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b'The most disruptive and transformative event in the Middle Ages wasn\\u2019t the Crusades, the Battle of Agincourt, or even the Black Death. It was the Mongol Conquests. Even after his death, Genghis Khan\\u2019s Mongol Empire grew to become the largest in history\\u2014four times the size of Alexander the Great\\u2019s and stretching from the Pacific to the Mediterranean. But the extent to which these conquering invasions and subsequent Mongol rule transformed the diverse landscape of the medieval Near East have been understated in our understanding of the modern world.

Today\\u2019s guest is Nicholas Morton, author of \\u201cThe Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Middle East.\\u201d We discuss the overlapping connections of religion, architecture, trade, philosophy and ideas that reformed over a century of Mongol rule. Rather than a Euro- or even Mongol-centric perspective, this history uniquely examines the Mongol invasions from the multiple perspectives of the network of peoples of the Near East and travelers from all directions\\u2014including famous figures of this era such as Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Ibn Khaldun, and Roger Bacon, who observed and reported on the changing region to their respective cultures\\u2014and the impacted peoples of empires\\u2014Byzantine, Seljuk and then Ottoman Turks, Ayyubid, Armenian, and more\\u2014under the violence of conquest.'