From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane

The Reawakening of Mongol Asia

By: Peter Jackson

Narrated by: John Lee

An epic account of how a new world order under Tamerlane was born out of the decline of the Mongol Empire.

By the mid-fourteenth century, the world empire founded by Genghis Khan was in crisis. The Mongol Ilkhanate had ended in Iran and Iraq, China's Mongol rulers were threatened by the native Ming, and the Golden Horde and the Central Asian Mongols were prey to internal discord. Into this void moved the warlord Tamerlane, the last major conqueror to emerge from Inner Asia.

In this authoritative account, Peter Jackson traces Tamerlane's rise to power against the backdrop of the decline of Mongol rule. Jackson argues that Tamerlane, a keen exponent of Mongol custom and tradition, operated in Genghis Khan's shadow and took care to draw parallels between himself and his great precursor. But, as a Muslim, Tamerlane drew on Islamic traditions, and his waging of wars in the name of jihad, whether sincere or not, had a more powerful impact than those of any Muslim Mongol ruler before him.

©2023 Peter Jackson (P)2024 Tantor

purely an academic study

was hoping for a history of Tamerlane bur this book doesn't even discuss hum for the first 8 or 9 hours.

it's completely weighed down with minutae

wonderful book with a truly terrible reader

it would have probably made sense to find a reader who can pronounce turkic and mongol names and words. most of this recording is the narrator struggling through names.

Hard to Listen to

The topic of this book fills a crucial gap and holds a lot of interest. But the audiobook version is hard to sit through. The author fills the text with double dates, and spends a long chapter describing sources; scholarly but not compelling listening. The narrator does not help by having strange pronouciation of everything, making even well known names like Subutai hard to figure out.