The Mongol Empire was the largest continuous land empire in history, forged by uniting nomadic peoples into a war machine that brought destruction and death but also laid the foundation for the modern world.

6:29events. This was the uniting of a nomadic  people who called themselves the Mongols. From their homeland far away in the steppe grasslands  of East Asia, the Mongols had fused their anarchic pastoral culture into a war machine that has had  few equals in history, and forged an empire that would stretch across much of the landmass of Asia,  the largest continuous land empire in history. In almost every land they touched, they would  bring destruction and death, fear and anguish,

7:09but in places they also laid the foundation  for our modern world. As Ibn Battuta stood in the abandoned streets of Balkh, Samarqand, and Bukhara,  he must have wondered at the unlikely story of these strange nomadic conquerors. He must have wandered  those ruined palaces and crumbled places of worship, those empty markets and dilapidated  houses, and asked himself, where had these mysterious conquerors come from? What did they want,  and why had no one been able to stop them?

8:21My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to  The Fall of Civilizations Podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose  to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask, what did they have in  common? What led to their fall, and what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who  witnessed the end of their world? In this episode,