of the khanate, in the Blue Horde or the ulus of Orda. The Shibanids held lands in what was to become the Khanate of Sibir, named for the fortress of the same name. The heart of this territory was the upper Irtysh River, and if the name of Sibir sounds familiar, that's because in time it gave its name to Siberia. The Toqa-Temürids meanwhile seem to have generally ranged east of the Ural river, across the Kazakh steppes.   In the chaos that followed Berdi Beğ Khan's death in 1359, it was representatives of the Shibanids who first moved west to claim the throne in Sarai. When Orda's line died out in the 1360s, the Toqa-Temürids were the ones on the scene to usurp the ulus in the Blue Horde lands, though it was not a secure power base. The order of khans is a matter of great contention: reigns were brief, and various sources often offer contradictory information, which is often further contradicted with the dates given on coinage in the period. What is clear is that the Blue Horde contenders quickly, if not immediately, saw their conflict and their state as independent of the wars for Sarai ongoing at the same time. The Blue Horde was now separate, once more, from the Golden.   One of the earliest figures to seize the vacant throne of the Ordaids was Qara-Nogai, a Toqa-Temürid. In the early 1360s he was elected khan in Sighnaq, the Blue Horde administrative capital, located on the lower reaches of Syr Darya River near the Aral Sea. His reign was brief, but after some years of conflict members of his family continued to claim the throne; the most notable of these was Urus Khan, whose reign is usually dated to beginning in 1368.    Urus Khan was a real strong man— and not a descendant of Orda, as newer research has demonstrated. In the decade of his reign Urus established a firm hold on power and firm military backing. Rivals for the throne were violently killed or exiled, and around 1372 he even led an army to take Sarai and declare himself Khan of the Golden Horde, though he soon abandoned the city. Nonetheless he exercised a monopoly on power in the Blue Horde which made it considerably more stable than the ongoing troubles in the Golden Horde, which was too much even for Urus to exert control over. But such was his influence that his sons and descendants continued to be prominent players for decades. Two sons, Quyurchuq and Ulugh Muhammad, later became khans of the Golden Horde, while the latter established the Khanate of Kazan; a grandson of Urus, Baraq, also became Khan of the Golden Horde, while Urus' great-grandchildren established the Kazakh Khanate. It should not be a surprise then that some historians suggest that Urus should be identified with Alash Khan, the legendary founder of the Kazakhs from whom all khans were descended.  Descent from Urus, in effect, became a new form of legitimacy after the fourteenth century.   As mentioned, Urus took to killing and exiling his rivals to power. These were often fellow Toqa-Temürids. One such fellow who he had killed was his cousin, Toy-Khwaja. In the aftermath, Toy-Khwaja's son was forced to flee; this is our first introduction to Toqtamish. Toy-Khwaja must have been quite the rival and had some following, for Toqtamish never had much trouble finding supporters for himself. One source indicates Toqtamish's mother was a high ranking lady of the Sufi-Qonggirads, a dynasty which had recently established its quasi-independence from the Blue Horde at Urgench and now ruled Khwarezm. A young and courageous warrior, if not the most tactically skilled, Prince Toqtamish deeply desired both revenge and power. Urus Khan's horsemen pursued him, and Toqtamish fled for his life right out of the steppe, crossing the Syr Darya River to seek shelter with a new rising power: Aksak Temür as the Turks of the time knew him; he'd prefer to be known as Emir Temür Güregen, son-in-law to the house of Chinggis and sahib-i qiran, “lord of the Auspicious Conjunction.” Persians knew him as Temür-i Lang, and today we know him best as Tamerlane. Since half the people in this period are named some variation of Temür, to help make it easier to tell everyone apart we'll stick with his popular moniker of Tamerlane.   Since the beginning of the 1360s, Tamerlane had fought for power in the ruins of the western half of the Chagatai Khanate. By spring 1370 he had succeeded in becoming master of Transoxania. As a non-Chinggisid, Tamerlane could not bear the title of khan or rule in his own right over nomads. Thus his official title was Emir, presenting himself as the protector of his new puppet khan, a descendant of Ögedai. From this basis the Timürid empire began to expand.    When Toqtamish fled to the domains of Tamerlane around 1375, the Emir's attention was still mostly local. His campaigns into Iran had not yet begun, and instead he alternated between attacking the Sufi-Qonggirads in Khwarezm, and Qamar al-Din, the ruler of the eastern Chagatai lands, or Moghulistan as it was commonly known at the time.  Undoubtedly, Tamerlane held a wary eye to his northern border; Urus Khan and his horsemen posed a real threat to Tamerlane, in a way none of his other neighbours did. Thus when a young, pliable claimant to the throne of Urus arrived in his court, Tamerlane was more than willing to oblige. Should Toqtamish control the Blue Horde, then Tamerlane needn't worry over that border and could turn his attention elsewhere. Toqtamish was received in Tamerlane's court with high honours and respect, and granted Otrar and other lands along the Syr Darya as patrimony, in addition to troops, horses and supplies. Not coincidentally, Otrar was within spitting distance of Sighnaq. Tamerlane had given Toqtamish a platform to seize the Blue Horde.   Toqtamish quickly began raiding the lands of Urus, building his reputation as a warrior and charismatic leader. But Urus was no fool and quickly had an army sent after Toqtamish, under the command of a son, Qutlugh Buqa. Despite fierce effort on Toqtamish's part, and the death of Qutlugh Buqa in the fighting, Toqtamish was defeated and sent back to Tamerlane. The Emir provided Toqtamish another army, only for Toqtamish to again be defeated when another of Urus' armies came seeking to avenge Qutlugh Buqa. This time, according to the Timurid historian Yazdi, Toqtamish was so thoroughly beaten down that he ditched his armour and swam across the Syr Darya River to save his life, and returned to Tamerlane naked and humbled. Not long after came a representative of Urus, named Edigü, a powerful bey within the Blue Horde and head of the Manghit people. Edigü bore Urus' message demanding Tamerlane handover Toqtamish; was it not right for the father to avenge the son? What right did Tamerlane have to hold such a fugitive?   Tamerlane refused to handover Toqtamish— whatever Tamerlaner's faults, and there were many, he had given his word as overlord to protect the young prince. Some authors go as far as to present an almost father/son dynamic between them. It's not impossible; Tamerlane had gone through his own period of qazaqliq,  the Turkic term for when a prince was reduced to a state of near brigandage, a freebooter fighting for every scrap. It's the etymological basis, by the way, for both the Turkic Kazakh and the Cossacks of the Pontic steppes.  Tamerlane may have sympathized with the fierce, proud Toqtamish, in contrast with his own sons who tended to range from lazy to unreliable. Tamerlane's own favoured son and heir, his second son Jahangir Mirza, died about this time in 1376 or 7, leaving his father stricken with grief. Toqtamish may have filled in the gap, and as Toqtamish himself had lost his father, it's not difficult to imagine Toqtamish valuing Tamerlane's presence greatly.  Of course, it may simply have been convenience on the part of both parties.    With Tamerlane's refusal to hand over Toqtamish, Urus Khan led an army against them. Tamerlane raised one in response, with Toqtamish in the vanguard. Skirmishing ensued, and nearly did the full forces clash, had not, according to Yazdi, a vicious rainstorm kept the armies apart. They returned to their respective realms. The dramatic confrontation between the two great warlords of Central Asia was averted when, likely in 1378, Urus Khan suddenly died, followed in quick succession by the chief of his sons, Toqta Caya.       In a mad dash, Tamerlane sent Toqtamish with an army to Sighnaq, and had him finally declared khan. Tamerlane returned comfortably to his capital of Samarkand, only to learn that Toqtamish had again been ousted, when another of Urus Khan's sons, Temür Malik, had declared himself khan and raised an army. Once more Tamerlane reinforced Toqtamish, though now Toqtamish was able to gather more support of his own. Finally Temür Malik Khan was overcome, and Toqtamish firmly emplaced as Khan of the Blue Horde. Not coincidentally, from this point onwards Tamerlane was able to secure his frontiers and begin his southern conquests into Iran, which would hold his attention for the rest of the 1380s.       The new Khan, Toqtamish,  set about confirming the support of the pillars of his new realm. The Shibanids of Sibir, and the Sufi-Qonggirads of Khwarezm, despite their capital of Urgench being sacked by Tamerlane in 1379, were important suppliers of troops for Toqtamish. Numerous beys and princes came over to pledge allegiance to him. Toqtamish either convinced them of his divine support, or richly rewarded them, and succeeded in breaking even some factions. The Manghit leader Edigü, for instance, found that his brother ‘Isa Beğ became a staunch ally of Toqtamish Khan. Edigü's sister had been married to Urus Khan's son, the late Temür Malik Khan, and despite the latter's defeat Edigü remained a powerful and prominent figure within the Horde, controlling a great swath of pasture east of the Ural and Emba Rivers. To bring him over, or at least stop his active resistance, Toqtamish provided Edigü tarkhan, or tax-exempt, status and granted him more lands.       With his rear secured, Toqtamish had not a moment to lose. His intentions were clear. Toqtamish was not aiming to just succeed his father, or Urus Khan, or be merely Khan of the Blue Horde. He had much bigger dreams. He idolized Öz Beg Khan and the glory days of the united ulus. Beyond that though, outside of Mongolia proper, Toqtamish was effectively the only Chinggisid monarch who held power in his own name. The Yuan Khans had been pushed from China, and their power restricted to the Mongol homeland, and their attention focused on battling Ming Dynasty incursions into the steppe. In the west, all other Chinggisids were puppets or minor princelings. Toqtamish therefore presented himself not just as heir to Özbeg and Jani Beg, or of Batu and Jochi, but as the heir to Chinggis Khan. For the rest of his life Toqtamish remained the most powerful single member of the house of Chinggis, and styled himself not as khan, but as khagan, Great Khan. And for that, he needed Sarai.         Quickly, but carefully, he made his way onto the Jochid capital, winning over allies or defeating foes as he went, before taking the city in 1380. Only one great enemy remained, and that was the western beylerbeyi, Mamai. There was not a moment to waste once Mamai suffered defeat at Kulikovo against the Prince of Moscow in September 1380. As Mamai retreated to his base in the steppes north of Crima, Toqtamish granted yarliqs to the Italians in the Crimea to confirm and expand their privileges, trapping Mamai between them. Toqtamish unleashed a full assault on Mamai and crushed his power in a decisive engagement along the Kalka River. In the aftermath Toqtamish took Mamai's camp, his treasury, his wives and beys, and the rest of his troops. Mamai fled for his life, making his way to Caffa, where the Genoese took him captive and executed him in the name of Toqtamish Khaan.        By 1381 Toqtamish was master of the Golden Horde, and set about reminding everyone of the order of things. The Rus' princes reaffirmed their submission, with even Dmitri Donskoi, the victor of Kulikovo, promptly sending gifts for Toqtamish, his wives and his princes. But their tardiness in submitting in person brought Toqtamish to shorten the leash. The Rus' had grown too haughty over the last two decades, and Toqtamish surprised them with a sudden and horrific onslaught.  The Prince of Ryazan' saved his city with a last moment surrender. Other cities were not so lucky. Dmitri Donskoi had hoped to raise an army, but losses after Kulikovo were too great, the princes unwilling to follow Dmitri to such certain doom. In the end Dmitri was forced to flee Moscow before Toqtamish encircled the city. After three days, on the 26th of August 1382,  the city was stormed, sacked and burned. Numerous others followed suit.        Dmitri Donskoi was forced to send his son Vasili as hostage to the Horde, and paid heavy tribute. Once more Moscow minted coins in the name of the Khan, and once more Dmitri collected taxes for him too. Though Dmitri had his revenge on the Prince of Ryazan' with a vicious attack, the victor of Kulikovo died in 1389, only thirty years old.        Now master of the lands of Jochi, Toqtamish set about re-strengthening the Horde. The internal stability, as the Horde enjoyed 10 years of relative peace after Toqtamish took Sarai, did wonders for internal trade and movement, coupled with the lessening of the plague impact. He enacted monetary reforms, expanding the centres which minted coins and a lighter standard for silver dirhams, which in the opinion of researchers like Nedashkovsky, was a recognition and response to inflation.  When the bey Bekbulat tried to declare himself khan in Crimea, Toqtamish was able to come to agreement with him and reach a peaceable solution.  Khwarezm and its Sufi-Qonggirad Dynasty, which Tamerlane had considered his subjects, now recognized Toqtamish as overlord and minted coins in his name from 1381 onwards. On the western frontier, the loss of lands to Lithuania was halted when Toqtamish won a victory over the Lithuanians at Poltava in 1382, and forced them to continue paying tribute for the lands they had already taken from the Horde. From Toqtamish's point-of-view, this was essentially making them his vassals, though the Lithuanians did not quite see it like this. Nonetheless, the Khan retained generally stable relations with the states along his border.   Toqtamish also looked abroad. In distant Moghulistan Toqtamish established relations with Qamar al-Din, the effective ruler of the eastern Chagatai lands. In 1385 he opened contact with the Mamluks of Egypt, the first time in ten years diplomatic contact was made. He did not make the mistake of invading Azerbaijan, but instead formed a treaty of friendship with its ruler, Sultan Ahmad Jalayir. And this became quite the issue, for shortly after this treatment was made, Tamerlane invaded Azerbaijan and forced Ahmad Jalayir to flee Tabriz.    Perhaps Tamerlane had been unaware of the treaty between Toqtamish and Sultan Ahmad, but it seems to have been the evolution of the ever-more fraught relationship between the two. Toqtamish Khan and Emir Tamerlane were already on roads to argument with both claiming the lands of Khwarezm. Tamerlane, now with a puppet Il-Khan, made a show of restoring the former lands of the Ilkhanate; just as Toqtamish was making a claim to restoring former Jochid lands in the Caucasus. But there was another ideological aspect at play. As we've emphasized already, Toqtamish was very proud of his Chinggisid ancestry, and appears to have a particular disgust for pretensions of non-Chinggisids to rule. Tamerlane's presentation of himself as a supreme lord, while also walking around with a bundle of Chinggisid puppets, was an insult Toqtamish could not idly abide. The Golden Horde and Timurid empire lay beside each other like two sharks, in a tank too tight for the both of them. Both rulers simply may have seen confrontation as inevitable, the presentations of both stretching past what the other anticipated, and both expected antagonism.    It was Toqtamish who launched the first blow. After Timurid forces withdrew from Azerbaijan, Toqtamish attacked in late 1386, taking Baku, Tabriz, and Nakhchivan. Then in 1387, Toqtamish spun around the Caspian and Aral Seas, and in conjunction with Qamar al-Din of Moghulistan, Toqtamish took Tashkent and Qarshi before besieging Bukhara and Tamerlane's capital of Samarkand.     Once Toqtamish withdrew, Tamerlane quickly retook Khwarezm, sacking Urgench in 1388 with a massacre to invoke those of Chinggis Khan. Immediate reprisals against Toqtamish were halted by rebellions in Khurasan and a retaliatory campaign in Moghulistan against Qamar al-Din. Once dealt with, Tamerlane could begin extensive preparations for an invasion of the Golden Horde, spending months assembling a large army and supplies collected from across his empire. After a series of feints, Tamerlane set out unexpectedly early in January 1391. Eyeing Tamerlane after several months of marching, Toqtamish felt he knew Tamerlane's plan. Anticipating that the Emir would cross the Ural River at Kurk-qul, Toqtamish ordered his army to gather there. In one of the surprise maneuvers he so loved, Tamerlane darted in a different direction; before Toqtamish's full force had even gathered, he learned Tamerlane had crossed further upriver. Toqtamish retreated lest he be outflanked, and his forces who arrived late were set upon by the Timurids.   But despite this, Tamerlane was playing in Toqtamish's lands, and was no man of the steppe. Toqtamish drew Tamerlane deeper into the steppe, and in the process began to starve his large army. Parties sent out to forage were ambushed by Toqtamish's warriors, and the Khan tried to burn the grasslands before the Timurids, though the wet spring hampered this. Knowing his starving men would soon be at their limit, Tamerlane rallied with men with  a large hunting expedition and glamourous review of the troops, while sending his son, Omar-Sheikh Mirza with 20,000 swift riders to overtake Toqtamish and force him to battle, allowing the main force to catch up to the Khan. The ploy worked, and Toqtamish was forced to draw up at the Kondurcha River on June 18th, 1391.    The two massive armies arrayed themselves in large, crescent formations. Both forces were largely horse archers, light and heavy cavalry, with Tamerlane bringing infantry from his Central Asian cities and as far as Badakhshan, and Toqtamish infantry from the Horde's urban centers. Tamerlane strengthened his wings with units staggered behind them to protect against encirclement, and commanded the rearguard behind the centre. The Golden Horde struck first, attacking across the entire front, Toqtamish himself leading repeated charges. However, some of Toqtamish's flank commanders retreated, either due to treachery or miscommunication. With the Horde now stretched thin,  Tamerlane ordered a counter charge against Toqtamish's left and centre, which broke and the rest retreated. Though the field was won, Toqtamish and much of his army had escaped. Deprived of a total victory, Tamerlane withdrew, but not before appointing another Toqa-Temürid Temür Qutlugh, as khan, with the wily Edigü empowered too.   With Tamerlane spending the next few years darting hither and yon across Iran, Toqtamish recoupled his strength, and planned the next bout. When the Prince of Moscow, Dmitri Donskoi's son Vasili, wished to annex the city of Nizhnii Novgorod, he delivered a large bribe to Toqtamish which the khan was happy to put to use. Gifts and messengers went across the world as Toqtamish built an anti-Timurid alliance. Old allies like the Mamluks and Jalayirids, but also other Turkic states with whom the Horde had had no ties with before, such as the Ottomans and Qaraqoyunlu, the so-called Black Sheep Turkomans.  Tamerlane was hardly blind to it, and engaged in his own diplomacy to dissuade such a coalition from forming. But Tamerlane's political capital was spent. Watching Tamerlane's movement, Toqtamish placed his own army north of the Caucasus. The two sent envoys to one another in a final diplomatic effort, to no avail, and Tamerlane marched into the steppe in the first months of 1395.   This time he caught Toqtamish along the Terek River in April 1395, near Grozny in Chechnya. The Golden Horde controlled the north bank of the closest ford and unwilling to storm it, Tamerlane marched upstream, with Toqtamish mirroring him for three days. According to a Spanish envoy to Tamerlane's court, Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, on the third night, the women and servants in Temur's camp donned armour and continued on, while the main force swiftly doubled back in the darkness and crossed the now unguarded ford. It didn't take Toqtamish long to discover the ruse, but it was too late: Tamerlane's army deployed on their side late on April 14th. Anticipating a night attack, Tamerlane ordered a moat dug around his camp. Toqtamish's forces skirmished along the edges of the moat, playing instruments and shouting, keeping Temur's army up with expectations of an assault. But Toqtamish held the main army back, resting them.   On the morning of the 15th, they formed up. Again they brought massive armies, and Tamerlane increased the size of his rearguard in expectation of encirclement. Toqtamish opened the battle, his right falling upon Temur's left rearguard. Tamerlane ordered the left wing to assist, and the Golden Horde's right retreated. Eager to press the assault, Tamerlane's left  pursued, leaving the security of the main army and were drawn into a feigned retreat. Surrounded, the Timurid left was decimated, the survivors colliding with Tamerlane's lines as a Jochid charge followed up. Battle order was lost. Tamerlane retreated to the fortified camp, Toqtamish's troops in hot pursuit and nearly captured the emir. With Tamerlane himself now under threat, his commanders acted promptly, forcing wagons together in an impromptu stockade. They held off the Horde long enough for the remainder of the army to form back up, and by evening counterattacked and forced back the Jochids, until nightfall separated them. So ended the first day of battle.   Discipline and composure were reestablished that night and the armies drew up early on the 16th. Toqtamish's army again began the battle, his left flank forcing back Tamerlane's vanguard, and soon Temur's right was nearly overcome as well. One commander ordered large shields forced into the ground, and from behind this barricade Tamerlane's archers dismounted and shot at the approaching Tatars, halting their advance. Temur reinforced them with several units from his bodyguard, repulsing the Jochids under this volley of arrows.   The second day ended better than the first for Tamerlane, but the old emir knew Toqtamish had him matched. That evening he made overtures to a discontented emir in Toqtamish's camp, Aktau, promising him rewards for promoting intrigue. By morning Aktau had abandoned the battlefield, making his way in time to Anatolia. Toqtamish was disheartened but determined, and formed up again, his left wing weaker with Aktau's absence. Toqtamish's centre and flanks all attacked Tamerlane, but Tamerlane had built up his forces on the right, and broke through the weakened Jochid left. Hard fighting continued until evening, Toqtamish valiantly trying to save the left and prevent encirclement, but Temur had the better of the day. Defeated, Toqtamish had an orderly retreat planned, sending one commander to the Caucasus in an effort to harass Tamerlane's rear. This gave Toqtamish enough time to escape while Temur crushed this army. However, Toqtamish could not rally another army, leaving his cities isolated before the might of Tamerlane.   Tamerlane pursued Toqtamish, but upon losing him decided to prevent Toqtamish from ever having strength to raise another army again. He then set about systematically dismantling the economy of the Golden Horde, thoroughly sacking every single one of the major cities of the steppe; from the Crimea trade cities, where only Caffa, due to a timely bribe escaped judgment. Tana, Ukek, Sarai to Hajji Tarkhan and more all were brought to ruin on Tamerlane's order, left smoldering husks as his army moved past. Despite some popular claims, Moscow was not attacked; the Rus' chronicles indicate only the town of ‘Elets suffered the wrath of the Emir. He declared another of Urus Khan's sons, Quyurchuq as Khan, and was convinced by Edigü to grant him yarliq to collect and summon his peoples; but realized too late that Edigü had tricked him, and used Tamerlane's patent and the vacuum of power to carve out his own lands.   By the summer of 1396, the steppe environment and some sort of epidemic was wreaking havoc on Tamerlane's troops, and he ordered the withdrawal to Samarkand, carrying with it the loot and treasures of the Golden Horde. The Horde's cities and trade had struggled through the upheavals of the fourteenth century, but Tamerlane had just delivered a death blow from which they would not recover.   Toqtamish was not done yet. For the next ten years he continued to seek to reclaim his throne, but now faced a stiff opponent in the form of Edigü. Ridding himself of Tamerlane's puppet, Edigü reenthroned Temür Qutlugh, in time followed by a host of other puppets, and directed the effort to crush Toqtamish once and for all. But as a man well accustomed to defeat and bouncing back from it, Toqtamish proved remarkably hard to kill, and simply would not take “no” for an answer. The most notable effort came in 1399. After allying with Vytautas the Great, Grand Duke of Lithuania, the two launched a joint-invasion of the Golden Horde. At the Vorskla River in 1399, Edigü and Temür Qutlugh inflicted a crushing defeat on the army of Vytautas and Toqtamish. Many Lithuanian princes were killed, and the fleeing Duke was chased as far as Kyiv, where only after hefty ransom was the city and its refugees spared. The Toqtamish-Lithuanian alliance continued though, and Toqtamish's son Jalal al-Din fought alongside Vytautas at the famous battle of Grünwald, or Tannenburg, against the Teutonic Order in 1410. Today, the Lipka Tatars in Lithuania and Poland are their distant descendants.   By 1405, the humbled Toqtamish was in Siberia, and reached out to his former mentor, Tamerlane. Tamerlane was then in the midst of a march on China, wintering in Otrar, and it seems his old heart was warmed by Toqtamish's offer of cooperation against Edigü. But nothing was to come of it; the old emir died that winter, and the next year Toqtamish fell in a skirmish against the forces of Edigü.   So ended the life of Toqtamish Khan, the final powerful khan over the whole of the Golden Horde. Though not a truly transformative or administrative monarch, the fact he instilled any sort of stability over the Horde, and led a remarkable effort at unifying it before its final disintegration, left him a powerful legacy.  In later Turkic histories Toqtamish is one of the most popular Jochid khans, and over the next century he was benchmark for others who wished to unify the Horde. In 1509, the Crimean Khan Mengli Giray, when sending a large army against Astrakhan during his own bid to reunify the Horde, is reported to have said “I shall be a Toqtamish.” And perhaps Toqtamish would have been successful, had he not faced Tamerlane in battle, perhaps the only man at the time with the strength to overcome the might of the Golden Horde. And for that, the Golden Horde paid dearly. Our next, and final episode on the Golden Horde, deals with its final disintegration, 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. 

Our previous episode took you through important transformations of the Golden Horde during the long-reign of Özbeg Khan; the islamization, and urbanization, of the khanate. Today we share the first part of our coverage of the political dimensions of Özbeg's nearly thirty year reign, focusing on Özbeg's interactions with the Ilkhanate and the Mamluk Sultanate, an area in which Özbeg suffered almost continual defeats.  I'm your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.   As we covered previously, upon becoming khan of the Golden Horde in 1313, Özbeg ordered a wide purge of the Jochid princes, a two-pronged assault to both remove potential rivals and promote Islam among the elite, for those who refused to convert were punished mortally. After his first year in power Özbeg would be remarkably tolerant to other religions within his empire, but he made it abundantly clear that the religion of the Khan and the court was Islam. One of Özbeg's earliest actions was the construction of a mosque in the Crimean city of Solkhat, or as it's known for Turkic speakers, Eski Qırım, or Staryi Krym after the Russian annexation. [note for David: Qırım=Crimea, hard K sound]. Built in 1314, parts of the mosque are still extant, though in the sixteenth century parts of it were moved into a new building some distance away.   Özbeg was no idle khan. With the assistance of the powerful bey Qutlugh-Temür, Özbeg further weakened the power of the remaining Jochid princes with the establishment of the qarachi beys as the lead ministers of the empire, putting greater administrative power into the non-Chinggisid elite. The qarachi beys were headed by the beyleribey, the chief bey,  held first by Qutlugh-Temür, and later his brother ‘Isa. These two men were instrumental in Özbeg's control. Powerful, islamic lords, their early backing had not just been key in Özbeg seizing power in the first place, but in solidifying Özbeg's islamization of the khanate's upper echelons. Their support and influence among the military-elite were significant in Özbeg's centralization of authority, and in the smooth function of the empire as lands and territories were redistributed with the change in authority. And Özbeg went to great effort to ensure their loyalty, creating  a reciprocal marriage alliance with them that the Mongols called quda. Qutlugh-Temür married a Jochid princess named Turabey, while ‘Isa married one of Özbeg's daughters, and in turn Özbeg married one of ‘Isa's daughters. The brothers were then assigned some of the most economically important and lucrative regions within the khanate; Qutlugh-Temür as governor of Khwarezm, but with his authority expanded to stretch to the Lower Volga, while ‘Isa was situated in the Crimean Peninsula.  With Özbeg in the capital on the Volga River, three of them were like three weights balancing the khanate.   In 1314, only the second year of Özbeg's reign, the Khan of Chagatai Khanate, Esen Buqa reached out to Özbeg. The ten years since the Pax Mongolica in 1304 had hardly instilled the desired unity among the khanates. Esen Buqa Khan was in the midst of growing tensions with the Ilkhanate and Yuan Dynasty, and feared a combined Toluid assault on the Chagatai lands.  By then Esen-Buqa had taken captive Ilkhanid and Yuan envoys, and contacted Özbeg in an effort to bring him into an alliance, telling him that the Great Khan, Ayurburwada, saw Özbeg as illegitimate, and wished to depose him. Özbeg, likely on the council of the experienced Qutlugh-Temür, refused the request for support. The Golden Horde did not take part when Yuan forces invaded the Chagatai lands in 1316 while Esen-Buqa was campaigning in the Ilkhanate. The effort at neutrality with the khanates who had influence in Central Asia was also likely influenced by Özbeg's success at bringing the Blue Horde, the eastern wing of the Golden Horde, closely under his control, especially after 1321. The once autonomous, if not outright independent, khanate became essentially a province of the Golden Khan through Özbeg's effort. As the Blue Horde, backed by Özbeg's troops, in this period extended to the Syr Darya and incorporated former Khwarezmian cities of Otrar, Jand and others, Özbeg did not want the Yuan Dynasty intervening with this profitable expansion.   Throughout his life Özbeg retained amicable relations with the Yuan Khans, sending them tribute, gifts and his nominal allegiance in exchange for revenues from Jochid estates in China.  He valued this income higher, and was not above sending his envoys to the Yuan court to remind them to keep up the payments. Some historians have gone as far as to suggest that Özbeg, influenced by the Yuan administrative system, based his reforms in the Golden Horde upon it's two-tiered system.  Others see Özbeg's four qarachi beys an adoption of the system employed by the Yuan, where the keshig's four day-commanders had to countersign the orders of the khan. Furthermore, Özbeg encouraged and profited greatly from the great overland trade. Wares both originating from, and influenced by, China  are found within the remains of the Horde cities. The trade across Asia, from Egypt, India, China, the Chagatais and even the Ilkhanate, was the source of much of the great wealth enjoyed by the Jochid khans in the fourteenth century. For more on that, be sure to listen to our previous episode though.    But Özbeg was no man of peace. His lack of involvement in Esen Buqa's war with the Ilkhanate and Yuan was not out of a firm belief in the pax Mongolica. In 1314 Özbeg was simply not in a position of security to take part in a larger conflict, and neither did he wish to sour relations with the Great Khan. In fact, Özbeg was to take up seriously Jochid claims on the Caucasus. After his enthronement he sent envoys to the Ilkhanate demanding they cede these lands to the Golden Horde, while another letter reached the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt, urging Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad to join him in an attack on the Ilkhanate. When the opportunity presented itself, Özbeg was to commit wholeheartedly to the task.    This came after the death of Il-Khan Ölejitü in 1316, and the enthronement of the young Abu Sa'id as Il-Khan the next year. Özbeg promptly set about ordering preparations for an all-out assault; a prince of the Chagatai lineage who had recently defected to the Ilkhanate, Yasa'ur, was convinced to revolt in the eastern part of the Ilkhanate, while Özbeg rallied a great host to assault the Caucasus.  In late 1318 the invasion commenced, in what was likely the largest army put to the task since the days of Berke and Nogai almost 60 years before. In the account of the contemporary writer Wassaf, Özbeg's official pretext was that he came to rest the regency of the Ilkhanate away from Choban, the non-Chinggisid who really ran the Ilkhanate while Abu Sa'id was still in his minority. Yet, Abu Sa'id and Choban rose to the occasion. In the east, Yasa'ur's revolt was crushed, and the young Abu Sa'id and Choban defeated and repulsed Özbeg along the river Kur, though not before Abu Sa'id was nearly overcome by the Jochid forces.   Özbeg was not put aside though; in the early 1320s he resumed the effort, this time in conjunction with an army under the Chagatai Khan Kebek.  The dating is a bit uncertain; 1322 or 1325, or perhaps these were two distinct invasions. Regardless of the date, the result was the same. The Ilkhanate was victorious, Choban's skilled military mind outplaying Özbeg, and Choban even pursued Özbeg's fleeing army back into the Golden Horde. Özbeg's dreams at conquering the Caucasian pastures did not end. In 1335 Özbeg gave it another go, rumoured to have been invited by Abu Sa'id's wife, Baghdad Khatun. In the midst of riding north to meet him, Abu Sa'id died, possibly poisoned by his estranged wife. Yet here too, Özbeg was defeated by Abu Sa'id's hastily chosen successor, Arpa Khan. It may have been too that Özbeg was demoralized when news came of the death of his ally, Qutlugh-Temür, late in 1335. So ended Özbeg's final attempt to invade the lands of the Ilkhanate. No single reason is obviously apparent for the consistent defeats. It was not based on an inherent military differentiation; both armies continued to field lightly-armoured horse archers. The Ilkhans relied on knowledge of the Caucasus, fortifying and blocking the Jochids at river crossings and preempting Jochid mobility. Jochid defeats may not have necessarily been military failures, as much as an inability to advance except through strategic choke points controlled by large, well-supplied Ilkhanid armies. There is an assumption that Ilkhanid troops were on average better armed and equipped than their Jochid counterparts, even though  Özbeg may have fielded larger armies.  One factor seems to have been Özbeg himself; the Ilkhanate's commanders he faced, Choban Noyan and Arpa Khan, were simply better commanders than Özbeg.    Özbeg's repeated assaults on the Ilkhanate became a main detail of his reign in numerous medieval accounts, and was evidently well known; the Book of the Knowledge of all the Kingdoms, an anonymous, late-fourteenth century work by a Spanish Franciscan, is a source where the author claims to have travelled around the world, though generally repeats nonsensical claims. Yet even here, a recognizable account of Özbeg's invasion of the Ilkhanate is presented. A circa 1330 Franciscan account, the Book of the Estate of the Great Khaan, has Özbeg attack Abu Sa'id with 707,000 horsemen, a forced he raised “without pressing hard on his empire.” Some centuries later, Turkic histories like that of Abu'l Ghazi Bahadur Khan even retained mentions of  Özbeg's campaigns against the Ilkhanate, even when such sources are otherwise rather brisk or religion focused when it comes to describing  Özbeg's reign.     With the military front making no progress, Özbeg was not above that other favoured Jochid strategy. That is,  attempting to get the Mamluks to do the work for them. Özbeg had opened contact with the Mamluks soon after his enthronement, where he signaled his support for the alliance. Özbeg heavily promoted his conversion to Islam in his letters, as well as his successes in converting the nomadic population. Coupled with allowing the Genoese back into the Black Sea ports and reopening the slave trade with the Mamluks, Özbeg was clearly marking the time had come to move past the poor Jochid-Mamluk relations that had existed during the reign of his predecessor Toqta Khan. For the Mamluk Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad, this seemed a convincing enough transformation, and showed himself willing to commit to Özbeg's initiative. It was this detente, as well as his dreams of a glorious Qalawunid dynasty, that led al-Nasir Muhammad to make an unusual request. In 1315, his messengers arrived in Özbeg's ordu requesting a Chinggisid princess for al-Nasir Muhammad. Thus began the lengthy, and headache inducing, process of organizing the first, and only, marriage between a Chinggisid and the Mamluks of Egypt.    It should first be noted that the marriage of Chinggisid women to non-Mongol dynasties was not uncommon. Numerous examples can be found with the other khanates, but for the Golden Horde alone, shortly before al-Nasir's offer Özbeg had married his own sister Konchaka to Prince Yurii Daniilovich of Moscow, and during the 1250s the khans had offered princesses in marriage to the Hungarian king Béla IV. To the Mongols, such a marriage symbolized one thing; submission to the house of Chinggis Khan, for only a subject could have the right to marry a daughter of his lineage. And Özbeg certainly thought so. As we noted in earlier episodes, the Golden Horde likely imagined the Mamluks as their vassals, and Özbeg must have seen this as a confirmation of it, even if the Mamluks did not view it as such. Negotiations went on, and Özbeg's demands for a great dowry —some 27,000 dinars, which the Sultan had to borrow from merchants—were reluctantly met. The princess, Tulunbey, arrived in Cairo in 1320 after five years of back and forth, and the marriage was undertaken.    Unfortunately for Tulunbey, Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad was not the most loving of husbands. Al-Nasir Muhammad had, by that point in his life, lost his throne three separate times, and his youth been manhandled by greedy emirs; the consequences of these emirs resulted in the  boy sultan suffering an humiliating defeat at the hands of Ghazan Il-Khan in 1300. Extreme paranoia of all those around him was al-Nasir Muhammad's primary personality trait, and he was not exactly unjustified in this. But it seems the Sultan rather quickly came to doubt Tulunbey's heritage, and accused her of not actually being a Chinggisid. The Mamluk chronicles are confused over her background; variously, they identify her as a descendant of Batu, of Berke, or as Özbeg's daughter, sister or niece. Yet these chroniclers do not share al-Nasir Muhammad's doubt over the fact of her being a Chinggisid, and appear almost embarrassed at his accusation. As the Mamluks' general portrayal of Özbeg is as a pious and sincere Muslim monarch, such an accusation of an important ally was a bit of a needless incident. Furthermore, it seems an unusual ploy for Özbeg to play given the scenario, and his outrage over al-Nasir's treatment of her seems rather much had Özbeg in-fact sent a dummy Chinggisid.    But even before al-Nasir's suspicions of Tulunbey developed, his detente with Özbeg had already begun to fray.  Özbeg had used the marriage to make greater economic and military demands of the Mamluks, requesting that al-Nasir Muhammad attack the Ilkhanate.  As the early 1320s saw the ongoing peace talks between al-Nasir Muhammad and the Il-Khan Abu Sa'id, Özbeg's demands for military asssitance were evermore discomforting.  The frustration of Özbeg Khan resulted in him sending lower-ranking embassies to the Mamluks, beginning a spiraling game of tit-for-tat where each side further disrespected the other's envoys in an ever-escalating series of diplomatic slaps. At one point Özbeg even forbid the sale of slaves to Egypt in reaction. Perhaps not coincidentally, Özbeg also began to build up his own body of mamluk guards, according to Ibn Battuta. This fall out hardly bode well for the relationship between Sultan al-Nasir and Tulunbey.   The marriage to Tulunbey produced no children, and by 1327 al-Nasir divorced her and married her off to a lower ranking commander. It took Özbeg some time to learn of this, but once he did he was furious. In 1334 his letter arrived in Cairo, and lambasted the Sultan, telling him that Tulunbey should have been sent back to the Horde, and wrote “Someone like you should not injure the daughters of the Qa'ans!” Özbeg, like all khans, thought little of the Mamluks' origins as Qipchap slaves. For him to divorce and humiliate a Chinggisid princess was an insult beyond measure.   Al-Nasir's very thoughtful response was to claim that Özbeg had been misinformed, and that actually Tulunbey had sadly died. In fact, Tulunbey was still very much alive; her second husband had recently died though, so al-Nasir forced her to marry another commander. This fellow too predeceased her, and Tulunbey was married to a fourth husband. She never returned to the Golden Horde, and died in Cairo in the 1360s, where her tomb remains today.    Özbeg requested that al-Nasir Muhamamd provide him a daughter to marry in recompense. Just like he would do with the Ilkhanate when they made the same request, al-Nasir equivocated, claiming his daughters were too young to marry. At the same time, he was marrying them off to Mamluk emirs. The relationship between their two states remained strained. While Mamluks chronicles retain a high opinion of Özbeg, neither al-Nasir or Özbeg cared much for the other, and tension remained until both died in 1341. In effect this was the great result of much esteemed Jochid-Mamluk alliance. What initially may have proved promising, largely turned into diplomatic squabbling, annoyance at the failure of the other party to meet expected demands, and never materialized into actual cooperation against the Ilkhanate. At best it stopped the Ilkhanate from truly concentrating too greatly on the Mamluk or Golden Horde frontiers. At worst, it was coincidental diplomatic posturing with two states the Ilkhanate had gone to war with independently. Özbeg, the mighty Islamic khan, proved no more effective with the Mamluks than his non-Muslim predecessors.   Özbeg's “southern policy” with the Mamluks and the Ilkhanate then, was not one of great successes. But what of his western frontiers, with Europe and the Rus'? That will be the topic of our next episode, 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. 

With the death of Nogai by 1300, one man was now master of the Golden Horde; Toqta, son of Möngke-Temür Khan, great-grandson of Batu, great-great-grandson of Jochi, and great-great-great-grandson of Chinggis Khan. After the troubles of the 1290s, Toqta ushered in a new age of stability as rivals to power were snuffed out over his twenty year reign. Today we take you through the reign of Toqta Khan. I'm your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.   Toqta, known also as Toqtogha, was one of Möngke-Temür Khan's ten sons. While most of Möngke-Temür's children had joined Tele-Buqa Khan's alliance from 1287 to 1291, Toqta and three other brothers— Tudan, Sarai-Buqa and Bürlük—seem to have been excluded for unclear reasons. We have only reference to Toqta being seen as a strong figure of certain manly qualities, supposedly embodying Mongol ideals of rulership. Perhaps a skilled archer and rider, a fearsome wrestler and warrior, Toqta appeared an ideal rival to the always militarily-doomed Tele-Buqa.   Regardless of why, Toqta first appears in the sources being singled out as a rival by Tele-Buqa and his allies. The story, as you heard in our previous episodes, resulted in Toqta allying with Nogai and killing most of his brothers. In 1291 Toqta was enthroned as khan, perhaps also in another four way power division with his surviving brothers, according to the Mamluk chroniclers. Nogai then returned to his territory along the Danube. Popularly it is claimed that Toqta spent his first years as Khan under Nogai's thumb, but there is relatively little information to support that. Both Toqta and Nogai demanded the other kill surviving supporters of Tele-Buqa Khan, but Nogai is given no involvement in the sources in the  major actions Toqta undertook. In 1293, on the request of the Rus' prince Andrei, son of the famed Alexander Nevskii, Toqta sent his brother Tudan on a devastating attack on the Rus', aimed on ousting Andrei's rival brother, Dmitri. 14 Rus' cities, including Moscow, were sacked, and Novgorod only narrowly avoided destruction due to a timely, and very expensive, pile of gifts. Dmitri died the next year, leaving Andrei as Grand Prince of the Rus' undisputed. In 1294 Toqta also organized  a peace treaty with the Il-Khan Geikhatu, ending hostilities with the Ilkhanate.    As we covered in the last episode, most of Toqta's reign in the second half of the 1290s was caught up dealing with Nogai, as growing tensions were fanned into open war between them. After initial defeats, Toqta succeeded in overcoming Nogai, and the old dog was dead by 1300.  So ended the first decade of Toqta's reign, and he could begin to restore the Jochid Khanate's wider influence. On Nogai's defeat the Byzantine Emperor Andronikos II sent a daughter to marry Toqta, while the Rus' princes reaffirmed their vassalage. At a gathering of the princes in 1304 Toqta's influence over them was confirmed with a reallotment of certain cities.     Like his father Möngke-Temür Khan, Toqta sought to extend the Jochids' influence over their borders, though faced difficulties in doing so. He placed his brothers Bürlük, Sarai-Buqa and his own sons Ilbasar and Tükel-Buqa into prominent governorships. Sarai-Buqa was made the master of the late Nogai's former territory. On Toqta's permission, the new Bulgarian tsar Theodore Svetoslav killed Nogai's son Chaka in 1301, and on Chaka's death Sarai-Buqa moved into the Nogayid lands, and Toqta's son Tükel-Buqa took Nogai's former administrative centre at Saqchi, thus reasserting the Horde's mastery over the region. Bulgaria, counter to some suggestions, remained a part of the Golden Horde as a vassal. Toqta might have thought the matter finished, had Nogai's sole surviving son, Turai, not come out of hiding.  Turai, through some silver tongue-work, was welcomed into the local court of Toqta's brother Sarai-Buqa. In short order, Turai convinced Sarai-Buqa that he should be khan, and thereby had Sarai-Buqa march against Toqta. Sarai-Buqa sought to get another brother, Bürlük, in on the plot. Bürlük made a show of agreeing, while contacting Toqta in secret. With his brother's permission, Bürlük turned on Turai and Sarai-Buqa, capturing and killing them. Toqta's son Ilbasar was then made overseer of Nogai's former lands.    Meanwhile, on his far eastern border, Toqta had another opportunity arise. There lay the Blue Horde, the khanate under the rule of the line of Orda, the older brother of Batu. Whether the Blue Horde was ever really under the authority of Batu's line, or was in fact its own independent khanate from its inception, is a matter of hot debate in the scholarship. Regardless of the original intention, during the reign of Orda's grandson Qonichi from the 1270s until 1300, the Blue Horde was, for all intents and purposes, its own power outside of the influence of the Batuid lineage. Independent contemporaries like Marco Polo and Rashīd al-Dīn attest to the fact. Qonichi, according to Rashīd al-Dīn, was so monstrously overweight that no horse could bear him, and he needed to be carried around in a cart. His guards had to watch over him at night just to make sure his neck fat did not crush his throat, and allegedly, a failure to do so one night resulted in Qonichi's death. Whether we can give any credence to this story, or it was simply a yarn which made its way across the Mongol Empire we cannot know, but one thing that is apparent is that Qonichi had a keen political mind. While Qaidu Khan fought for mastery over the Chagatais and warred with the Yuan Khans, Qonichi's realm appeared a beacon of stability. With every other Mongol khanate, Qonichi succeeded in maintaining a friendly or neutral diplomatic status, which secured his realm from the conflicts that marked the second half of the thirteenth century.    On Qonich's death in the late 1290s, his son Bayan succeeded him. However, here he was challenged by a younger brother, Mumkqiya, while the Chagatayid Khan Du'a and his Ögedeid ally Qaidu backed one of Bayan's cousins, Küilük, evidently seen as a man more complimentary to the needs of the Central Asian Mongols. Bayan went to Toqta Khan for aid, but Toqta was at that point in the midst of war with Nogai, and could lend no support beyond sending envoys to Du'a and Qaidu asking them to kindly leave Bayan alone. Somehow, that did not convince Du'a and Qaidu, and we are told that they did not even bother to respond to Toqta's messages. Qaidu's death in 1301 didn't halt the conflict, and by 1303 Bayan was sending out envoys to the Great Khan, Khubilai's grandson Temür Öljeitü, and the Il-Khan Ghazan, seeking alliance against Du'a Khan. Du'a, undesiring getting caught between a rock and a hard place —that is, the Il-Khan and the Great Khan— proved amenable to the idea of a general Mongol peace. So came about over 1304 and 1305 the Great Mongol peace as Du'a Khan of the Chagatai Khanate, Qaidu's sons in the Ögedeid khanate, Bayan Khan in the Blue Horde and Ghazan's successor, Öljeitü Il-Khan, all recognized the supremacy of the Great Khan. When Toqta was alerted of it, he too jumped on board. For the first time since Berke became khan in the 1250s, the Jochid ruler now recognized the overlordship of the Great Khan. For the remainder of Yuan rule in China, the Golden Horde officially regarded Khubilai's heirs as the rightful ruler of the world— albeit, nominally, and the Great Khan held no real authority within any of the western khanates. From this point onwards Toqta and his successors were provided revenues from prefectures in China.   In terms of actual peace between the khanates, 1304's success was rather more ephemeral. Bayan of the Blue Horde continued to face struggles from rivals to power. When his cousin Küilük died, his son continued to challenge Bayan. Only around 1310, when Toqta was able to intervene militarily, was the situation calmed in the Blue Horde. On Bayan's death by 1312 he was succeeded, apparently without issue, by his son Sasi-Buqa. However, the Blue Horde's independence was now on a leash, and would be restricted further by Toqta's successor Özbeg.   On his border with the Ilkhanate, Toqta was never too subtle. In the 1290s Toqta made peace with Il-Khan Geikhatu and then with Ghazan, but following Nogai's death Toqta's policy pivoted. In the first years of the fourteenth century Toqta sent messages to Ghazan demanding he relinquish control over the Caucasus. Like a good Jochid khan, Toqta knew not only the economic value, but the political acumen he would enjoy, if he brought these lands back under control of the Jochid lineage. Evidently he had taken note of the failures of previous efforts, and had convinced himself that diplomacy would instead convince the Ilkhanids to abandon these valuable lands. Ghazan would have none of that though, and responded succinctly with “I conquered these lands by the sword and I will defend them by the word!” If Toqta wanted them, then he'd have to come and take them by force.    So well known were Toqta's demands, that they even appeared in the work of the contemporary Byzantine author Pachymeres, where Toqta is portrayed as a deceitful figure trying to steal the kingdom from Ghazan while the latter was on his deathbed. And it's not altogether inaccurate. When Ghazan died in 1304 he was succeeded by his brother Öljeitü, with whom Toqta at first made peace with, and likewise recognized the Great Mongol Peace. But almost immediately afterwards Toqta sent his first envoys to the Mamluks, where he urged them to join him in an attack on the Ilkhanate. He sent several rounds of these messages to the Mamluks, but found an unwilling ear there. The sultan, the young al-Nasir Muhammad, had signed a truce with Öljeitü, but only a few years before had suffered a crushing defeat at Wadi al-Khaznadar at the hands of the late Ghazan. There was no mood in Cairo for any large expedition against the Ilkhan. Toqta's hopes for any great conquest of the Caucasus would be dashed. It shows also the almost immediate failure of the Great Mongol Peace; Toqta saw it as an opportunity to settle the disputed claim with the Ilkhanate, and perhaps appealed to the Great Khan to mediate it as would have been done in times past. But no sense of Mongol unity was imposed, or past grievances really settled, by the effort.   The Mamluk Sultanate's failure to reply positively to Toqta's demands brought perhaps the lowest point in Mamluk-Jochid relations. The fact that Toqta was a shamanist or Buddhist meant there was not even a religious common ground for them to work with. It's perhaps not coincidental that Toqta began to put great pressure on the Italian merchants in the Golden Horde who supplied the Mamluks with captive Qipchaps for their armies.  Over the second half of the thirteenth century, a growing colony of Genoese traders had formed along the Golden Horde's Black Sea coastline. The most important of these sites was at Caffa in the Crimean Peninsula. The Italians made considerable income by selling the most important of the Horde's overseas exports; grains, which were particularly important for feeding Constantinople, and slaves. With the defeat of Nogai, many of his defeated men and their entire families were sold abroad, but slaves were also procured in raids and even from desperate parents unable to feed their children, and thereby forced to sell them into servitude. The Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt purchased a great many of these slaves, particularly children, who would then be raised in the skills of war to form the actual Mamluk core of the Sultanate's armies. In theory the Genoese paid tax for this privilege, but in recent years had failed to pay the primary tax on this transaction. Their arrogance did them no favours in Toqta's eyes.   It seems probable that Toqta aimed to put pressure onto this trade, and by extension hurt the Mamluks. The official reason given was that Toqta wanted to put an end to the sale of Mongol children abroad. While Toqta perhaps did have a personal dislike to the selling of Mongol and Qipchap children, Toqta may also have wanted to put a stop to the sale of valuable future warriors. After the destructive war against Nogai and arid years of the 1280s and 90s, it may have been necessary to recoup some of these demographic losses. That it could also force the Mamluks to play nice was a handy consequence, as far as Toqta was concerned.   In October 1307 Toqta gave the order for the expulsion of the Genoese in the Golden Horde. First in the capital of Sarai, the local Genoese were arrested, their goods confiscated. Then he sent his son Ilbasar with an army into Crimea, who laid siege to Caffa at the close of 1307. Here Caffa's stout stone walls stood defiant. Raids at sea from Venetian rivals, and Nogai's own vicious attack on Crimea in 1299, had led to the denizens of Caffa strengthening their fortifications. The siege wore on for 8 months, but by May 1308 the defenders knew the situation was hopeless. Thus they abandoned their posts, taking to their ships and setting flame to the city. Ilbasar sacked whatever was left. In the end, the campaign was a success, as the Genoese had been expelled,but if it was indeed intended to make the Mamluks play nice, it did not have this effect. The Mamluks remained stubbornly opposed to any attack on the Ilkhanate. By 1311 Toqta sent an embassy with considerable gifts of slaves and luxurious furs to soften matters. But Mamluk-Jochid relations remained poor until the reign of Toqta's successor Özbeg, who would also allow the return of the Genoese.       Toqta also played his hand at monetary reform, perhaps inspired by increased contact with the Yuan Dynasty, and Ghazan's reforms in the Ilkhanate. His efforts seem more focused on coin weights, and which sites were allowed to mint, while retaining regional variety. Thus in islamic parts of the khanate, the shamanist-buddhist Toqta is given the very Islamic title of sultan.       Much of the remainder of Toqta's actions within the Golden Horde are unknown. He was struck by personal tragedies, as it seems between 1308 and 1312 his sons predeceased him. The general image we have is of relative, much needed stability, within the Golden Horde, a period of respite after the war against Nogai and its other neighbours. In the spring of 1312, Toqta apparently decided on a visit to the Rus' lands himself, making him the first reigning Jochid monarch to do so. Or at least, he would have been the first. Toqta made the unusual decision to travel by ship up the Volga river; the details remain vague, but in an ensuing shipwreck, or from illness aboard the vessel, Toqta died in August 1312. Suspicion, even by contemporaries, was that his nephew, Özbeg, had a role in it. Özbeg was a son of Toqta's brother, To'rilcha, who had been one of the top allies of Tele-Buqa Khan. Toqta had killed To'rilcha in the coup of 1291, then married To'rilcha's chief wife, Bayalun Khatun, Özbeg's stepmother.  The young Özbeg was exiled from court, and is commonly assumed to have spent his time in the Jochid lands in Khwarezm near the Aral Sea. Determined and ambitious, Özbeg stood to gain greatly from the death of the childless Toqta.       What followed next is foggy, to say the least, as the sources offer various, competing narratives. Here we feel the loss of Rashīd al-Dīn, who around the time of Toqta's death was in the midst of copying the Jami' al-Tawarikh, and no longer adding information to it. His clear eyed sourcing and reporting of information goes much amiss, as Qashani, Rashīd al-Dīn's successor when it came to recording events after 1305, provides an account of Toqta's succession sourced apparently directly from Jochid envoys in 1313. However, Qashani's account confuses names and chronologies and is totally contradictory with the Mamluk accounts; Toqta's sons, for instance, are alive in Qashani's writing, whereas the Mamluks have them all die before their father. Qashani also makes the emir, Qutlugh-Temür, a rival of Özbeg, while the Mamluks and other accounts had Qutlugh-Temür as Özbeg's chief ally from the start.   To save your ears, our dear listeners, we'll simplify this as best we can, based on recent research.  First we can mention an interesting hypothesis from  historian Thomas Tanase.  A long running problem was that contemporary Fransican accounts of the 1320s spoke of a certain Coktoganus being a khan of the Golden Horde who converted to Catholicism, and died before Özbeg. The identity of Coktoganus has been a troublesome thing, with suggestions ranging from this referring toToqta himself, to simple wishful thinking on the part of the Fransciscans in the Golden Horde. However, neither explanation is sufficient. The sources are fairly consistent of Toqta's position as a shamanist or Buddhist. Further, Fransciscans were generally careful with their gathering of information, and learnt local languages; the idea being that an individual had to be rather knowledgeable of local affairs and language to better convert them. These Franciscans were also stationed within the Golden Horde, from Crimea to Sarai, and likely learned these facts first hand.   Tanase offers a likely explanation; that Coktoganus was not Toqta, but one of his brothers, Kutukan. If we drop the latin ending -us, Coktogan is a fairly decent rendering of Kutukan, and indeed the Fransicans also noted Coktoganus was a brother of the “Tartar emperor.” The most convincing evidence is that one of these Franciscan accounts lists three of Coktoganus' sons, whose names match exactly with the sons of Kutukan listed by Rashīd al-Dīn. Mamluk accounts had Kutukan among the brothers killed by Toqta in the 1291 coup, but we might wonder if this was not an accidental or anachronistic addition by the Mamluks, who saw a son of Möngke-Temür missing and added him to the list of dead princes. Based on Tanase's suggestion, we can propose the following timeline. Toqta died on the Volga in the summer of 1312, with no surviving children. Per Tanase's idea, the Christian convert Kutukan declared himself khan to succeed his brother, but died within a few weeks or months. A very brief reign would explain how the Mamluks did not record him, particularly if he was never officially enthroned as khan, while also aligning with the Franciscan reports of a natural death for Coktoganus, while also aligning with Qashani's and al-Aharai's reports of a member of Toqta's family being a contender against Özbeg. In these accounts, as well as later Turkic ones, Toqta's son Tükel-Buqa is alive and battles Özbeg for the throne. Perhaps they confused Kutukan with Tükel-Buqa, or perhaps the Mamluks falsely reported Tükel-Buqa's death.       Regardless of whether Tükel-Buqa or Kutukan tried to take the throne in 1312, neither claimant could overcome Özbeg. Even if he was uninvolved in Toqta's death, Özbeg moved quickly to take the throne himself, backed by the powerful Qutlugh-Temür, the governor of Jochid Khwarezm, and perhaps the most powerful Islamic figure within the Golden Horde.  Either on Qutlugh-Temür's urging, or to gain Qutlugh-Temür's backing, Özbeg made a simple promise. “Back me as khan, and I will convert to islam.” What Özbeg's campaign showed was the growing body of Muslims within the Golden Horde, particularly among the beys, or the noyad. A sizeable body of the Jochid elite were, by 1312, converts to Islam. Particularly if a Christian Kutukan had briefly tried to claim the throne, Özbeg may have had great success in rallying support. Among those who backed him included Bayalun Khatun, the widow of both his father To'rilcha, and of Toqta. This influential lady, skilled in Jochid politics, brought important support for Özbeg's claim.    A rallying of Islamic beys, and a conversion upon taking the throne, appears to varying degrees in later Turkic accounts like Ötemish Hajji, and Özbeg's own letter to the Mamluks upon his enthronement, where Özbeg announced proudly his recent conversion to Islam. Qashani is again the odd man out, where Özbeg appears as a Muslim for several years before he takes the throne. In general, the sources agree that Özbeg led an Islamic faction against the entrenched shamanist-Buddhist faction, represented by some member of Toqta's family. A recurring scene, appearing first in Qashani, and two hundred years later in Ötemish's Hajji's version, is that at a feast, rivals for the throne from the opposing faction sought to ambush Özbeg at a feast. Özbeg learns of their treachery, and with his allies storms out of the tent to kill his opponents.   As you should have gotten a sense after all that, the transition between Toqta and Özbeg is a murky period. Regardless of the specifics, Özbeg was enthroned as Khan of the Golden Horde in January 1313. And the experience left a sour taste in his mouth. Officially, Özbeg set out a mandate; whichever prince failed to convert to islam would be killed. Very conveniently, many of those killed also happened to be descendants of his grandfather, Möngke-Temür Khan; that is, potential rivals to the throne.  And what a great many were killed. Some of it was obviously religiously motivated; shamans and Buddhist lamas were killed en masse, and Christian privileges were reduced though they did not suffer any great executions, likely due to their limited presence among the nomadic population. The main element of the slain though, were Jochid princes. Any surviving family members and supporters of Kutukan or Tükel-Buqa, had they indeed challenged Özbeg, were hunted down and killed. Özbeg's aim was very simple, and based on the lessons of the previous decades, perhaps as passed down by the experienced Qutlugh-Temür. At the start of the 1280s, Möngke-Temür's successor Töde-Möngke had exiled the sons of Möngke-Temür, but not killed them. Thus they came back to seek revenge. In 1287 Tele-Buqa seized the throne with a group of allies, but had left so many rivals in place that those displeased with his reign had found a figurehead to rally around in the form of Toqta. And while Toqta had killed  a great many of the supporters of Tele-Buqa, he had not ripped them up root and bud, leaving Özbeg to nurse his vengeance for twenty years. Özbeg made no such mistake. Of all the purges carried out by the various Chinggisids, perhaps none were as total as that carried out by Özbeg. By the time he was done, the only members of the line of Batu still left, was that of Özbeg and his own sons. The results in  a way speak for themselves, for Özbeg would enjoy the longest reign of any descendant of Jochi.    Our next episode picks up with the reign of Özbeg Khan, from 1313 to 1341, so be sure to subscribe to the Kings and Generals podcast to follow. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help us continue bringing you great content, then consider supporting us on patreon at www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. This episode was written and researched by our series historian, Jack Wilson. I'm your host David, and we'll catch you on the next one.    

“In [this year] Nogai sent his wife [Yaylaq] Khātūn to the king Țuqṭā with a missive she would carry to him, and advice she would give to him. When she arrived at the [Golden] Horde he greeted her with honor, and celebrated hospitality and gifts with her, and she stayed in the hospitality for days. Then he asked her as to the reason for her coming, she said to him, “[Nogai] says to you that there are some thorns left on your path, so clean them up!” [Toqta] said, “What are the thorns?” so she named off the emirs who Nogai had mentioned to her, who were [23 in numer]. These were those who had conspired with Töle Buqa against Nogai.  When this missive was conveyed to him, and she told him this story, [Toqta] sought after those emirs, one after another, and killed all of them. So [Yaylaq] Khātūn returned to Nogai, informing him of their killing, so his worry subsided, and his fear gone.”       So the Mamluk chronicler Baybars al-Mansūrī records an interaction between Nogai, the Mongol master of the lower Danube and southeastern Europe, and Toqta, Khan of the Golden Horde. In 1291 Nogai had assisted Toqta Khan to the Jochid throne, overthrowing the previous Khan, Tele-Buqa. Now both expected favours of the other, which would have deadly consequences.  Our last episode looked at Nogai's role in Europe; today, we look at his interactions with the Khans of the Golden Horde, culminating in the destructive civil war between Toqta and Nogai at the end of the 1290s. I'm your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.       As noted before, much of this is based off the research of our series historian, Jack Wilson, who offered a reinvestigation of Nogai in the process of his Masters thesis. If you're curious about more on this matter of his reinterpretation of Nogai, you can speak with directly through his Youtube channel The Jackmeister: Mongol History, where he is in the midst of sharing this reinterpretation in a video form.        While Nogai was the governor of the Golden Horde's territory in southeastern Europe, he was hardly removed from wider Jochid affairs. After the death of Möngke-Temür Khan in 1280 or 1282, Nogai was the aqa of the Jochid lineage, as a few sources state, including an interesting letter from the Il-Khan Tegüder Ahmad to the Mamluks. As aqa,  he was one of the senior-most members of the family, respected and consulted on all sorts of familial and government matters. And indeed, this is the role he often appears in; when Töde-Möngke Khan considered releasing a captive son of Khubilai Khaan, he is recorded consulting with Nogai as well as other prominent members of the Jochids. Most of Nogai's interactions from the Jochid khans Töde-Möngke, Tele-Buqa and Toqta all seem based on this aqa relationship. While scholarship has often accused Nogai of putting these various khans on the throne, and reducing the khans Töde-Möngke and Tele-Buqa to puppets, this is unsupported by the sources. In the royal succession, Nogai is unmentioned in the transition except in the overthrow of Tele-Buqa, as we covered in a previous episode. Over these years Nogai appears focused on the territory he was assigned to in southeastern Europe. On occasion he sent troops to assist Rus' princes in raids in Poland and Lithuania, but Nogai only did so when requested by these princes, as described in the Rus' chronicles. Likewise, when he led armies into Hungary and Poland himself, as we discussed in our previous episodes, Nogai only did so when demanded by Tele-Buqa.    If not presented as overthrowing khans, or reducing them to figureheads, literature often presents Nogai actively undermining the khans, or undertaking his own diplomatic efforts. But the evidence for this is likewise weak.  An interesting case of Nogai possibly undermining Tele-Buqa Khan comes in 1288, when he sent an embassy to the Il-Khan, Arghun, which gave him Buddhist relics. A few weeks after this meeting, Tele-Buqa unleashed his first invasion of the Ilkhanate. It's tempting to see this as Nogai having his own Ilkhanid diplomacy or alerting Arghun of Tele-Buqa's attack, but this is the only record of such an embassy, and Arghun was caught unawares by the invasion, as he was in the midst of leaving the Caucasus when the attack occurred. We might wonder if Nogai had actually been instructed to placate Arghun, sending him gifts in order to not suspect any Jochid attacks; Arghun may have seen little reason to believe the truce with the Ilkhanate was in any danger. Neither did Nogai carry out a marriage alliance with the Il-Khan, as if sometimes stated; references to him marrying one of his sons to a daughter of Abaqa Il-Khan have confused Nogai of the Golden Horde with another Nogai, a non-Chinggisid general who lived in the Ilkhanate, and the father of Abaqa's son-in-law, in this instance.        Nogai did gave shelter to at least one Rus' prince, who was out of favour with the reigning khan. Dmitri Alexandrovich, a son of the famous Alexander Nevskii, had a decades long feud with his brother Andrei for the title of Grand Prince. Most usually, you'll see this presented as a sort of proxy war between Nogai and the khans, with Nogai pushing forward Dmitri as his candidate, and the khans supporting Andrei. While the khans did give Andrei armies and a yarliq to support his candidacy, there isn't evidence for those who claim that Nogai did the same for Dmitri. In the early 1280s, Andrei Alexandrovich went to the khan, likely Töde-Möngke, and received military support for his claim to Grand Prince of Vladimir, the chief of the Rus' princely titles. Dmitri fled before Andrei, and after a lengthy flight made his way to Nogai for shelter. As the Nikonian Chronicle records;       “Grand Prince Dmitrii Aleksandrovich with his druzhina, princes, children and entire court fled to the horde of Khan Nagai, to whom he told everything in order, relating it with tears, and gave him and his nobles many gifts. Khan Nagai listened to him and kept him in honour.”       What exactly being kept in “in honour” means in this context is unclear. Dmitri arrived with a great many gifts for Nogai to earn Nogai's favour, a wise move. Nogai only the year before had taken fugitives like Ivaylo and Ivan Asen III to his court; as we noted in the last episode, Nogai, on the urging of his Byzantine father-in-law Michael VIII, had killed Ivaylo and almost executed Ivan too. Dmitri was wise to bribe Nogai for his favour, but should not have expected Nogai's hospitality to go far if the request from the khan came for his head. But none came. By the next year Dmitri returned from Nogai and made peace with his brother Andrei. This is notable to emphasis; Nogai did not send Dmitri back with an army, or a yarliq. And later that year, Dmitri restarted the war with Andrei himself when he assassinated one of Andrei's boyars. Only at this juncture, do ‘Tatars' appear in Dmitri's service. Their origin is uncertain, but they cannot be directly linked to Nogai, as the Rus' chronicles themselves do not do so. The presence of Tatar troops of unspecified origin should not be too surprising. Similarly, at the famed Battle on the Ice against the Teutonic Order in 1242, Dmitri's father Alexander Nevskii had nomadic horse archers fighting alongside him, but their identity, or origin, goes unmentioned. Since this is the closest the sources come to showing Nogai directly challenging the Khan in influence over the Rus', we shouldn't rely too much either on this image.       Our last episode discussed the fall of Tele-Buqa Khan and the enthronement of Toqta in 1291. This, in all of the primary sources, is the only actual removal and enthronement of a khan that Nogai took part in. Toqta had come to Nogai for aid, and promised to carry out Nogai's will once he became khan. Nogai, as a pragmatic fellow, agreed, for who wouldn't want the Khan to owe you a favour? Particularly since Nogai had already learned Tele-Buqa was plotting against him. Faking a severe illness, Nogai convinced Tele-Buqa and his allies that he was dying, and wanted to make final amends. With their guard let down, Toqta arrived with an army and executed Tele-Buqa Khan.  After Toqta was enthroned, Nogai returned to the Danube, where he carried out a rush of activity, bringing the submission of many of the banates and Serbia that we mentioned last week. New raids are recorded on Poland in the early 1290s, and Mongol emissaries reached even the King of Bohemia. Though unmentioned, it seems likely they originated from Nogai, who devoted most of his attention before 1295 on Europe.   A young man, Toqta was likely overawed at first by the experienced aqa. Nogai recognized that Toqta's reign faced threats from loyalists to Tele-Buqa who still lived, and therefore sent word to Toqta; these princes needed to be killed in order to secure the throen. In 1293 a list of 23 noyans was provided, and Toqta duly carried out Nogai's suggestions. More deaths of such Tele-Buqa loyalists, and presumably enemies Nogai had made over his career, followed the next year. This was much to Nogai's relief, we are told, as he had been quite concerned over the matter. But Toqta was hardly the pushover he's often presented as. In 1294 Toqta sent a message to Nogai, demanding the death of Jijek-Khatun and some of her followers. Jijek-Khatun was a widow of Berke and Möngke-Temür Khan, and had briefly served as regent in the final years of  Möngke-Temür and Töde-Möngke's reigns. Nogai carried this out swiftly.    These reprisals, in which both Nogai and Toqta made demands of the other, seem to have been the extent of effective cooperation between them. Toqta in the early 1290s undertook his own actions which Nogai is not recorded affecting; in response to a request from Andrei Alexandrovich, Toqta ordered a devastating attack on the Rus' principalities in 1293. This campaign permanently broke the power of Dmitri Alexandrovich, who had once sought shelter with Nogai. In 1294, Toqta also reached a peace agreement with the current Il-Khan, Geikhatu. Once more, it seems Nogai's influence on Toqta was limited to that of the aqa, rather than a puppet master.       It appears that the actual fallout between Nogai and Toqta was not out of desire for one to depose the other, but more familial. Nogai had a number of wives and children, and despite his proclamation of Islam in his letter to Baybars in the early 1270s, seems to have not forced it onto any of his family. As noted he married the Greek Orthodox Christian Byzantine Princess Euphrosyne; no indication is provided of her ever abandoning her faith. Another wife, Yaylaq-Khatun, was baptized into the Catholic faith by Franciscan missionaries in Crimea around 1287. One of Nogai's daughters, Qiyan, married a son of Salji'udai Güregen, who was Toqta's grandfather and father-in-law. It was obviously a prominent alliance  related to Toqta's ascension, as Salji'udai was close to Toqta and held great influence over his grandson. Salji'udai's wife was Kelmish Aqa, a lady not only powerful in the Golden Horde, but respected in the Ilkhanate. Marrying into the family cemented Nogai's relevance to the central court. After the marriage though, Nogai's daughter Qiyan converted to Islam, to the great displeasure of her Buddhist husband. The husband began to abuse her, and Qiyan alerted her father. Nogai was furious at his daughter's treatment, and demanded justice from Toqta; hand over Salji'udai and his son, or dismiss them. Toqta of course, was hardly about to hand over his grandfather.       It should be said that the abuse of Nogai's daughter was unlikely to have been the sole cause of the conflict, but perhaps rather the spark that set off a growing pile of kindling. Rashīd al-Dīn records that Nogai was greatly frustrated already by Salji'udai's influence over Toqta compared to his own. As Rashīd says, allegedly quoting Nogai's response to one of Toqta's embassies:   “It is known to all the world what toil and hardship I have endured and how I have exposed myself to the charge of perfidy and bad faith in order to win for [Toqta] the throne […]. And now Saljidai Küregen has authority over that throne. If my son Toqta wishes the basis of our relationship to be strengthened between us, let him send Saljidai Küregen back to his yurt, which is near Khwārazm.”       Nogai knew he had undertaken an extreme action by taking a lead role in the death of Tele-Buqa, and had expected greater reward for his actions. Rather than Toqta being a figurehead in Nogai's shadow, as scholarship so often presents, Toqta had failed to give Nogai the respect and influence he felt he was owed. That is, Toqta was always rather independent and powerful, and Nogai lacked authority over him, yet still had hoped for it. Even before the marriage, Nogai may have been frustrated at his lack of influence over Toqta compared to Salji'udai, and perhaps the marriage had been an effort to address this. But the beating of his daughter was pushing things too far for this. And Toqta's refusal to give justice for Nogai, even after multiple embassies only worsened things.       Numerous sources,  such as Rashīd al-Dīn and Marco Polo, record that at various points, both Nogai and Toqta began ignoring the embassies of the other, which may have occurred at any step of the process but only deepend antagonism between them. Feeling denied options, Nogai decided to force Toqta's hands. He sent a wife, Chübei, and three sons, Chaka, Teke and Büri, to push a number of princes and generals in the western steppe into running amuck and causing damage, perhaps harassing officers of the khan. After essentially starting a revolt, many of these princes fled to Nogai's court, where one married another of Nogai's daughters. Messengers came from Toqta, demanding that Nogai hand over the rebellious princes. Nogai refused, unless Toqta would hand over Salji'udai and his son. That was the price, and it was not one Toqta was willing to pay. More rounds of envoys came, and finally, according to the Mamluk chronicler Baybars al-Mansūrī, Toqta sent a message bearing a plow, an arrow, and a pile of dirt as a riddle. The advisers of Nogai pondered it, but Nogai swiftly deduced what it was, declaring:        “For the plow, with it Toqta wants to say: if you went into the very depths of the earth, all the same I will pull you out from there with this plow; as for the arrow, with it Toqta wants to say: if you climbed to the very skies, then with this arrow I will force your descent;  as for the land, he says: choose for yourself the land on which our meeting will take place."       It was Toqta Khan's declaration of war on Nogai. Nogai spoke simply to Toqta's envoy, “tell Toqta that our horses our thirsty, and wish to drink from the Don.” The Don River was deep in the steppes, northeast of the Black Sea. Nogai was going to march against Toqta Khan.       War thus broke out around 1297. The initial advance in winter failed, as the rivers did not freeze, preventing either from crossing. A rest followed over the spring and summer of 1298, Toqta rested his troops near the Don river. Nogai advanced tentatively with a small force, including his wives and sons. Realizing that Toqta's forces were dispersed until the fall, Nogai sent a messenger, telling the khan that Nogai was coming for a quriltai to make peace. In reality, he was hoping to capture Toqta with his small force before Toqta's tümens could be recalled. Toqta saw through the ruse too late, and had only a small force with him when Nogai fell upon him near the Don.     Nogai had the better of this first engagement, and forced Toqta's retreat. It is this victory which actually forms the final event in most versions of Marco Polo's manuscripts. While Toqta fled back to Sarai, Nogai did not pursue; this was not a battle for mastery of the Golden Horde, and Nogai did not have the forces to advance so deep into Toqta's territory, particularly once a number of his noyans defected, for unclear reasons. We might wonder if this was not unease among them, for going to war with the Khan of the Horde; another indication that Nogai had not spent the last thirty years in open revolt. Nogai fell back to his own territory, lest he become overextended. His cast his eye on the Crimean peninsula though, the valuable trade center the Golden Horde Khan collected a great many revenues from. Many Crimean cities offered their submission, and Nogai left it to his grandson Aqtaji to take further tribute. While invited to dine in Solkhat, called by Mongols and Turks as Eski Qirim, Aqtaji was wined, dined, and violently murdered by the inhabitants. Needless to say, Nogai was enraged, and swiftly ordered his army into Crimea. In December 1298 a number of Crimean cities were sacked, and refugees fled as far as Mamluk Sultanate bringing word.       Interestingly, when the survivors begged Nogai for the release of prisoners, he allowed it. Rather than a peaceful nature on Nogai's part, we should assume this was Nogai attempting to build a base to renew trade ties with Crimea after the war, and remind them of his clemency. For Nogai's generals and troops though, it did not have the desired effect, for they now lost out on their slaves. His forces already overstretched, and many generals having only recently allied with him, Nogai suddenly had to deal with a massive revolt as many of these discontented commanders declared for Toqta. One of his sons, Teke, seems to have sought to ally with the rebels before being captured, and Nogai's oldest and most capable son, Chaka, with great slaughter and destruction put down the rebellion and rescued Teke. But many rebels had fled to Toqta with news of the discord; Toqta had used the intervening time to rebuild his forces, pulling troops from the borders. Truce was reconfirmed with the Il-Khan Ghazan, and the border garrisons now reinforced Toqta's host.        With some sixty tümens, according to Rashīd al-Dīn, Toqta led the army himself against Nogai, who was still reeling from the revolt. Along the Dnieper River in the last days of 1299, Toqta faced off against Nogai's much smaller army. The old dog had one last trick to play. Nogai stalled for time, claiming he was deathly ill, sending messengers to Toqta begging forgiveness. Nogai's message laid the blame for the war all on his sons; while at the same time, the eldest of those sons, Chaka, was leading a force upstream in an effort to flank Toqta. Toqta, having taken part in Nogai's ploy against Tele-Buqa almost a decade prior, saw right through it and spotted Chaka's army. The gig was up. Toqta's full weight fell against Nogai's army, which disintegrated before it. Nogai tried to flee with a small group of horsemen, only to be caught by a detachment of Rus' cavalry. Nogai was injured in the attack, and told the Rus', “Do not not kill me! Take me to Toqta, for he is the khan, and I must speak with him.” The unit returned to Toqta, but Nogai died en route, either of injuries, or as one of the Rus' decapitated him. In the account of Baybars al-Mansūrī, Toqta had the man who killed Nogai executed; no matter if Nogai was a rebel, he was still a Chinggisid, and this lowly Rus' druzhina had no right to harm him. So ended the reign of Nogai.           Nogai's armies and sons were dispersed. Chaka briefly rallied them from his base in Bulgaria, but when his younger half-brother Teke, and Teke's mother suggested surrendering to Toqta, Chaka had them executed. The resistance of Chaka was cut short in 1301 when he was betrayed, imprisoned and soon strangled by the new Bulgarian Tsar, his brother-in-law Theodore Svetoslav, the son of Tsar Giorgi Terter. Svetoslav's murder of Chaka was done only after getting the permission of Toqta Khan, who reconfirmed the vassalage of Bulgaria. The region was then reincorporated into the Golden Horde, and put under the jurisdiction of Toqta's family, though he constantly had trouble with whoever was in the position. The remainder of Nogai's family and forces submitted to Toqta, fled to the Byzantine Empire or even the Ilkhanate. All now recognized the authority of Toqta Khan, who quickly set about reasserting the authority of the Jochid khan.       Nogai's influence and life ended suddenly at the start of the fourteenth century. Often presented as an all powerful, crafty mayor-of-the-palace type figure, Nogai's actually handling of the khans seems somewhat clumsy. While true he knew how to play a trick, and could be a devious fellow, he grew rather over confident as soon as he had leverage over the khan— and even quicker, frustrated when he realized how little influence he actually had over Toqta. His actual power over the Golden Horde itself was minimal. Unlike real kingmakers in the Golden Horde in the late fourteenth century, named Mamai and Edigü, Nogai was totally forgotten about after his death. Turkic histories written in the fifteenth centuries onwards which collected some folk tales from the former Horde lands, such as those written by Ötemish Hajji and Abu'l Ghazi Khan, make no mention of Nogai, despite retaining stories of the reigns of Möngke-Temür, Töde-Möngke and Toqta. Some of you might make reference to the Nogai Horde, the Golden Horde successor state which emerged in the fifteenth century. But despite its name, the Nogai Horde bears no connection to Nogai of the thirteenth century; the Nogai Horde emerged in the lands northwest of the Caspian Sea, where Nogai's influence never extended, and indeed, he was never known for certain to have even traveled east of the Volga. More importantly though, the Nogai Horde traced its rulers not to Nogai, but to the sons of Edigü, the later Golden Horde kingmaker until his death in 1419. Edigü remains a prominent folk hero among many Tatars, but no historical source connects him in any capacity to prince Nogai. A regional commander who once overthrew a khan, and once went to war with another, posthumously Nogai was turned into the most powerful figure of the Golden Horde by modern writers. While we can imagine he might have been flattered by the picture, it's probably not one he would have recognized. Such was the reign of Nogai Khan.        Nogai's life remains one of the most interesting, yet misunderstood parts of the thirteenth century Golden Horde. If you're interested in learning more about that, you can check out the work of our series historian, Jack Wilson, who is sharing his ongoing research on Nogai through his Youtube Channel, the Jackmeister: Mongol History, and it forthcoming articles in Golden Horde Review, and Acta Orientalia Hungarica. For now, our series will continue with the reign of Toqta Khan in our next episode, 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 Jack Wilson. I'm your host David, and we'll catch you on the next one!

“In [this year] Nogai sent his wife [Yaylaq] Khātūn to the king Țuqṭā with a missive she would carry to him, and advice she would give to him. When she arrived at the [Golden] Horde he greeted her with honor, and celebrated hospitality and gifts with her, and she stayed in the hospitality for days. Then he asked her as to the reason for her coming, she said to him, “[Nogai] says to you that there are some thorns left on your path, so clean them up!” [Toqta] said, “What are the thorns?” so she named off the emirs who Nogai had mentioned to her, who were [23 in numer]. These were those who had conspired with Töle Buqa against Nogai.  When this missive was conveyed to him, and she told him this story, [Toqta] sought after those emirs, one after another, and killed all of them. So [Yaylaq] Khātūn returned to Nogai, informing him of their killing, so his worry subsided, and his fear gone.”       So the Mamluk chronicler Baybars al-Mansūrī records an interaction between Nogai, the Mongol master of the lower Danube and southeastern Europe, and Toqta, Khan of the Golden Horde. In 1291 Nogai had assisted Toqta Khan to the Jochid throne, overthrowing the previous Khan, Tele-Buqa. Now both expected favours of the other, which would have deadly consequences.  Our last episode looked at Nogai's role in Europe; today, we look at his interactions with the Khans of the Golden Horde, culminating in the destructive civil war between Toqta and Nogai at the end of the 1290s. I'm your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.       As noted before, much of this is based off the research of our series historian, Jack Wilson, who offered a reinvestigation of Nogai in the process of his Masters thesis. If you're curious about more on this matter of his reinterpretation of Nogai, you can speak with directly through his Youtube channel The Jackmeister: Mongol History, where he is in the midst of sharing this reinterpretation in a video form.        While Nogai was the governor of the Golden Horde's territory in southeastern Europe, he was hardly removed from wider Jochid affairs. After the death of Möngke-Temür Khan in 1280 or 1282, Nogai was the aqa of the Jochid lineage, as a few sources state, including an interesting letter from the Il-Khan Tegüder Ahmad to the Mamluks. As aqa,  he was one of the senior-most members of the family, respected and consulted on all sorts of familial and government matters. And indeed, this is the role he often appears in; when Töde-Möngke Khan considered releasing a captive son of Khubilai Khaan, he is recorded consulting with Nogai as well as other prominent members of the Jochids. Most of Nogai's interactions from the Jochid khans Töde-Möngke, Tele-Buqa and Toqta all seem based on this aqa relationship. While scholarship has often accused Nogai of putting these various khans on the throne, and reducing the khans Töde-Möngke and Tele-Buqa to puppets, this is unsupported by the sources. In the royal succession, Nogai is unmentioned in the transition except in the overthrow of Tele-Buqa, as we covered in a previous episode. Over these years Nogai appears focused on the territory he was assigned to in southeastern Europe. On occasion he sent troops to assist Rus' princes in raids in Poland and Lithuania, but Nogai only did so when requested by these princes, as described in the Rus' chronicles. Likewise, when he led armies into Hungary and Poland himself, as we discussed in our previous episodes, Nogai only did so when demanded by Tele-Buqa.    If not presented as overthrowing khans, or reducing them to figureheads, literature often presents Nogai actively undermining the khans, or undertaking his own diplomatic efforts. But the evidence for this is likewise weak.  An interesting case of Nogai possibly undermining Tele-Buqa Khan comes in 1288, when he sent an embassy to the Il-Khan, Arghun, which gave him Buddhist relics. A few weeks after this meeting, Tele-Buqa unleashed his first invasion of the Ilkhanate. It's tempting to see this as Nogai having his own Ilkhanid diplomacy or alerting Arghun of Tele-Buqa's attack, but this is the only record of such an embassy, and Arghun was caught unawares by the invasion, as he was in the midst of leaving the Caucasus when the attack occurred. We might wonder if Nogai had actually been instructed to placate Arghun, sending him gifts in order to not suspect any Jochid attacks; Arghun may have seen little reason to believe the truce with the Ilkhanate was in any danger. Neither did Nogai carry out a marriage alliance with the Il-Khan, as if sometimes stated; references to him marrying one of his sons to a daughter of Abaqa Il-Khan have confused Nogai of the Golden Horde with another Nogai, a non-Chinggisid general who lived in the Ilkhanate, and the father of Abaqa's son-in-law, in this instance.        Nogai did gave shelter to at least one Rus' prince, who was out of favour with the reigning khan. Dmitri Alexandrovich, a son of the famous Alexander Nevskii, had a decades long feud with his brother Andrei for the title of Grand Prince. Most usually, you'll see this presented as a sort of proxy war between Nogai and the khans, with Nogai pushing forward Dmitri as his candidate, and the khans supporting Andrei. While the khans did give Andrei armies and a yarliq to support his candidacy, there isn't evidence for those who claim that Nogai did the same for Dmitri. In the early 1280s, Andrei Alexandrovich went to the khan, likely Töde-Möngke, and received military support for his claim to Grand Prince of Vladimir, the chief of the Rus' princely titles. Dmitri fled before Andrei, and after a lengthy flight made his way to Nogai for shelter. As the Nikonian Chronicle records;       “Grand Prince Dmitrii Aleksandrovich with his druzhina, princes, children and entire court fled to the horde of Khan Nagai, to whom he told everything in order, relating it with tears, and gave him and his nobles many gifts. Khan Nagai listened to him and kept him in honour.”       What exactly being kept in “in honour” means in this context is unclear. Dmitri arrived with a great many gifts for Nogai to earn Nogai's favour, a wise move. Nogai only the year before had taken fugitives like Ivaylo and Ivan Asen III to his court; as we noted in the last episode, Nogai, on the urging of his Byzantine father-in-law Michael VIII, had killed Ivaylo and almost executed Ivan too. Dmitri was wise to bribe Nogai for his favour, but should not have expected Nogai's hospitality to go far if the request from the khan came for his head. But none came. By the next year Dmitri returned from Nogai and made peace with his brother Andrei. This is notable to emphasis; Nogai did not send Dmitri back with an army, or a yarliq. And later that year, Dmitri restarted the war with Andrei himself when he assassinated one of Andrei's boyars. Only at this juncture, do ‘Tatars' appear in Dmitri's service. Their origin is uncertain, but they cannot be directly linked to Nogai, as the Rus' chronicles themselves do not do so. The presence of Tatar troops of unspecified origin should not be too surprising. Similarly, at the famed Battle on the Ice against the Teutonic Order in 1242, Dmitri's father Alexander Nevskii had nomadic horse archers fighting alongside him, but their identity, or origin, goes unmentioned. Since this is the closest the sources come to showing Nogai directly challenging the Khan in influence over the Rus', we shouldn't rely too much either on this image.       Our last episode discussed the fall of Tele-Buqa Khan and the enthronement of Toqta in 1291. This, in all of the primary sources, is the only actual removal and enthronement of a khan that Nogai took part in. Toqta had come to Nogai for aid, and promised to carry out Nogai's will once he became khan. Nogai, as a pragmatic fellow, agreed, for who wouldn't want the Khan to owe you a favour? Particularly since Nogai had already learned Tele-Buqa was plotting against him. Faking a severe illness, Nogai convinced Tele-Buqa and his allies that he was dying, and wanted to make final amends. With their guard let down, Toqta arrived with an army and executed Tele-Buqa Khan.  After Toqta was enthroned, Nogai returned to the Danube, where he carried out a rush of activity, bringing the submission of many of the banates and Serbia that we mentioned last week. New raids are recorded on Poland in the early 1290s, and Mongol emissaries reached even the King of Bohemia. Though unmentioned, it seems likely they originated from Nogai, who devoted most of his attention before 1295 on Europe.   A young man, Toqta was likely overawed at first by the experienced aqa. Nogai recognized that Toqta's reign faced threats from loyalists to Tele-Buqa who still lived, and therefore sent word to Toqta; these princes needed to be killed in order to secure the throen. In 1293 a list of 23 noyans was provided, and Toqta duly carried out Nogai's suggestions. More deaths of such Tele-Buqa loyalists, and presumably enemies Nogai had made over his career, followed the next year. This was much to Nogai's relief, we are told, as he had been quite concerned over the matter. But Toqta was hardly the pushover he's often presented as. In 1294 Toqta sent a message to Nogai, demanding the death of Jijek-Khatun and some of her followers. Jijek-Khatun was a widow of Berke and Möngke-Temür Khan, and had briefly served as regent in the final years of  Möngke-Temür and Töde-Möngke's reigns. Nogai carried this out swiftly.    These reprisals, in which both Nogai and Toqta made demands of the other, seem to have been the extent of effective cooperation between them. Toqta in the early 1290s undertook his own actions which Nogai is not recorded affecting; in response to a request from Andrei Alexandrovich, Toqta ordered a devastating attack on the Rus' principalities in 1293. This campaign permanently broke the power of Dmitri Alexandrovich, who had once sought shelter with Nogai. In 1294, Toqta also reached a peace agreement with the current Il-Khan, Geikhatu. Once more, it seems Nogai's influence on Toqta was limited to that of the aqa, rather than a puppet master.       It appears that the actual fallout between Nogai and Toqta was not out of desire for one to depose the other, but more familial. Nogai had a number of wives and children, and despite his proclamation of Islam in his letter to Baybars in the early 1270s, seems to have not forced it onto any of his family. As noted he married the Greek Orthodox Christian Byzantine Princess Euphrosyne; no indication is provided of her ever abandoning her faith. Another wife, Yaylaq-Khatun, was baptized into the Catholic faith by Franciscan missionaries in Crimea around 1287. One of Nogai's daughters, Qiyan, married a son of Salji'udai Güregen, who was Toqta's grandfather and father-in-law. It was obviously a prominent alliance  related to Toqta's ascension, as Salji'udai was close to Toqta and held great influence over his grandson. Salji'udai's wife was Kelmish Aqa, a lady not only powerful in the Golden Horde, but respected in the Ilkhanate. Marrying into the family cemented Nogai's relevance to the central court. After the marriage though, Nogai's daughter Qiyan converted to Islam, to the great displeasure of her Buddhist husband. The husband began to abuse her, and Qiyan alerted her father. Nogai was furious at his daughter's treatment, and demanded justice from Toqta; hand over Salji'udai and his son, or dismiss them. Toqta of course, was hardly about to hand over his grandfather.       It should be said that the abuse of Nogai's daughter was unlikely to have been the sole cause of the conflict, but perhaps rather the spark that set off a growing pile of kindling. Rashīd al-Dīn records that Nogai was greatly frustrated already by Salji'udai's influence over Toqta compared to his own. As Rashīd says, allegedly quoting Nogai's response to one of Toqta's embassies:   “It is known to all the world what toil and hardship I have endured and how I have exposed myself to the charge of perfidy and bad faith in order to win for [Toqta] the throne […]. And now Saljidai Küregen has authority over that throne. If my son Toqta wishes the basis of our relationship to be strengthened between us, let him send Saljidai Küregen back to his yurt, which is near Khwārazm.”       Nogai knew he had undertaken an extreme action by taking a lead role in the death of Tele-Buqa, and had expected greater reward for his actions. Rather than Toqta being a figurehead in Nogai's shadow, as scholarship so often presents, Toqta had failed to give Nogai the respect and influence he felt he was owed. That is, Toqta was always rather independent and powerful, and Nogai lacked authority over him, yet still had hoped for it. Even before the marriage, Nogai may have been frustrated at his lack of influence over Toqta compared to Salji'udai, and perhaps the marriage had been an effort to address this. But the beating of his daughter was pushing things too far for this. And Toqta's refusal to give justice for Nogai, even after multiple embassies only worsened things.       Numerous sources,  such as Rashīd al-Dīn and Marco Polo, record that at various points, both Nogai and Toqta began ignoring the embassies of the other, which may have occurred at any step of the process but only deepend antagonism between them. Feeling denied options, Nogai decided to force Toqta's hands. He sent a wife, Chübei, and three sons, Chaka, Teke and Büri, to push a number of princes and generals in the western steppe into running amuck and causing damage, perhaps harassing officers of the khan. After essentially starting a revolt, many of these princes fled to Nogai's court, where one married another of Nogai's daughters. Messengers came from Toqta, demanding that Nogai hand over the rebellious princes. Nogai refused, unless Toqta would hand over Salji'udai and his son. That was the price, and it was not one Toqta was willing to pay. More rounds of envoys came, and finally, according to the Mamluk chronicler Baybars al-Mansūrī, Toqta sent a message bearing a plow, an arrow, and a pile of dirt as a riddle. The advisers of Nogai pondered it, but Nogai swiftly deduced what it was, declaring:        “For the plow, with it Toqta wants to say: if you went into the very depths of the earth, all the same I will pull you out from there with this plow; as for the arrow, with it Toqta wants to say: if you climbed to the very skies, then with this arrow I will force your descent;  as for the land, he says: choose for yourself the land on which our meeting will take place."       It was Toqta Khan's declaration of war on Nogai. Nogai spoke simply to Toqta's envoy, “tell Toqta that our horses our thirsty, and wish to drink from the Don.” The Don River was deep in the steppes, northeast of the Black Sea. Nogai was going to march against Toqta Khan.       War thus broke out around 1297. The initial advance in winter failed, as the rivers did not freeze, preventing either from crossing. A rest followed over the spring and summer of 1298, Toqta rested his troops near the Don river. Nogai advanced tentatively with a small force, including his wives and sons. Realizing that Toqta's forces were dispersed until the fall, Nogai sent a messenger, telling the khan that Nogai was coming for a quriltai to make peace. In reality, he was hoping to capture Toqta with his small force before Toqta's tümens could be recalled. Toqta saw through the ruse too late, and had only a small force with him when Nogai fell upon him near the Don.     Nogai had the better of this first engagement, and forced Toqta's retreat. It is this victory which actually forms the final event in most versions of Marco Polo's manuscripts. While Toqta fled back to Sarai, Nogai did not pursue; this was not a battle for mastery of the Golden Horde, and Nogai did not have the forces to advance so deep into Toqta's territory, particularly once a number of his noyans defected, for unclear reasons. We might wonder if this was not unease among them, for going to war with the Khan of the Horde; another indication that Nogai had not spent the last thirty years in open revolt. Nogai fell back to his own territory, lest he become overextended. His cast his eye on the Crimean peninsula though, the valuable trade center the Golden Horde Khan collected a great many revenues from. Many Crimean cities offered their submission, and Nogai left it to his grandson Aqtaji to take further tribute. While invited to dine in Solkhat, called by Mongols and Turks as Eski Qirim, Aqtaji was wined, dined, and violently murdered by the inhabitants. Needless to say, Nogai was enraged, and swiftly ordered his army into Crimea. In December 1298 a number of Crimean cities were sacked, and refugees fled as far as Mamluk Sultanate bringing word.       Interestingly, when the survivors begged Nogai for the release of prisoners, he allowed it. Rather than a peaceful nature on Nogai's part, we should assume this was Nogai attempting to build a base to renew trade ties with Crimea after the war, and remind them of his clemency. For Nogai's generals and troops though, it did not have the desired effect, for they now lost out on their slaves. His forces already overstretched, and many generals having only recently allied with him, Nogai suddenly had to deal with a massive revolt as many of these discontented commanders declared for Toqta. One of his sons, Teke, seems to have sought to ally with the rebels before being captured, and Nogai's oldest and most capable son, Chaka, with great slaughter and destruction put down the rebellion and rescued Teke. But many rebels had fled to Toqta with news of the discord; Toqta had used the intervening time to rebuild his forces, pulling troops from the borders. Truce was reconfirmed with the Il-Khan Ghazan, and the border garrisons now reinforced Toqta's host.        With some sixty tümens, according to Rashīd al-Dīn, Toqta led the army himself against Nogai, who was still reeling from the revolt. Along the Dnieper River in the last days of 1299, Toqta faced off against Nogai's much smaller army. The old dog had one last trick to play. Nogai stalled for time, claiming he was deathly ill, sending messengers to Toqta begging forgiveness. Nogai's message laid the blame for the war all on his sons; while at the same time, the eldest of those sons, Chaka, was leading a force upstream in an effort to flank Toqta. Toqta, having taken part in Nogai's ploy against Tele-Buqa almost a decade prior, saw right through it and spotted Chaka's army. The gig was up. Toqta's full weight fell against Nogai's army, which disintegrated before it. Nogai tried to flee with a small group of horsemen, only to be caught by a detachment of Rus' cavalry. Nogai was injured in the attack, and told the Rus', “Do not not kill me! Take me to Toqta, for he is the khan, and I must speak with him.” The unit returned to Toqta, but Nogai died en route, either of injuries, or as one of the Rus' decapitated him. In the account of Baybars al-Mansūrī, Toqta had the man who killed Nogai executed; no matter if Nogai was a rebel, he was still a Chinggisid, and this lowly Rus' druzhina had no right to harm him. So ended the reign of Nogai.           Nogai's armies and sons were dispersed. Chaka briefly rallied them from his base in Bulgaria, but when his younger half-brother Teke, and Teke's mother suggested surrendering to Toqta, Chaka had them executed. The resistance of Chaka was cut short in 1301 when he was betrayed, imprisoned and soon strangled by the new Bulgarian Tsar, his brother-in-law Theodore Svetoslav, the son of Tsar Giorgi Terter. Svetoslav's murder of Chaka was done only after getting the permission of Toqta Khan, who reconfirmed the vassalage of Bulgaria. The region was then reincorporated into the Golden Horde, and put under the jurisdiction of Toqta's family, though he constantly had trouble with whoever was in the position. The remainder of Nogai's family and forces submitted to Toqta, fled to the Byzantine Empire or even the Ilkhanate. All now recognized the authority of Toqta Khan, who quickly set about reasserting the authority of the Jochid khan.       Nogai's influence and life ended suddenly at the start of the fourteenth century. Often presented as an all powerful, crafty mayor-of-the-palace type figure, Nogai's actually handling of the khans seems somewhat clumsy. While true he knew how to play a trick, and could be a devious fellow, he grew rather over confident as soon as he had leverage over the khan— and even quicker, frustrated when he realized how little influence he actually had over Toqta. His actual power over the Golden Horde itself was minimal. Unlike real kingmakers in the Golden Horde in the late fourteenth century, named Mamai and Edigü, Nogai was totally forgotten about after his death. Turkic histories written in the fifteenth centuries onwards which collected some folk tales from the former Horde lands, such as those written by Ötemish Hajji and Abu'l Ghazi Khan, make no mention of Nogai, despite retaining stories of the reigns of Möngke-Temür, Töde-Möngke and Toqta. Some of you might make reference to the Nogai Horde, the Golden Horde successor state which emerged in the fifteenth century. But despite its name, the Nogai Horde bears no connection to Nogai of the thirteenth century; the Nogai Horde emerged in the lands northwest of the Caspian Sea, where Nogai's influence never extended, and indeed, he was never known for certain to have even traveled east of the Volga. More importantly though, the Nogai Horde traced its rulers not to Nogai, but to the sons of Edigü, the later Golden Horde kingmaker until his death in 1419. Edigü remains a prominent folk hero among many Tatars, but no historical source connects him in any capacity to prince Nogai. A regional commander who once overthrew a khan, and once went to war with another, posthumously Nogai was turned into the most powerful figure of the Golden Horde by modern writers. While we can imagine he might have been flattered by the picture, it's probably not one he would have recognized. Such was the reign of Nogai Khan.        Nogai's life remains one of the most interesting, yet misunderstood parts of the thirteenth century Golden Horde. If you're interested in learning more about that, you can check out the work of our series historian, Jack Wilson, who is sharing his ongoing research on Nogai through his Youtube Channel, the Jackmeister: Mongol History, and it forthcoming articles in Golden Horde Review, and Acta Orientalia Hungarica. For now, our series will continue with the reign of Toqta Khan in our next episode, 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 Jack Wilson. I'm your host David, and we'll catch you on the next one!  

Kings and Generals: Mongol Empire Podcast Episode 64: Golden Horde #4, Tele-Buqa and the Third Mongol Invasion of Poland       Our previous episode saw a watershed moment in the normally stale politics of the Golden Horde: in the aftermath of the second Mongol invasion of Hungary, the reigning Khan, Töde-Möngke, was deposed by his nephew, Tele-Buqa. Accusing his uncle of insanity, Tele-Buqa and a group of allies now ruled in a four-way alliance, dividing the Golden Horde between them. Over the next four years, all sorts of hell broke loose, as Tele-Buqa ordered a number of new military ventures, all of which ended in failures. An increasingly desperate Tele-Buqa brought the princes Nogai and Toqta into a whirlpool, which would spell disaster for Tele-Buqa, and open warfare as the Golden Horde approached its first civil war. I'm your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.        Tele-Buqa was a great-grandson of Batu Khan, a son of Tartu, the older brother of Khans Möngke-Temür and Töde-Möngke. As is standard for the Jochid Khans, we know almost nothing about his life before he took the throne of the Golden Horde in 1287, just over 80 years after Chinggis Khan first declared the Mongol Empire. A great-great-great-grandson of Chinggis, Tele-Buqa shared little in common with his illustrious ancestor, though certainly sought to emulate him through military ventures. Tele-Buqa first appears leading the army into Hungary in 1285, as covered in our last episode. You'll sometimes see in the literature and Wikipedia that Tele-Buqa and Nogai both took part in the 1259 attack on Poland. We covered this campaign in our first episode on the Golden Horde, where it was commanded by Burundai Noyan. The placement of Nogai and Tele-Buqa in the 1259 attack first appears in the fifteenth century chronicle of Jan Długosz, which almost certainly conflated it with the attack Tele-Buqa did lead on Poland in 1287. No other contemporary source supports it, and given that Tele-Buqa was born in the sixth generation of Chinggisids, he was at best a young boy when the 1259 attack occurred. Though children can be known for their lack of mercy, it's rather doubtful even the most ruthless of toddlers would be given an army.        When Tele-Buqa took the throne in 1287, he was probably in his late twenties or early thirties. As we discussed in our last episode, Töde-Möngke Khan entered in a religious or mental torpor by the mid-1280s, and the Golden Horde was governed by a widow of Möngke-Temür Khan, Jijek-Khatun. While Nogai is popularly said to have deposed Töde-Möngke and sat Tele-Buqa onto the throne, our series researcher, Jack Wilson, has demonstrated in his own studies how this is not the portrayal in the surviving primary sources. Rather, it seems Tele-Buqa eyed the throne himself, and the ensuing attack on Hungary in 1285, led by Tele-Buqa, was an effort to garner the status and resources to succeed his uncle Töde-Möngke. As we detailed in the last episode, this campaign resulted in the loss of much of his army while crossing the Carpathian mountains.        Tele-Buqa was furious over his defeat, particularly as Nogai's forces had escaped comparatively whole with considerable loot. Requiring a new plan, Tele-Buqa conspired with his brother, Könchak, and two sons of Möngke-Temür, Alghui and To'rilcha. As the Mamluk chronicles recorded Töde-Möngke exiling a number of these sons during the succession to Möngke-Temür, we might suspect they had nursed their vengeance throughout Töde-Möngke's reign. Together, they forced Töde-Möngke to abdicate early in 1287. The justification they told the Mamluks was that Töde-Möngke willingly stepped down to live as a religious hermit; the justification within the Golden Horde seems to have been that Töde-Möngke was insane and unfit to rule. This was what Rashīd al-Dīn learned in the Ilkhanate, and when Ötemish Hajji was collecting folktales from former Horde lands in the sixteenth century, stories of an insane Töde-Möngke had grown in popularity and particularly vulgar ones were supposedly favourites around the campfire.       The four-way princely junta  that Tele-Buqa ruled through is not well understood, beyond the fact that it was some sort of division of power between them, with Tele-Buqa the first-amongst-equals rather than overlord. Rashīd al-Dīn simply remarks that they ruled jointly. The Rus' chronicles typically mention Alghui alongside Tele-Buqa, indicating that he may have been Tele-Buqa's #2. As Alghui was the oldest of Möngke-Temür Khan's sons, it was unsurprising that Alghui was likewise predominant. Their division of power is also supported archeaologically. In the Mongol Empire, coinage generally bore the khan's name and the tamgha, a sort of individual stamp or crest. In the Golden Horde, Möngke-Temür had been the first to mint coins not in the name of the Great Khan, but in his own name. Likewise, Töde-Möngke followed him in this pattern, and so did Tele-Buqa. Except under Tele-Buqa, it was not just his name on coins. As coins usually bore the city and date of minting, the following pattern emerges. Tele-Buqa's name is on coins minted in Crimea, but in Sarai, Ukek and Khwarezm—the central and eastern parts of the Golden Horde— coins bearing the tamgha of the deceased Möngke-Temür predominant. These, in the opinion of scholars like Roman Reva, indicate coins minted by  Möngke-Temür's son, Alghui and To'rilcha. A different tamgha in the northern part of the khanate, the important centre of Bulghar on the Volga likely belonged to Tele-Buqa's brother, Könchak.        Interestingly, at the same time, there is evidence that Nogai, from his base on the lower Danube at Saqchi, modern Isaccea in Romania, began minting coinage as well. It seems on a whole, Tele-Buqa oversaw a decentralization of the Horde, something understandable given the size of the khanate, Tele-Buq's own inexperience, and the perceived right of all of the sons of Möngke-Temür to rule.  The Mamluk chronicles indicate that most of Möngke-Temür's sons joined the princes too, though Tele-Buqa, Könchak, Alghui and To'rilcha remained the dominant. Had this union lasted longer, we might be able to discuss how such a princely division worked; were these all new administrative wings, with all the leaders considered khans equal in status, in a sort of Mongolian version of the Roman tetrarchy? Certainly foriegn authors understood Tele-Buqa as the senior, but our lack of internal Golden Horde documents means we can't, at the current time, understand precisely how this worked in practice.       With the administration supposedly settled, Tele-Buqa could devote himself to other pursuits; namely, war. Tele-Buqa had a major problem facing him. By usurping the throne, his legitimacy was questionable, particularly without much of a military reputation to justify himself. Additionally, both the textual and climatic proxy data indicates the Golden Horde saw a decrease in precipitation after 1280. What this meant in the steppe, was an associated decrease in pasture, in the form of both aridisation and less bountiful pastures. And a consequence of this, was famine among the herds of the Horde. Starving, sick and dying animals, meant less supplies for the nomadic element of the khanate, the valuable Turkic and Mongolian troops who made up the Horde's military.  For the usurper Tele-Buqa, already know for a catastrophic defeat in Hungary, to now be in the midst of an ever worsening climate, it could have appeared rather dangerously like Heaven was expressing its displeasure.  Therefore, Tele-Buqa thought he might remedy the solution, and shore up his legitimacy, with military victories.       The first target was Poland.  In 1241 and in 1259, the Polish duchies had been horrifically ravaged by the Mongol armies. Tele-Buqa undoubtedly expected the same result.  Jan Długosz directly connects the attack as a reaction to famine within the Golden Horde, supporting the earlier thesis. The new Khan, soon after the coup, summoned Nogai and his forces, as well as a body of Rus' troops, and possibly Lithuanians as well, and in December 1287, his armies entered Poland in two main bodies; one under himself and Prince Alghui, and the other under Nogai. The Galician-Volhynian Chronicle informs us that discord still existed between Nogai and Tele-Buqa, and it seems they refused to interact in person. It was, in the words of that same chronicle, a great host, though no specific numbers are given. After taking the time to array his troops in a field and perform an inspection, the campaign was underway. Largely Tele-Buqa bypassed fortifications, ravaging suburbs and outlying communities. He had not come for conquest, but to loot, to return with wagons of slaves and goods in order to demonstrate how Heaven had granted him victory, and therefore smiled upon his place as khan. His efforts to cross deeper into Poland were stymied by initial difficulty finding ice thick enough to bear his army over the Vistula River. Next, a large body of the Rus' troops withdrew, on account of the mortal illness one of the lead Rus' princes suffered from. Pressing on without them, Tele-Buqa's army encircled and assaulted the city of Sandomierz. In the two previous Mongol invasions, the city had fallen to them in quick order. But this time, resistance was stiff, and finally Tele-Buqa lifted the siege when it was clear it would not be overrun except with great struggle.       He gave his troops leave to ravage a broad strip of Poland for 10 days while he decided his next maneuver. As December 1287 gave way to January 1288, Tele-Buqa settled on Kraków, and the city he marched. Near Torzk he halted, for there he learned that Nogai had been lain siege to  Kraków since Christmas. His frustration had not subsided with Nogai, and having felt denied his great victories throughout the campaign, Tele-Buqa Khan abandoned the effort altogether; the imperial equivalent of taking the ball home with you at recess, once you stopped having fun. He'd be damned if he, the Khan of the Golden Horde, would assist Nogai in a siege. Thus in early January 1288 did Tele-Buqa leave Poland, ravaging all the territory he could as he went; including Galicia, his own subjects. And Nogai too was soon forced to withdraw, unable to break the defences of Kraków. For their valiant defence, the Polish Duke Leszek the Black granted the krakowianin [people of Kraków] generous tax exemptions.        The immediate consequence of the 1287 attack on Poland was in furthering the divide between Tele-Buqa and Nogai. There was no outright defeat, and no great numbers had been lost as had been in the withdrawal from Hungary. Certainly, the Mongols left with a good deal of loot and slaves, given the amount of time they spent ravaging the countryside. But both Nogai and Tele-Buqa blamed the other for the rather inconclusive outcome. There had been attempts to take cities, and these were repulsed, and Nogai knew that Tele-Buqa had actively chosen to not assist in the siege of Kraków. Tele-Buqa's military dreams were not dashed, though; he simply found another target. In May 1288, only a few months after the return from Poland, Tele-Buqa ordered an attack on the Ilkhanate, under the command of Tamma-Toqta. The Il-Khan, Arghun, rapidly turned back and repelled the Jochid troops, as well as their followup assault that October. And in spring 1290, when Tamma-Toqta once again led Jochid troops into the Ilkhanate, they were again met with defeat. The Ilkhanid forces killed a great many, and captured numerous Jochid princes in the army. It was a humiliating defeat.       From 1285 through to 1290, Tele-Buqa had led or ordered a number of military ventures. Most of them ended in outright, or even catastrophic, failure. Only in Poland could the result be, somewhat charitably, described as inconclusive. If we imagine Tele-Buqa had undertaken these campaigns in order to shore up his position— a usurpation in the midst of drought and famine— then these efforts had instead looked like Heaven offered no support for Tele-Buqa's rule; for if it did, surely it would have signaled this through some sort of victory? Alas for Tele-Buqa Khan, this was not the case.       His legitimacy shaky, his right to rule questioned, rumours may have come to Tele-Buqa of doubt in his leadership, that Heaven was displeased at him and now the princes and noyad whispered of how ill-fit he was. He had usurped the throne from a man seen as incompetent; what would stop someone else from doing the same to him? At this point, Tele-Buqa may have decided to strike first at his perceived rivals. This manifested in two main figures; one was Nogai, who Tele-Buqa had already blamed for military defeats. The powerful prince on the Danube  seemed a great potential threat. And the other was Toqta; a son of Möngke-Temür Khan, Toqta is described in all sorts of manly virtues, a real figure to rally anti-Tele-Buqa support around. More significantly, there is no evidence for Toqta taking part in the princely-power sharing arrangement Tele-Buqa had organized with Möngke-Temür's other sons. Or perhaps he had been, and an ever-more paranoid Tele-Buqa threw him out on some perceived slight, and then decided he should have killed him. Regardless of the process, Toqta felt that Tele-Buqa was threatening his life, and fled to the most powerful person he could: Nogai. Tele-Buqa had inadvertently made the alliance that would cost him his life.       Fleeing to Nogai's ordu,  according to Rashīd al-Dīn, Toqta gave this message to the elder prince: “My cousins are trying to kill me, and thou art the aqa. I will take refuge with thee so that thou mayst preserve me and prevent the hand of their oppression from reaching me. As long as I live I shall be commanded by my aqa and shall not contravene thy will.” While scholarship usually presents Nogai as the khanmaker deposing the Jochid rulers at will and the man actually running the state, our series researcher has argued against this. If Nogai was the less dominant man, then this offer from Toqta must have been an enticing promise; to have the ruler of the Golden Horde essentially be your man, especially when the current one was making threatening moves? It was too good an opportunity to pass up. Nogai quickly came up with a stratagem to bring down Tele-Buqa and get Toqta to the throne.       Nogai was the aqa of the Jochids; that is, the senior member of the lineage. As aqa, he held great influence, and was expected to be consulted on prominent matters, delivering his experience and wisdom to those younger generations who simply didn't know any better. “Kids these days!” we might imagine the one-eyed Nogai mumbling after a frustrating council session with Tele-Buqa. His consultation is recorded when Töde-Möngke released the captive son of Khubilai Khaan, for instance. In fact, most of his influence within the Golden Horde is certainly attributable to this status. And it was this status that Nogai would employ for his plan.       Two slightly different versions of what he did exist, recorded separately by Rashīd al-Dīn in the Ilkhanate and Baybars al-Mansūrī in the Mamluk Sultanate. It's possible both accounts are correct, and this is how it may have looked. In the Mamluk account, Nogai received summons from Tele-Buqa, that the khan demanded his presence, on the pretext of needing his advice, though in truth planned to kill him. Nogai gathered his allies, and with foreknowledge accepted Tele-Buqa's summons, and advanced to meet him. Both the Mamluks and Rashīd recorded that before the meeting though, Nogai contacted Tele-Buqa's mother, who was not involved in the plot. He convinced her that he had only peaceful intentions; he was the aqa, and only wanted to advise Tele-Buqa, and therefore the lady should convince her son to come, unarmed, with a small party to meet Nogai. Rashīd's account differs slightly, in that at the same time Nogai feigned that he was deathly ill; he needed the Khan and his allies to come and make final amends before he passed on.  He sold the show further by swallowing blood clots, which he would then dramatically cough up. The weakening Nogai assuaged the fears of all others who came across him, telling them “Old age has set in, and I have abandoned conflict, fighting, and disputes. I have neither intention of contending with anyone nor thought of doing battle. However, we have been commanded by [Chinggis] Khan that if anyone in his ulus or urugh goes astray and upsets the ulus, we must investigate and make them content to agree.”       Tele-Buqa's mother was utterly convinced, and sent word to her sons, “Go as fast as possible and meet that weak old man who is about to depart this life for the hereafter. If you do not, your mother's milk will be forbidden to you.” Tele-Buqa and his allies arrived as Nogai had desired, unarmed without any army. Perhaps they had indeed fallen for Nogai's trick, or perhaps Tele-Buqa wanted a final chance to gloat over the old-man.        As Tele-Buqa and the princes arrived in the camp, and were beguiled by Nogai's smooth talk and pained coughs, a messenger was sent to Toqta, bringing him and his men out of hiding. In quick order, Tele-Buqa and the sons of Möngke-Temür were surrounded. Their eyes must have darted back and forth in confusion and terror, from the armed horsemen under Toqta, to the suddenly perfectly fine Nogai rising from his bed, who promptly gave the order for Tele-Buqa and the princes to be tied up. Nogai turned to Toqta, and pointed to Tele-Buqa, almost dismissively saying, “This one took over the kingdom of your father, but these sons of your father agreed with him to seize and kill you.  I give them into your hands;  kill them as you wish.”       Out of respect to their imperial status, the bound princes had their heads covered, and backs broken. So ended the four year reign of Tele-Buqa Khan. It was not just Tele-Buqa and his closest allies killed; all of the sons of Möngke-Temür Khan, Toqta's brothers, were likewise executed Swiftly, Toqta was confirmed as khan of the Golden Horde; Nogai stayed close to confirm it, and Toqta's few surviving brothers swore their loyalty to him. Upon the completion of the ceremonies, Nogai swiftly returned to the lower Danube. For Nogai's khanmaker reputation, this was the first, and last, overthrow of the ruling khan that he took part in, according to the primary sources. Even Marco Polo, passing through Anatolia only a few years later, recorded a muddled version of events, making Töde-Möngke and Nogai work together to overthrow Tele-Buqa. Tele-Buqa's brief reign would largely be forgotten in succeeding generations, but it had ushered in a process of decentralization that would require some time to be corrected. Toqta would begin the process; but not before things came to a head with Nogai. Both men had made promises of assistance, and both were about to find that the other was not as keen to keep their end of the bargain. To see how their conflict develops, be sure to subscribe to the Kings and Generals Podcast. If you'd like to help us continue bringing you great khan-tent, please consider supporting us on patreon at www.patreon.com/kings and generals, or sharing this with your friends. 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. 

For a full transcript of the podcast click on the transcript tab in Buzzsprout or go to the website https://storiesfrompalestine.info/2022/01/27/caesarea-maritima/On the coast half way between Jaffa and Haifa are the ruins of the ancient port city of Caesarea Maritima. It was built by King Herod the Great about 2000 years ago. He named it Caesarea to honor the Roman emperor Ceasar Augstus. He built a harbor with a very advanced breakwater in the sea, made of pozzolana, volcanic ash mixed with limestone. He had the typical Roman city built with cardo, decumanus, Roman theater, hippodrome, bath houses and a big Temple dedicated to Augustus.The city grew in Byzantine times and became much larger. It was an important center of Christian theology and had a big library of manuscripts. In the Muslim era that followed Caesarea was not very important because the Arab rulers did not focus on sea trade and the port cities. The city was rebuilt by the Crusaders and until today you can see some of the massive walls, towers and a beautiful late Crusader time gate in gothic style, built by the French King Louis the ninth.The Mamluks destroyed Ceasarea. During late Ottoman time a group of Bosnian refugees resettled close to the Crusader tower fortress and a fishing village of 960 people was found near the beach until Zionist militias killed a number of villagers and forcibly displaced the rest. The area has been turned into a National Park with a large number of holiday resorts and hotels in the vicinity. You can also watch a video we produced on the YouTube channel.Follow the social media accounts for more updates and photos.All the links can be found on the Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/StoriesfrompalestineIf you enjoy listening to Stories from Palestine then you should also check out the podcast Jerusalem Unplugged. You can find it on most podcast players and on social media.

A special live in English with Kubilay Balcı, the founder of "Turk-ish/ic history" that he will gonna talk his travels in Egypt, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Follow him on his page on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/turkishichistoryFind all the links here: https://linktr.ee/mediorientedintorni, but, going into detail:- all updates on the instagram page @medioorienteedintorni-for articles visit our website https://mediorientedintorni.com/ you will also find the "article version".- podcasts on all major platforms in Italy and around the world (for the most in Italian, here the link to the English version: https://open.spotify.com/show/1blKWghNRW4eY1tSI5jfoe?si=d823e420195f4d14 you will find it on all the best podcast platforms )- Do you want all the releases in real time? Subscribe to the Telegram group: https://t.me/mediorientedintorniengAny like, sharing or support is welcome and helps us to dedicate ourselves more and more to our passion: telling the Middle East

This episode has a transcript so that you can read along. You can find it on the Buzzsprout site if you click on Transcript (next to Description) Or find it on the website:https://storiesfrompalestine.info/2022/01/12/al-aqsa-and-dome-of-the-rock/I recorded this interview after I visited the Dome of the Rock and Aqsa mosque on the Haram al Sharif (the Nobel Sanctuary) in the old city of Jerusalem. We made a special arrangement with the 'Awqaf' so that we could enter into the different mosques on the platform.Then I met with Dr Yousef Al Natsheh, an Islamic art historian who served in the Awqaf for 40 years and who wrote several books on Jerusalem. I recorded this interview in the heart of the old city very close to the Aqsa Mosque.It is important to understand that the whole area on the top of the hill, enclosed by a wall, is referred to as the Aqsa mosque. The area comprises around one sixth of the size of the old city. The two most famous buildings are the Dome of the Rock with the golden dome and the Friday prayer mosque, also called the Aqsa mosque or the Qibly mosque, on the southern end of the platform. There are other mosques, such as the Marwani mosque and the Omar mosque. Furthermore the area has a lot of small domes, platforms, fountains, schools, arches, four minarets and several other structures that all together form the Haram al Sharif, the Nobel Sanctuary. We talk about the history of the location, Jewish claims to the site, Islamic architecture, Mamluks and the end of times. If you want to see some videos I made then check out the social media pages, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and sign up for the mailing list. You can find all the links here:https://linktr.ee/StoriesfrompalestineYouTube video 'Haram al Sharif in 9 minutes'For a great online (PDF) guide to the Al Haram al Sharif click hereThe website that comes with the great walking trails through the old city of Jerusalem by Dr Yusef Al Natsheh is worth exploring. http://enjoyjerusalem.com/If you enjoy listening to Stories from Palestine then you should also check out the podcast Jerusalem Unplugged. You can find it on most podcast players and on social media.

Before Columbus had even set foot in America, medieval Europe and the Islamic Middle East already had a long history in trading and exploiting slaves. An important branch of the slave trade involved buying captives from the shores of the Black Sea and trafficking them through the Mediterranean to the commercial cities of Italy or to Egypt, where many of them became slave soldiers or even rulers (called "Mamluks"). We discuss the history of the trade, who these thousands of slaves were and what became of them with Hannah Barker of Arizona State University, author of "That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500." Image: Pillar capital with sculpted faces of foreign peoples, including Turk and Tatar, Doge's Palace, Venice. Please support this podcast to hear all patron-only materials, such as "History of the United States in 100 Objects" -- www.patreon.com/user?u=5530632 New website! -- www.historiansplaining.com

How did bestselling author Steven Pressfield (“The Legend of Bagger Vance,” “The War of Art,” “A Man at Arms) spark the writing career of Brad Graft? And how was that career further inspired by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy (“Blood Meridian,” “No Country for Old Men,” “All the Pretty Horses”)? Brad Graft, our guest for this episode, explains and also talks about his writing regimen and rituals.Brad Graft is author of the Brotherhood of the Mamluks trilogy consisting of the novels “Chains of Nobility,” “A Lion's Share” and “Edge of Armageddon.” The final installment of that trio (soon to be released) is set during the 13th century and is a story that brings together characters from books I and II. It features an enslaved nomad boy who rose to command a reconnaissance unit; Leander, the French soldier who abandoned the Crusades to join the devout Islamic warriors he admired, and a character from the Eurasian steppe who is now the charismatic leader of the elite Bahri Mamluks of Egypt. It's a tale of  betrayal and love, retribution and mercy, and abandonment and redemption — a compelling account of a historical battle, an unheralded clash whose outcome leaves crucial repercussions still felt today.Take a listen, and if you enjoy this podcast we hope you will subscribe and also share a link with friends, colleagues and family members who are avid readers or aspiring writers.Your host is Mike Consol, author of “Hardwood: A Novel About College Basketball and Other Games Young Men Play.” Write him at novelistspotlight@gmail.com

Have you ever wondered what life was like for Mamluk farmers? In this episode, Lucie Laumonier talks with Omar Abdel-Ghaffar, a PhD candidate at Harvard University about Nile floods, landscapes and village communities in late medieval Egypt. You can support this podcast on Patreon - go to https://www.patreon.com/medievalists

In this episode of our series on the French campaign in Egypt, we follow Napoleon Bonaparte and the Army of the Orient as they win a series of victories against the rulers of Egypt, the Mamluks. We then watch as the British deal the French expedition a devastating blow that changes everything. Email me Follow me on Twitter Like the show on Facebook Visit the Ebay store Support the show on Patreon Works Cited: De, Bourrienne Louis Antoine Fauvelet. The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte. Vol. 1, Forgotten Books, 2008. Herold, J. Christopher. Bonaparte in Egypt. Fireship Press, 2009. Jabarti Abd al-Rahman. Al-Jabartiʼs Chronicle of the French Occupation, 1798: Napoleon in Egypt. Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995. Strathern, Paul. Napoleon in Egypt. Bantam Books Trade Paperbacks, 2009.

“The most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation." - David HumeThe Crusades is one of the defining chapters in History, a showcase for ‘East meets West'. It was the era of great men, Saladin, Richard the Lionheart, St Bernard of Clairvaux. So who cocked up the Fourth Crusade? And how did it end up turning on fellow Christians?Comedian Mikey Robins and Historian Paul Wilson kick off their new series in style. Join them as they take on Seljuks, Saracens, Mamluks and more.FacebookTwitterInstagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For nearly six centuries, an empire of slave soldiers dominated the Muslim world and stopped all conquerors.  The era of the Mamluks was one of contradictions - a time of constant instability but of great economic, scientific and artistic achievement.  Leaders who struggled to hold onto their own positions struck fear in the nations around them.  In this episode we look at the system that, for better and worse, would shape the Muslim world for centuries.

In the 1250's Kublai Khan built his military reputation in China. Meanwhile in the West of the Empire the Mongols suffered their first major defeat, against the Mamluks.