Mongols Part 4-1: The Erased World – Subadai's Ride

This is not a lecture. This is a war cry.
In this scorched-earth episode to Time Machine Diaries: Mongol Nightmare, we rip the mask off one of history’s most over-sanitized legacies. No, the Mongols weren’t just some badass horse lords who gave us trade routes and dumplings. They were the mother of all extinction events—steamrolling civilizations, incinerating entire knowledge systems, and breaking human spirits from Samarkand to Kiev.

But this episode isn’t just about what they did back then—it’s about what we’re still doing now. Empires still march. Governments still lie. History still gets rewritten by the victors with Wi-Fi and warheads. From Ibn Battuta's shell-shocked travels to the obliteration of Merv, we connect medieval genocide to modern geopolitics, mass incarceration, and the psychological warfare of late-stage capitalism.

If you’re tired of sugarcoated history, if you’ve ever looked around and asked, “How the hell did we end up like this?”—strap in.

Primary & Medieval Sources:

Bar Hebraeus. Chronicon Syriacum. In The Mongol Empire and Its Legacy, edited by Reuven Amitai-Preiss and David Morgan, Brill, 1999.

Carpini, Giovanni da Pian del. The Mission to the Mongols. Translated by Christopher Dawson, Sheed and Ward, 1955.

Ibn Battuta. The Travels of Ibn Battuta, A.D. 1325–1354. Translated by H.A.R. Gibb, Hakluyt Society, 1958.

Juvayni, Ata-Malik. The History of the World Conqueror. Translated by John Andrew Boyle, Harvard University Press, 1958.

Rashid al-Din. The Successors of Genghis Khan. Translated by John Andrew Boyle, Columbia University Press, 1971.

Plano Carpini, Giovanni. Historia Mongalorum. In The Mongol Mission, translated by Dawson, Sheed & Ward, 1955.

Amitai, Reuven. Holy War and Rapprochement: Studies in the Relations between the Mamluks and Mongols. Variorum, 2009.

Allsen, Thomas T. Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Biran, Michal. The Mongols in Central Asia: The Rise of the Ilkhanate. Curzon Press, 1997.

Favereau, Marie. The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World. Harvard University Press, 2021.

Halperin, Charles J. Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History. Indiana University Press, 1985.

Jackson, Peter. The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion. Yale University Press, 2017.

Jackson, Peter. The Mongols and the West, 1221–1410. Routledge, 2005.

May, Timothy. The Mongol Conquests in World History. Reaktion Books, 2012.

Morgan, David. The Mongols. 2nd ed., Blackwell Publishing, 2007.

Weatherford, Jack. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. Crown, 2004.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt, 1973.

Chomsky, Noam. Who Rules the World? Metropolitan Books, 2016.

Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? Seven Stories Press, 2003.

Giroux, Henry A. The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America's Disimagination Machine. City Lights Books, 2014.

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Picador, 2007.

Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books, 2010.

Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. Harper Perennial, 2005.