
Emperor of the Seas
Kublai Khan and the Making of China
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Narrated by:
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Mark Elstob
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By:
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Jack Weatherford
About this listen
Bloomsbury presents… Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China by Jack Weatherford, read by Mark Elstob
Control the sea, and you control everything...a gripping tale of naval warfare, dynastic rivalry, and technical innovation, from the author of the classic work Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.
Genghis Khan built a formidable land empire, but he never crossed the sea. Yet by the time his grandson Kublai Khan had defeated the last vestiges of the Song empire and established the Yuan dynasty in 1279, the Mongols controlled the most powerful navy in the world. How did a nomad come to conquer China and master the sea? Based on ten years of research and a lifetime of immersion in Mongol culture and tradition, Emperor of the Seas brings this little-known story vibrantly to life.
Kublai Khan is one of history’s most fascinating characters. He brought Islamic mathematicians to his court, where they invented modern cartography and celestial measurement. He transformed the world’s largest land mass into a unified, diverse and economically progressive empire, introducing paper money. And, after bitter early setbacks, he transformed China into an outward looking sea-faring empire.
By the end of his reign, the Chinese were building and supplying remarkable ships to transport men, grain, and weapons over vast distances, of a size and dexterity that would be inconceivable in Europe for hundreds of years. Khan had come to a brilliant realization: control the sea, and you control everything.
A master storyteller with an unparalleled grasp of Mongol sources, Jack Weatherford shows how Chinese naval hegemony changed the world forever - revolutionizing world commerce and transforming tastes as far away as England and France.
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Golden Horde complete history, well done
- By Amazon Customer on 03-10-22
By: Marie Favereau
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Spice
- The 16th-Century Contest That Shaped the Modern World
- By: Roger Crowley
- Narrated by: Samuel Roukin
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Spices drove the early modern world economy, and for Europeans they represented riches on an unprecedented scale. Cloves and nutmeg could reach Europe only via a complex web of trade routes, and for decades Spanish and Portuguese explorers competed to find their elusive source. But when the Portuguese finally reached the spice islands of the Moluccas in 1511, they set in motion a fierce competition for control.
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Spice or Megellan?
- By BarbieAlaska on 06-21-24
By: Roger Crowley
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1453
- The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West
- By: Roger Crowley
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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The fall of Constantinople in 1453 signaled a shift in history and the end of the Byzantium Empire. Roger Crowley's listenable and comprehensive account of the battle between Mehmed II, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, and Constantine XI, the 57th emperor of Byzantium, illuminates the period in history that was a precursor to the current jihad between the West and the Middle East.
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A well written narrative with bizarre and biased commentary
- By Patrick D. Flynn on 08-17-17
By: Roger Crowley
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The Scythian Empire
- Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China
- By: Christopher I. Beckwith
- Narrated by: Jim Lee
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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This audiobook narrated by Jim Lee provides a rich, discovery-filled account of how a forgotten empire transformed the ancient world.
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Demystifying the mysteries of the Ancient Worlds through a common source
- By cpdb on 02-10-23
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The Mongol Storm
- Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East
- By: Nicholas Morton
- Narrated by: Nick Biadon
- Length: 12 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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For centuries, the Crusades have been central to the story of the medieval Near East, but these religious wars are only part of the region's complex history. As The Mongol Storm reveals, during the same era the Near East was utterly remade by another series of wars: the Mongol invasions. In a single generation, the Mongols conquered vast swaths of the Near East and upended the region's geopolitics. This is the definitive history of the Mongol assault on the Near East and its enduring global consequences.
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History explained and experienced
- By Bob H on 03-20-25
By: Nicholas Morton
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Empires of the Silk Road
- A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present
- By: Christopher I. Beckwith
- Narrated by: Jim Lee
- Length: 13 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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The first complete history of Central Eurasia from ancient times to the present day, Empires of the Silk Road represents a fundamental rethinking of the origins, history, and significance of this major world region. Christopher Beckwith describes the rise and fall of the great Central Eurasian empires, including those of the Scythians, Attila the Hun, the Turks and Tibetans, and Genghis Khan and the Mongols.
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A curious history of the Silk Road
- By Anonymous User on 07-14-23
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Rivers of Gold
- The Rise of the Spanish Empire, from Columbus to Magellan
- By: Hugh Thomas
- Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart
- Length: 27 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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From one of the greatest historians of the Spanish world, here is a fresh and fascinating account of Spain's early conquests in the Americas. Hugh Thomas shows Spain at the dawn of the sixteenth century as a world power on the brink of greatness. For Spain and for the world, the decision to send Christopher Columbus west was epochal—the dividing line between the medieval and the modern.
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Great sweep of history from Spain to America
- By Anonymous User on 12-31-24
By: Hugh Thomas
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The Great Mughals and Their India
- By: Dirk Collier
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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A definitive, comprehensive and engrossing chronicle of one of the greatest dynasties of the world—the Mughal—from its founder Babur to Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last of the clan the magnificent Mughal legacy is an inexhaustible source of inspiration to historians, writers, moviemakers, artists and ordinary mortals alike. Here is a fascinating and riveting saga that brings alive a spectacular bygone era—authentically and convincingly.
By: Dirk Collier
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The Scythians
- Nomad Warriors of the Steppe
- By: Barry Cunliffe
- Narrated by: Matthew Waterson
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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The Scythians were nomadic horsemen who ranged wide across the grasslands of the Asian steppe from the Altai mountains in the east to the Great Hungarian Plain in the first millennium BC. Their steppe homeland bordered on a number of sedentary states to the south and there were, inevitably, numerous interactions between the nomads and their neighbours. The Scythians fought the Persians on a number of occasions, in one battle killing their king and on another occasion driving the invading army of Darius the Great from the steppe.
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Well researched but narrator is terrible
- By John M. on 01-17-21
By: Barry Cunliffe
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Letters from a Stoic (All 124 Letters)
- By: Seneca
- Narrated by: John Winston
- Length: 25 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 BC-AD 65), also known as Seneca the Younger, was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist from the Silver Age of Latin literature. This edition of Seneca's Epistles includes all 124 of the letters in a single volume, with explanatory notes, an appendix, and an index of the names occurring in the text. The letters were written by Seneca during his retirement and sent to his friend Lucilius Junior, a procurator of Sicily.
By: Seneca
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Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood
- The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade
- By: Anthony Kaldellis
- Narrated by: Nigel Patterson
- Length: 15 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In the second half of the tenth century, Byzantium embarked on a series of spectacular conquests. By the early eleventh century, the empire was the most powerful state in the Mediterranean. Yet this imperial project came to a crashing collapse fifty years later, when political disunity, fiscal mismanagement, and defeat at the hands of the Seljuks and the Normans brought an end to Byzantine hegemony. By 1081, Byzantium's very existence was threatened.
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Very Detailed but Tedious
- By Amazon Customer on 09-06-24
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