Steppe

Hello and welcome to the Russian Empire History Podcast, the history of all the peoples of the Russian Empire.

I'm your host, JP Bristow, and this is Season One, The Forest, The Steppe, and the Birth of the Russian Empire.

Episode 126, The Thirteen Years' War.

Before we begin, a quick thank you to new boyars Kenny and Sean, and everybody supporting the podcast on any other platform.

The ship's sail catches the wind, and the waters of the Gulf open before him, carrying Ibn Battuta onward once more into the unwritten pages of his own extraordinary life.

Chapter five: The Steppes and the Golden Horde, thirteen thirty-two to thirteen thirty-three.

The road north out of Ladikea does not announce itself as a turning point.

It looks at first like any other track worn into the earth by centuries of hooves and sandals, climbing gently away from the Mediterranean coast toward hills still green with the last of the spring rain.

He is appointed, it seems, to a position as a judge in Morocco, drawing on the legal training that first equipped him for travel three decades earlier.

The young scholar who left Tangier intending to study law under distinguished teachers has, by a circuitous route spanning most of the known world, arrived finally at the kind of settled scholarly and judicial life that might have been his had he never left home at all.

Except that he arrives at it having seen everything that lies between Tangier and the shores of China, everything between the Volga Steppes and the Niger River, a breadth of experience that no other judge in Morocco, or perhaps anywhere in the Muslim world, could claim.

What must these final years have felt like for a man built by circumstance and temperament into an instrument of almost perpetual motion? There is a particular kind of stillness that settles over a life once its great work is finished.

In this podcast, we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in, around, and about the Asia-Pacific region.

Winston Churchill famously called Russia, quote, "A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." But what if this riddle is partly of our own making, the product of a habit of only looking west for answers? Michael Gorokhovsky today argues that to understand Russia, we should look east to the steppe and the empires it shaped.

Michael's new book, The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts, sets Russia beside the Ottoman, Persian, and Mughal Empires in order to uncover the things that connect them.

Universal monarchy, reliance on outsider elites, law in the service of the state.

From the Mongol conquest to Putin's Russia, the steppe ends up explaining more than we'd expect it to.

Michael is a professor of history at Yale University in Chicago.

He is the author most recently of Russia's Twentieth Century: A Journey in One Hundred Histories and Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500 to 1800.

So Michael, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

I don't know.

Mm-hmm.

Steppes are kind of dry.

I was thinking that too.

Yeah.

Hello and welcome to the Russian Empire History Podcast: the history of all the peoples of the Russian Empire.

I'm your host, J.P. Bristow, and this is Season 1: The Forest, the Steppe, and the Birth of the Russian Empire.

Episode 125: Prussia Joins Poland.

Before we get to war between Moscow and Lithuania, we need to catch up on what has been happening in Lithuania since Casimir became Grand Duke of Lithuania and King of Poland.

...

the Steppes are inhospitable, where will they find food there, you know?

He's got a bad angle, but on the flip side, I feel like if the Dead King is invading Praes, then that means Praes is all that's left.

I don't, I don't think he's saying, "Uh, let me just scooch on by you to Procer." [laughs]

Even a marked Slavic character is evident in places which is only natural.

As is well known, Tchaikovsky's Overture Fantasy, Romeo and Juliet, is often dubbed Romeo and Juliet of the Steppes.

A first mention of the Souvenir occurs in a letter to Ippolitov Ivanov, dated May 5, 1890, written shortly after Tchaikovsky's return from abroad.

It is quoted by his brother Modest, My visit brought forth good fruit.