2.44. History of the Mongols: Yuan - From Crisis to Crisis

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">After Khuiblai Khan’s death in 1294, his successors ruled over the most powerful kingdom on earth, the Yuan Dynasty, controlling all of China and Mongolia. Yet not even one hundred years after the declaration of the Yuan in 1271, the Dynasty was pushed from China, their rulers a shadow of the men Chinggis Khan and Khubilai had been.  In our first episode on the Yuan Dynasty, we take you through the first 40 years of their rule after Khubilai, and introduce you to ten Khans, from Temur Oljeitu to Toghon Temur, and the manner in which they lurched from crisis to crisis in the fourteenth century. It was an age of political chaos and bloodthirsty brothers, scheming bureacrats, overbearing mothers and misplaced Khans, and a century where every other person was seemingly named a variation of Temur. It was a period  to have strangled even the greatest of rulers and most robust of dynasties; and these were not the greatest of rulers. I’m your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Our first of ten Khans for today is Temur Oljeitu, Khubilai’s grandson and first  successor. Khubilai, as we demonstrated rather thoroughly, had outlived his chosen heir, Jinggim, as well as a plethora of other sons and grandsons. After Jinggim’s death, Khubilai had vacillated on who should succeed him. It was much more traditional Chinese custom for chosen heirs and the like, as opposed to the Mongolian method of ‘to the strongest,’ and declarations of</span> <em><span style= "font-weight: 400;">quriltais</span></em><span style= "font-weight: 400;">. Seemingly reluctantly, only in the very twilight years of his life almost a decade after Jinggim’s death, did  Khubilai move to make Temur Oljeitu, one of the late Jinggim’s younger sons, his heir. In 1293 Khubilai gave Temur Oljeitu the jade seal of the heir apparent, but had not provided  him the full titles and honorifics that Jinggim had held. Thus, when the old Khubilai finally did