For the final episode on the Mongol Empire, we take you, our dear listeners, in a quick survey of the final years of Chinggisid rule in Mongolia, after the Yuan Dynasty was forced from China in 1368, until the Manchu conquests in the seventeenth century. This will help bridge the gap with the next series in this podcast, and serve as an afterword to this season.  I’m your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.   We detailed in previous episodes the final years of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty in China, which culminated with Töghön Temür Khaan fleeing his capital of Dadu to Mongolia. With the Yuan rulers ousted, the new Ming Dynasty, ruled by the Chinese warlord Zhu Yuanzhang now styled the Hongwu Emperor, seized Dadu. Dadu was renamed to Beiping, “northern peace,” and would soon to Beijing, “northern capital.” The Ming, under its early emperors, was a highly militarized state with what’s often described as an oppressively strong government. The Hongwu Emperor, though recognizing that the Mongols had had the Mandate of Heaven, had settled on one key flaw which allowed corruption and poor governance to settle in. That is, that the Yuan Khans simply did not have enough authority within their government, which had been augmented by Töghön Temür Khaan’s debauchery. The lords of the Yuan state simply had too much more power in comparison to the Yuan Emperor. The Ming solution to that, was to, at least in early years of the dynasty, ensure there were few checks on the might of the Ming Emperor. This would lead to intense control over society and its own oppression, but that’s another matter.       The flight of the Yuan rulers back into the steppe was neither the end of the Yuan, nor of the Mongol threat, and the Ming knew this. The flight of 1368, and Töghön Temür’s death in 1370, was hardly the end of war, as Ming and Yuan forces raided back and forced over the frontier repeatedly. The Ming led continued assaults into Mongolia itself, on one occasion sacking the much reduced former Mongol capital of Qaraqorum. But the Hongwu Emperor’s forces met defeats in Mongolia in 1372, and his armies were forced back in humiliating, destructive routs. The Hongwu Emperor continued to send armies into Mongolia throughout the 1380s, but finally recognized the stalemate. He had solidified rule over China, defeated the last of Yuan holdouts, but in the steppes his armies could be drawn out, starved and crushed by the Mongols. It was better to fall back to military garrisons along the frontier to launch counter attacks, rather than waste more resources in the steppes. Frustratingly, the sons of Töghön Temür continued to claim the right to rule China, and refused to recognize that the Ming now held the Mandate of Heaven. Ming historians from this point on refer to the Yuan in Mongolia as the Northern Yuan, though the Yuan Khaans themselves saw their rule as continuing unabated.       In the early fifteenth century, the ascension of the Hongwu Emperor’s son, Zhu Di, known as the Yongle Emperor, brought renewed conflict. The Yongle Emperor personally led some of these campaigns, and when he met the Mongols in battle he was victorious, aided by the prodigious usage of gunpowder weapons. But in the final campaigns, the strong man of the Northern Yuan, a fellow named Arughtai, increasingly favoured avoiding direct engagement with the Ming entirely. The Yongle Emperor’s ambitions were thus thwarted, and the threat of starvation and isolation in the steppes forced his withdrawal. It was on one of these withdrawals in 1424 that the Yongle Empire succumbed to illness, and with him died the last skilled military emperor of the Ming.    The arrival of the Yuan nobility back to the steppe brought with it its own problems, for the sinicized elite accustomed to the finery of great Dadu found life in Mongolia difficult and unrefined. The local lords in Mongolia, having long since felt abandoned by Dadu, did not easily abide the new arrivals or