Swallowed by the Russian Bear

In the 13th century, having overrun and terrorised Europe as far as Budapest, and in the process possibly bringing with them the flea which caused the Black Death, the heirs to Genghis Khan and the Golden Horde had also conquered territory to the east as far as the Korean peninsular.

The assiduous Swiss scholar and explorer Christoph Baumer chronicles the ensuing sagas of the remaining individual khanates in great detail. But by the 16th century it is clear that although a few pockets still flourished, producing impressive buildings and works of art, these erstwhile mighty nomadic clans had sunk to a point where they had disappeared from the consciousness of the outside world. Even their devastating expertise as equestrian bowmen had diminished under the overwhelming technology of firearms and cannon.

This decline changes in the late 16th century, when Russia’s territorial ambitions expanded, motivated partly by its Romanov tsars’ quest to acquire a safe warm-water port — a desire still relevant in Syria and the Horn of Africa today — but primarily by sheer greed.