Vol 4 Ep 4 - The Great Seljuk Empire

1000 BCE - 1897 CE - Two kingdoms, two legacies—Ifẹ and Benin shaped West Africa’s artistic soul and political power. From sacred bronze heads to sprawling palace complexes, this episode dives into the myths, monarchs, and masterworks that defined a civilisation. Discover how div ... Show More

A look into the most recent batch of episodes about pre-colonial societies of the world and the role that AI plays in the production of the podcast. A brief explanation about the more recent slowdown in publications and some discussion about pronunciation of local names and the e ... Show More

900 - 1629 - Imagine a great city in Africa, a stone kingdom so powerful its wealth flowed across oceans. Great Zimbabwe, built by the Shona people without a single drop of mortar, was a hub of sophisticated trade. Its riches in gold and ivory connected Africa's interior to a glo ... Show More

From the steppes of Central Asia, thousands of Turkish people migrate to Anatolia and the Middle East.  These new arrivals become first the Seljuk Turks, then the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, and finally, the Osmanlis. 

After the Fall of Constantinople, the Ottomans became the most powerful dynasty in existence. But the great empire began to decline, and in the early 20th century, a leader named Talaat and a group of radical nationalists worked to remove the ineffectual sultan and restore the Ot ... Show More

The Ottoman Empire was gigantic; at one point it reached the walls of Vienna to the Persian Gulf and beyond. It was established at the end of the 13th century with its centre in what is now modern Turkey. It held swathes of Europe for centuries right up to the First World War. In ... Show More

Persia was the first great superpower. The empire built by Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes and the rest of the Achaemenids stretched from India in the east to the Mediterranean in the west, from Russia in the north to the Gulf of Oman in the south. It laid the foundation for empires of the ... Show More

The Ottoman Empire rose from humble beginnings in Anatolia to dominate a vast swathe of territory. Holy war, gaza, was a powerful driving force behind that expansion. At the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396, Ottoman holy war clashed directly with its Christian equivalent: crusading.If ... Show More

It is one of the sharper ironies of Islamic history that the clan which had led the resistance to the young religion went on to found its first dynasty. Umayyad influence swelled under the third caliph, but Mu’awiya was the one to formalize it as the foundation of a dynasty. The ... Show More

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages thr ... Show More

The most disruptive and transformative event in the Middle Ages wasn’t the Crusades, the Battle of Agincourt, or even the Black Death. It was the Mongol Conquests. Even after his death, Genghis Khan’s Mongol Empire grew to become the largest in history—four times the size of Alex ... Show More

Much of what people associate with the idea of a medieval Arab caliphate is rooted in the reign of our upcoming caliph. The foundation he laid for his dynasty is so solid that it makes the Umayyad era seem like little more than a formalized extension of the early Arab raids again ... Show More