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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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THE MONGOL STORM

Nicholas Morton

Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East

A new look at how the Mongol invasions remade the world of the Middle Ages.
Drawing upon sources produced by every major Near Eastern society, including artwork, architecture, and a vast array of materials written in Arabic, Persian, Uighur, Armenian, Syriac, Greek, Latin, Old French, and Hebrew, The Mongol Storm will appeal to readers of sweeping books about global interconnections of the premodern world, including Dan Jones's Crusaders, Jack Weatherford's Genghis Khan, and Neil Price's Children of Ash and Elm.

The Mongols have long been viewed in the West as violent barbarians who plundered and wrecked the societies they invaded. But in fact the Mongol Empire was highly sophisticated, and through their conquests they built a new world order. Within the space of a single generation, they swept across the Middle East, tied Europe and Asia together through trade, and completely reshaped global geopolitics.

The Mongol Storm tells the story of the Mongols and the empires they conquered. Drawing on years of deep archival research, historian Nicholas Morton traces the rise of the Mongols in the 13th century through their rapid invasions of eight different Middle Eastern societies. As Mongol armies advanced upon the Middle East, Morton shows, longstanding powers such as the Khwarazmian Empire, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the Abbasid Caliphate collapsed, while waves of refugees broke across borders and upset the region's delicate religious and social hierarchies. Amidst the chaos arose aggressive new empires including the Mamluks and the Ottomans, who would ultimately challenge the Mongol Empire's authority and dominate the Middle East for centuries. Even as the Mongols' power declined, the diplomatic and economic ties their conquests had established between once-disparate societies endured, and they left a much more connected Eurasia in their wake, permanently reconfiguring the balance of medieval world power.

The Mongol Storm is an epic account of violent conflict unfolding against the vibrant backdrop of the Seljuk Turks' magnificent garden palaces, mighty Crusader fortresses, Egyptian pyramids, Damascus' sprawling markets, and the vast Mongol wagon cities. Vividly written and vast in scope, it completely revises our understanding of the Mongols and the world of the Middle Ages.

Nicholas Morton is UK-based, a senior lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, and protégé of preeminent medieval historian Jonathan Phillips. He is the author or editor of ten books covering different aspects of Middle Eastern history, and his first trade book The Field of Blood, was praised by The Wall Street Journal for being "lit by vivid re-creations of battles as well as concise descriptions of each warring group's military tactics," while the Washington Independent Review of Books called it "a lively and compact historical survey."
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Book

Published 2022-11-15 by Basic Books

Book

Published 2022-11-15 by Basic Books

Comments

author essay: How an English Exile Ended Up at the Court of Genghis Khan's Grandson Read more...

In his upcoming book, The Mongol Storm, historian Nicholas Morton discusses the vast subject that is the Mongol Empire. All of it. Here we talk about a small fraction of his excellent work. Read more...

Nicholas Morton is writing a series of articles for Medievalists.net Read more...

A tremendous book. This is, at heart, a timeless story about the power of the survival instinct. Read more...

A remarkable scholarly achievement.

This is the most exciting study of the Mongols and their encounters with the peoples of the Near East I have ever read. It is a story of epic proportions demanding much from an historian. Nicholas Morton rises to the challenge. His scholarship is impeccable, and his judgments are judicious and compelling. He has an exceptional facility for finding the apt quotation to underscore his points, and his prose is precise, clear and elegant. I found it extremely difficult to put this marvelous book down.

When Mongol armies arrived in the Near East in the later Middle Ages, they transformed the region utterly and irreversibly. Nic Morton's new history of their extraordinary deeds and conquests is deeply researched and elegantly written - essential reading for anyone interested in the descendants of Genghis Khan in the age of the Crusades.

...this expert study casts the Middle Ages in a new light. Read more...

With powerful prose, Morton leads readers through the complicated affairs of the Medieval Near East. A virtue of Morton's book is that it doesn't simplify anything but makes the most complicated parts understandable. For anyone who loves history, especially with military and diplomatic focuses. Read more...

UK: Basic Books UK ; China: Gingko ; Mongolia: Nepko ; Turkey: Kronik

The Mongol Storm is an elegant reproach to the sort of academic history seen in narrow studies that are of interest only to other academic historians, exclude the general reader and, worst of all, are frankly unreadable. It is a reminder that the best history writing...is eminently readable. What is the point of it otherwise? Read more...

[an] erudite, often thrilling and much-needed study... This is imperial history at its most 'complex and messy', but Morton passes little judgement... instead, he scrupulously contextualises all the actors within the belief systems of their day, and the harsh realities of their lives. Read more...

This week, Danièle speaks with Nicholas Morton about the one hundred year rise of the Mongol Empire in the Near East, why they were so effective, and why they pursued global domination. Read more...

...a well-researched and lucidly written book that will transform thinking about the great transitions of the Middle Ages... This is a history we've been needing for some time.

...outstanding book... the Mongols are today often associated with conquest and destruction. In The Mongol Storm, Nicholas Morton complicates these misconceptions... Morton's invaluable book shows how the Muslim world was profoundly reconfigured...