Daily Medieval

Batu Khan's military successes inspired Ögedei Khan to have him invade Europe. He had already conquered the Crimean Peninsula. Spies we...

History tells stories of Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes and Kublai Khan meeting Marco Polo, but Batu Khan is a name that is less-known b...

Sorghaghtani Beki stood firm after the death of her husband: she would not re-marry into the family (as was often Mongol custom), even at t...

The youngest son of Geghis Khan, Tolui, married a Christian woman named Sorghaghtani Beki. They had similarly noble backgrounds. Sorghaghtan...

Pope Honorius III (fl.1216 - 1227), in a letter dated 20 June 1221, referred to "forces coming from the Far East to rescue the Holy Lan...

Marco Polo is known for traveling to the Far East from Europe and observing things unknown to Europeans, but there were many travelers from ...

The name "Golden Horde" for the northwestern section of the Mongolian Empire is the English translation of a borrowed phrase from ...

[ source ] The Mongols were expanding westward. Under Genghis Khan they had taken a huge chunk out of Asia, from what is now the Koreas...

Among the western Europeans who traveled eastward and wrote of the wonders of "The Orient," we have mentioned William Rubruck  ...

Marco Polo was not the only, or the first, western European to travel to the East. When Pope Innocent IV wanted to send a letter to the G...

Ögedei Khan, who never got the letter Relations between the East and West have always been strained, generally because of radically dif...