You're Dead to Me - Genghis Khan (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: June 19, 2021

Greg Jenner is joined by Prof Peter Frankopan and comedian Phil Wang in the 12th century to meet one of the most feared conquerors in world history, Genghis Khan. We find out why silk shirts weren’t just a fashion choice and how kittens were apparently used as weapons as Genghis Khan established the largest land empire in history.

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Hello, Greg here. Just popping in to say that this is a radio edit of the episode, which means it's a bit shorter and some of the naughty stuff has been removed, so it's a bit more appropriate for family listening. If you want to hear the full length versions, scroll down to the original episode further back in our feed. Thanks very much. Enjoy the show. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, a history podcast for everyone. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. I'm the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories and you might have heard my other podcast, Homeschool History, but that one's for the kids. How does this one work? Well, every time I'm the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories, and you might have heard my other podcast, Homeschool History,

but that one's for the kids. How does this one work? Well, every time I'm joined by a clever clogs and a joke machine for a hilarious history lesson. And today we are setting the historical record straight and one of the most famous, feared and famously fearless conquerors in world history, Genghis Khan. And to help me do that, I'm joined by two very special guests.

In History Corner, he's a globetrotting rock star of history. He's Professor of Global History at the University of Oxford, Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. And he's the author of the multiple million selling books, The Silk Roads and The New Silk Roads. It is the wonderful Professor Peter Frankopan. Hi Peter, how are you? Lovely to be joining you. And in Comedy Corner, he's an award-winning comedian, a former president of the prestigious Cambridge Footlights. You'll have seen him on Live at the Apollo, Would I Lie to You?, Drunk History and the hilarious Taskmaster series.

It's the brilliant Phil Wang. Hi. Did you like history at school? Is it one of those subjects you're like, oh, do I have to? My early school years were in Malaysia. And in Malaysia, we kind of only learned Malaysian history, which is about 50 years old. So I came out of the Malaysian school system with a real historical ignorance. Did you do Genghis Khan at all? Did you do Mongolian or Chinese history?

Nope. No, no, no. So you are starting from zero here. Pretty much all I know about the Mongols is their involvement in Medieval 2 Total War for the PC. Yep, that's a good game. Great game. The Mongols are when the game gets difficult. So I get a bit scared of the Mongols, which I guess is their intention. Whenever the Mongols come up, I do get a pang of fear, which was always their specialty.

That's very on brand, and we're going to get to that later on. So I'm glad to hear that, actually, Phil. Thank you very much. So what do you know? This is where I have a crack at guessing what you at home might know about today's subject. And I'm hoping you've heard of Genghis Khan, or is it Chinggis Khan? I think that's probably how we're meant to pronounce it. You might know that he was the founder of the Mongol Empire, the largest contiguous land empire ever known, clocked in at 9 million square miles, which is arguably too many miles. You're probably thinking that Genghis or Chinggis was a ruthless killer and conqueror, which is certainly how he's portrayed in pop culture. He's been played on screen by John Wayne,

bit weird. Omar Sharif, slightly less weird. In 2007, there's a film called Mongols starring the Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano. He also pops up as a skateboarding baseball bat wielding troublemaker in the time travel classic Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. That's the best one for me, I think. If you're into historical fiction, you might have read about him in Con Iggleton's Conqueror books. And as Phil has mentioned, you can play him in various games. Age of Empires II, Civilization, Total War.

He certainly gets around in pop culture almost as much as he got around in 13th century Eurasia. But what do we need to know about the man himself? And is it all true? Let's find out. Professor Peter, Genghis Khan was not called Genghis Khan when he was born. And he was born into the Mongol tribe, which at the time was not a great world power. So can we mingle with the Mongols? Who were they when he was born?

And what was his name? Well, so going back to 3000 years, the steppe belt that stretches from roughly the northern lip of the Black Sea right the way across Central Asia, across the Mongolian plains, and ultimately to the Pacific, has been inhabited by lots of different tribes. And those tribes typically look after their animals, things like sheep, of course, but above all horses, and they tend to be nomadic migrants. And there are lots and lots of different tribes who are milling around. They sometimes conquer each other, sometimes they collaborate with each other, but they mainly go about minding their own business, working out where they can find markets for their produce,

and also avoiding the things that kill them, like disease, and adapting to climate change. So Herodotus, writing about steppe nomads 2,500 years ago, calls them the greatest survivors in history because they have to get on with things. But by the time that Genghis Khan is born, Temüjin is born, they are small bit part players because there are lots of small bit part players. We think he's born about the year 1160, give or take a couple of years. And as you say, Peter, he's called Temujin. Yeah, which means Smith. Oh, really?

Or blacksmith or something like that. Sort of fairly inauspicious. And in fact, he's given that name because the day that he's born, his father captures a Tatar. The Tatars are the kind of the bigger dominant tribe in Eastern Mongolia at that time. And his father captures a guy who's called Temujin. And in the steppe world, and typically with the Mongols, when you beat someone, you take everything from them. You take their goods, you take their children, you take their horses, you take their clothes, and you take their names. Phil, is the same in comedy if you defeat someone in a in a joke battle do you then get to have their entire set yeah yeah officially

my name now is ed gamble because of our first rose battle it doesn't suit me but uh rules are rules what are steps i've the steps we keep talking about ascendancy and steps? And all I'm picturing is Genghis Khan walking up some huge steps. They're a pop band, Phil. Yeah. So the steppe lands are the flat rolling plains that are unpunctuated by mountains. There are important rivers like the Oxus or the Jakarta, the Sir Darya and Amidarya. But the flat rolling lands that have very few even trees on them are grazing areas stretched for thousands and thousands and thousands of miles. And we know all this stuff because of a lovely document. It's called The Secret History of the Mongols.

Really interesting text because it's perhaps the most important in terms of Mongolian history. It tells us, Peter, that he was born with a lucky omen. Actually, Phil, do you want to guess what the lucky omen was? He came out of the womb clutching something in his little baby hand. What do you think it was? Like a four-leaf clover or something, or a rabbit's foot. It was a blood clot, which, you know, I wouldn't say it's particularly lucky. But yeah, that apparently was propitious and was a good sign. And it also has some Mongolian myths as well, doesn't it?

So the first Mongol supposed to be descended from a fallow deer and a blue-grey wolf. That sounds to us totally crazy. But then we think about Rome and Romulus and Remus being fed and brought up by a she-wolf and the wolf being the symbol of Rome. So it's not that unusual. But then the secret history tells us about how Genghis Khan's ancestors went through 11 generations, that one of his female ancestors or great grandmothers was abandoned by her family. And then one night she was minding her own business in her felt tent

and a glowing supernatural man came through the smoke hole in the top and lo and behold, a few months later, she had three children. This is familiar. I mean, this is very much like the Immaculate it just sounds like centuries of unfaithful people trying to come up with crazy stories as to how they got pregnant all of a sudden it was a supernatural glowing man and then bam kids he came in through the uh chimney phil what animal would you say you were descended from you know those very ugly deep sea fish that only come up after a tsunami? They all look surprised to be out of the water. I mean, a group probably am descended from them.

Maybe we all are. Apparently those blobfish, what I gather is that they don't actually look like that. It's the pressure that's placed on them when they get brought up. But actually in their own environment, like most people in the dark, they look alright. That's my excuse too. I look like this because of the pressure. That's my excuse too. I look like this because of the pressure.

So Phil, when Temujin is growing up a little bit, there is a bit of family discord with his brother. Do you want to guess what happens? So he fell out with his brother after a game of Monopoly or something. Fell out is probably right. I mean, it gets a bit worse than fall out. Oh, did he kill him and his heart fell out of his body? He killed him. He certainly certainly did it was an argument over a fish which um hey a blobfish i'm telling you it's the pressure no they already look like

that no this was dinner wasn't it peter the story goes that they have a massive argument and possibly he kills his brother because of the argument but anyway we know that he seems to be taken captive and is enslaved for at least some time yeah so he he is taken by a rival tribe the taishid clan but he gets released somehow and then he gets himself a nice wife when he's about 16 years old and she was called borta and then borta the wife gets kidnapped so he now has to go on a bit liam neeson taken type mission to get her back at this point was temujin like maybe it's me maybe i'm the common factor here this is all this moment is a definitive one i mean how one builds

the profile of someone who we have so few written records for it is a kind of make or break moment his wife is kidnapped she's held in captivity for something like eight months. She comes back pregnant. Temujin rides out to go and find her. And the story goes in the darkness, she recognizes the bridle and the tether and the reins of his horse. So she can tell that it's him without him speaking. But she's pretty cool, Berta. So later on in her life, she's crowned as the Grand Empress alongside him. She plays a pretty active role in decision making, so far as we can tell, and in keeping the show on the road. So Temujin has got to get her back because if he doesn't, then his status, his profile, his humiliation is complete. So he does start to become a slightly different person. And he adopts the baby as well. And he names the child Yoki or Joki.

He's been helped in his little mission by a couple of buddies, Togril and Jamukha. These are his blood brothers. These are his best friends. And then they end up killing each other. I mean, it goes a bit wrong, doesn't it? Also sounds like just because he's adopted someone doesn't mean he won't kill them at some point later on.

Yeah, you're not committing to anything in Mongolian times, are you really? It's a short-term contract. One of the great skills that the Mongols have is you tend not to be able to dominate and hold an empire together if you're always ruthless and always killing. You might want to do it selectively, but it's much more important to be bringing people inside your felt tent than leaving bodies strewn outside. Yeah, I was just about to say, Peter, the next thing in my script here is that he then wiped out the tatas he kind of he turned up and went um no you don't get to live anymore i mean he lets the women and children live modern guy any man taller than the linchpin of an ox cart he killed do you reckon a lot of like the older men were sort of hunching

and trying to get below the linchpin of a... It's like going on a roller coaster. You have to be this short to ride the rest of your life. Genghis Khan is a title. So it means universal leader, leader of everything. So he's now reached the stage where he's leading men, he's leading armies. He's taken on the Tatars and he's waved Tatar to them. They're now part of his wider empire. He's getting bigger.

He's got more troops. He's got more land. And so he now has to become an administrator. Is it also that he likes meritocracy? He likes to promote talented people rather than who your dad was. The most important prerequisite is loyalty. In a second instance, it's your efficiency to be able to deliver what it is that the great Khan tells you and what he needs. Step empires are all built on the need to acquire more goods

so you can distribute and reward more. So he needs to have around him a substantial retinue that he can rely on at all costs. And so becoming a member of that retinue is, in the first instance, are you related to him? In the second, are you one of his original tribes, the Mongols? But then there's a much more complicated calibration there of making sure that all these other tribes that you're bringing in

aren't going to either regroup and challenge you, but that they will respect and make sure that you are unchallenged. And he has that bodyguard, which we call the Keshig. You know, K-E-S-H-I-G. The Keshig's castle. Not Takeshi's castle. That's how the Mongols remained undefeated. All their enemies just kept hitting big rubber balls

and falling into bodies of water. Keshig is the name of the elite bodyguards. And as I understand it, Peter, some of those men in the bodyguards were sort of hostages. They were kind of the brothers of important men. There's a process of loyalty, but also I could kill your family members if they stab me, if they betray me. The bodyguard sounds a little bit too formal. It sounds a bit like they're all muscled up and they're kind of shadowing and looking after them. But the Kesheg includes

people who are cooks. It includes people who have night watch duty and things like that. Amongst those are what we might call hostages or diplomatic allies, where it's not just about keeping your enemies close. It's about showing that you matter to them. Okay, so he defeats the Tatars. He defeats the Keret tribe. He defeats Jamaka, his old best friend. By 1206, he's like that bloke in the gym who never skips leg day. He is now the step master. And this is when he receives his new name of Genghis Khan. He is the leader of everything, which means that realistically, he now needs to be conquering the big powers. And the big power in the area is China, presumably. But China at the time is not just a single nation of China. It's a few kingdoms. is the Xia, the Western Xia, which is in the northern part of China. To get there, he has to march across the Gobi Desert, which is no mean feat. So it's a bit of a commute.

But he turns up and he spends two years doing research. Phil, this is someone who's putting together a booklet. He's a nerd. A murderous nerd. He's a nerderer. He's scouting the city of Volohai and he finally makes his move in 1209 he conquers the city of volohai with cute birdies and fluffy kittens phil i'm gonna ask you to guess how he does this does he build like a just a mountain of dead birds and cats and he climbs over them over the wall and then someone's like you could have just used a ladder but he's like yeah there's nothing scary about a ladder look at how many cats i killed it's not a bad guess he gets the cats and the birds from the city and then sets them on fire and then of course they run back to their their homes and

and set that on fire allegedly that's the story anyway i mean that's extra horrible if you've been missing your cat for a week and you look out the window, oh, Mr. Snuffles is back. Oh, my God. In fact, that doesn't sound to me entirely plausible, partly because unless I've misunderstood something, birds, even if they have cotton in flames tied to their tails, tend not to explode particularly effectively. Haven't you played Angry Birds?

I think you'll find they very much do explode. He does manage to win against larger forces. I mean, this is one of the things that's really impressive about him. And some of his tactics are really quite inventive. So one of the things the Mongols do is they feign retreat. So they pretend to run away. So people chase them and then they turn around and go, ha ha. I know this from Medieval Two Total War.

Yeah. They're so annoying. I'd just taken, what is it, Damascus. And there I am. Because I keep running away. But also you keep dying because I'm shooting at you the whole time. That's it. And it's true, isn't it, Peter? They used composite bows, they were brilliant horsemen, they were tactically ingenious. They practiced all these manoeuvres, so you can't get close to them.

The big weakness is they're not very good against fortified locations and cities. Because first you need the technology to make the walls, well, explode, maybe like the exploding cats and birds. Most importantly is that the Mongols are on horses. And so as Phil's experience in Damascus shows, they're very annoying because there's very little reward in going after them. And if you do go after them, you're in trouble. But equally, if they come and sit outside your front gates, it's an irritant. What the challenge is for the Mongols is that to be able

to take big cities, it's very technically complicated. So you need to find ways of putting pressure on the inhabitants, either psychologically, or by diverting water into cities and messing things up, or by constantly issuing threats. Because otherwise, the longer it goes on, the more the odds are in favour of the people inside the city. Cities can withstand sieges lasting one, two, three years. So when he goes to look at other cities to investigate them, the reason he's doing his research is that he knows he can't make it work unless he comes up with some magic. You've mentioned the psychological warfare of it. He does issue threats. He does terrify. He deliberately sets out to scare people so that the next city will surrender, which obviously makes his job easier.

And that sort of works for him because in the Western Xia, having annihilated Volohai, he then turns up to the next guy and says, come on, just hand it over. And the king says, you know what? Yeah, fair cop. I will pay you lots of money and I'll be a client king. I'll do whatever you say. I'll be a puppet. Leave me alone. Please don't hurt my face. And he accepts that. He's fine with that, isn't he? Yeah, well, it's not necessarily the worst equation. Typically, the question is, am I going to end up paying more tax than I was paying before? And as long as the Mongols are fiscally liberal, then you're fine. The real thing to do is to be able to convince people that you are willing to follow through. And it's quite helpful in the mongol locker to have a couple of examples where you do stack up people's heads in pyramids or towers that can be seen from 25 miles away that does concentrate the mind yeah i

mean also the reputation thing works in his favor too and we think that perhaps the mongols deliberately spread misinformation spread rumors about their own violence fake news which i guess is a bit like stepping out on stage fill as a comedian if you've got a reputation and the audience are already like oh this guy's funny they're gonna laugh quicker yeah exactly they don't know who you are absolutely i haven't actually told a joke for five years now but i have been fortunate enough to build some kind of reputation where people presume i'm funny and you're it's amazing how many minutes you can get out of that so yeah i i've actually so in 1211 genghis khan or is it chingis khan peter let's settle this chingis or genghis chingis i think he'd be comfortable with

sir but i think chingis okay all right okay we'll call him chingis khan right so he wants to conquer jin china now he's conquered x Jia. And in 1211, he's like, right, I'm going to go for the big daddy. Now, this is proper China, proper, big, huge, massive army China. And he turns up at the city of Zhongdu, which is now Beijing. And it is a massive city. And they've got an army of 170,000 men. The city is guarded by huge walls, 900 guard towers. They are no pushover he's not getting in is he how is he going to conquer this city given that his army is all based on horses and they've got massive walls what's the plan yeah so there's no real prospect of storming the city but on the

other hand the weak point of large settlements is that they need a lot of food and if you can cut off or pressure on that food supply it doesn't take very long to really ramp up the temperature inside the city. So Zhongdu, I think it's already the Jin Dynasty having troubles anyway. But then what Genghis does is he tries to win over key supporters from nearby and even from inside by promising them status and so on, which is quite a good way of doing it. And Bob's your uncle and the big cat doesn't arrive. Zhongdu falls.

Very clever. And he also promises that he'll leave them alone and takes a big payment. And then he comes back the next year and storms the city. So he'll backstab as well. His next major conquest after Jin China, I'm going to get this wrong pronunciation here, Peter, the Khwarazm Empire. Khwarazm. That's a sort of a relatively new empire in central asia

persia and afghanistan and he initially approaches the ruler muhammad shah in 1218 for a bit of a chat bit of a trade deal and it very quickly goes wrong because the mongol emissary is killed and then the next emissary is their beard to shave to humiliate them this is basically poking the bear chingis khan will now demand vengeance presumably yeah he's not a fan of the metrosexual look with the wax and the shave yeah he wants men with hair it's intended to humiliate okay in retrospect stupid thing to do but basically when you get emissaries the equation is take it or leave it muhammad shah says he'll leave it and the way to do that is not send it back politely with a nice message it's to say say, I'm not scared of you. This is how I'm going to treat your envoys. Mohammed had built this empire of his own, basically doing the same thing that Chinggis Khan had been doing himself,

by picking off smaller groups. That gives opportunities for the Mongols. So from Chinggis Khan's point of view, that expanding westwards along these trade routes, looking at some of these big cities, that it was a nice ripe fruit that was ready to go and ready to be exploited. It's put very simply by one historian. He says that when the Mongols arrived, they burnt, they killed, they plundered, and then they left. And then another one says, I wish I'd just never been born. So I'd never had to live through such traumas. So he now controls the Silk Roads, essentially, this enormous trade network that connects East Asia through to Europe. I mean, he's got a huge amount of money now. Is he buying a big fancy palace, nice big hat?

So Mongols, they were very keen on bling. You showed off ostentatiously what you had. You wore silks and furs and jewels and the best horses. They're very keen on their bling, but they're very keen to distribute that across all the warrior groups otherwise if the leader takes all the cash it's not sustainable and so you need to be generating wealth all the time and you've got one shot with conquest but then after that you need to be galvanizing you need to be encouraging trade you need to be stimulating and normally if you murder people who come in step one foot inside your lands they don't want to come back when all you kill them phil have you got any silk shirts yeah yeah every single one a mistake i don't know why i bought them i don't know to come back until you kill them. Phil, have you got any silk shirts? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every single one a mistake.

I don't know why I bought them. I don't know who I thought I was. I just look flat out divorced when I put it on. I don't know who I thought I was. I'm sure you look that way. It feels nice. It does feel nice. But also, there's a hidden advantage.

Silk is a sort of armour, certainly on the battlefield. The remarkable thing about it is it's incredibly strong. And if you are hit by an arrow on the battlefield and you're wearing a silk shirt, the arrow might puncture your body, but the silk shirt doesn't break. So you can pull the arrow out by pulling the silk shirt away from your body

and it pulls the arrow out from within you without snapping or leaving bigger puncture wounds. It's rather clever. It's rather good. So if you were going through a midlife crisis in the Mongol days, you actually stood a better chance of surviving an arrow. We've talked about Genghis Khan as the brilliant strategist. He did have a pretty brutal, ruthless streak in him. So the final part of the story for Genghis Khan, Peter, is that he feels betrayed by the Xia and the Jin. He feels like the people back in China

that he sort of left behind, you know, they're not towing the line. So he returns to China to be much more brutal this time. And he wipes out entire towns, entire villages, entire cities. In total, Genghis Khan is said to have wiped out 40 million people during his career, which is so extraordinary that scientists have posited a theory that global warming slowed down by 700 million tons of carbon during his reign so he was an eco-friendly mass murderer basically he's greta thunberg i think his tactics were slightly different to greta for now i doubt she's going to wipe out 40 million she seems very nice so. So these numbers of 40 million, OK, I think we as historians need to be slightly boring about that

because they're high approximations. They're all to do with how people typically who are on the losing side or writing much later would say, oh, 1.75 million skulls were built up in pyramids. And that's a sort of cipher to say just a lot. And so I think we need to be, I think, cautious about putting numbers on it. And so I think we need to be, I think, cautious about putting numbers on it. And even with the climate element, the depopulation of Asia is much more

dramatic because of disease rather than because of mass murder. Even with the climate, the change to ecosystems, it's not absolutely clear that that's all to do with the fact that fewer people are around to till the fields. There are all sorts of reasons why carbon dioxide levels change and adjust. So we can correlate some of these things, but it doesn't mean there's causation. You sound like his lawyer. So in the end, Genghis Khan becomes a cropper in 1227. That's when he dies. And it's a pretty boring death. He's old. He falls off his horse. And that is the end of him. But it's not the end of the Mongol Empire. His son, his descendants carry it on and grow it. Is that because he'd put in place all of these protocols, all this system, everything sort of was able to carry on without him?

Yeah, I think it's partly to do with the sort of the great man theory that we focus on, on an individual rather than the underlying. The way in which this success takes place, it's not just about one particularly charismatic figure. You know, Chinggis Khan was obviously hugely determined, impervious to criticism and had a bad temper. But on the other hand, the structures that were put in place were very enduring. And, you know, they lasted for many, many centuries. The Mongol army is extraordinarily adaptable. It's brilliant. They're like a kind of murderous jazz band in that they can improvise, but they're also incredibly well trained. They know what they're doing. kind of murderous jazz band in that they can improvise but they're also incredibly well trained they know what they're doing and they also peter in terms of their army organization a bit like the romans they have decimal style 10 men 100 men

a thousand men 10 000 men but his legacy as a conqueror as a wiper outer of peoples of cities of towns there is something in that isn't't there? Empires are built on persecution, on violence. We look at the British Empire and transatlantic slavery, extermination of indigenous populations in North America. You look at the Spanish and Portuguese. This is how things work. One of the facts I find fascinating is Chinggis Khan, in his 25-year career, added more land to his empire than the Romans did in four centuries. to his empire than the Romans did in four centuries. The nuance window!

This leads us on to the bit of the show that I love the most, which is the nuance window. This is where our expert historian can geek out for two jingis minutes. Phil and I basically go quiet and we have a little listen. And Peter, we've already heard so much interesting stuff, but what is it that you'd like to nuance for us? Well, first, I think that it's important in the 21st century that we think about the whole of the world rather than our little corner of Europe. Historians are making great strides right now in thinking about interconnected histories. But I think that Mongol imprint has been highly negative all around the world. So in China right now, which is founded by the Mongols,

is one that's seen as a race of outsiders that come in. In Iran, likewise, the Mongols are seen as being disastrous. In Russia, too, what I suppose is striking is that the Mongols don't get judged with the same yardstick. So they are seen by us all to be significantly worse and by far the most brutal, bloody and whatever. And it's somehow because the Brits, we ended up playing cricket and, you know, having good sense of humor and recording, you know, podcasts like this, that that's somehow different. But, you know, those legacies that we talked about, I think are really important with the Mongols about how to give some kind of rehabilitation without playing down or denying the scale of violence. But, you know, that is no different to how empires always get built. And I think it's time to be more open-minded about how we think about how the Mongols work as an empire compared to how other empires work.

And to not just be looking at the gory and the dramatic and the awful things that happened. It's about, I think, trying to be more inclusive in how we think about things. And above all, to be not surprised that our ancestors, even the ones we paint in very bad light, were actually doing things sometimes better than we are today. Well, thank you so much, Peter. I mean, what I'm learning from this is that we'd probably judge the Mongols more kindly had they picked up cricket. Well, I'm afraid that's it for today. A huge thank you again to our guests in History Corner, the magnificent Professor Peter Frankopan from the University of Oxford, and in Comedy Corner, the sensational Phil Wang. And to you, lovely listener, we'll be back soon to conquer a new historical era with two different warriors by our sides. But for now, I'm off to

place a fire extinguisher by the cat flap. Bye! Just before you go, if you want to hear more history about fearsome warriors, why not check out the You're Dead to Me feed for episodes on Saladin, Boudicca or Gráinne o Máli, the Irish Pirate Queen. Or if you fancy a deeper dive into the Mongol Empire, check out the In Our Time episode on Genghis Khan or Chinggis Khan, whatever we're going to call him. All of that can be found on the BBC Sounds app. The system. A new six-part thriller from BBC Radio 4.

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If so, we may have something for you. The System. A new six-part thriller from BBC Radio 4. Available now on BBC Sounds.