The Mongol Empire is gone, but its shadow still covers the world.
We dive into the aftermath of collapse: the fall of the Yuan Dynasty, the Ilkhanate’s implosion, and the slow decay of the Golden Horde. The roads that once carried wealth now carry plague, and the same global network that connected humanity spreads its worst disasters.
This episode connects the 14th-century unraveling of empire to our own modern world, pandemics, broken supply chains, and systems too big to fail that fail anyway.
History doesn’t repeat itself. It just reloads with faster Wi-Fi.
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Allsen, Thomas T. Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
BBC Documentary. The Mongol Empire — Storm from the East. 1992.
Harl, Kenneth W. The Mongol Empire: Genghis and His Successors. The Great Courses, 2020. Audiobook.
May, Timothy. The Mongol Conquests in World History. Reaktion Books, 2012.
Morgan, David. The Mongols. Wiley-Blackwell, 3rd ed., 2016.
Rossabi, Morris. Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times. University of California Press, 1988.
Weatherford, Jack. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. Random House Audio, 2004. Audiobook.
History Hit Podcast. “Collapse of the Mongol Empire.” 2023 episode.
McNeill, William H. Plagues and Peoples. Anchor Books, 1998.
Aberth, John. The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348–1350. Routledge, 2017.