Qaidu was raised in Chinggis Khan’s camp, and after Ogedai Khaan he served in Mongke Khaan’s retinue. After him, he was with Ariq Boke, conspiring and amking efforts to elevate him to the khanate. When Ariq Boke went before Kublai Khaan and submitted to him, Qaidu was wary of Kublai Khaan because it was the law that no creature should change the Khaan’s command or decree, and any who did would be branded as criminals. He had transgressed the law and rebelled, and from that time until present, ona account of his rebellion, many Mongols and Tajiks have been annhilated, and flourishing land has been devastated.”       So our oft-cited friend Rashid al-Din describes, rather negatively, his contemporary Qaidu, Khan of the house of Ogedai and master of Central Asia in the late thirteenth century. Qaidu is best known for his daughter Qutulun, the wrestler-princess, his long resistance against his cousin Kublai, Great Khan of the Yuan Dynasty, and enjoys a popular image as a spirited defender of traditional Mongolian culture- or, for writers like Rashid al-Din, an image of little more than a brigand harassing settled regions. To explore Kublai’s failed attempts to exert power over the western half of the Mongol Empire, we will look at the long life of Qaidu, master of the uluses of Ogedai and Chagatai. I’m your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.   While Kublai Khan overcame his brother Ariq Boke to become Khan of Khans in 1264, that was not the end of his troubles from his Mongolian kinsmen. Many refused to recognize Kublai’s authority, or actively took up arms against him, most famously Qaidu, a grandson of Ogedai Khan who led a 40 year campaign of resistance against Kublai Khan. While most famous for stories of his warrior daughter Qutulun and for his own personal sternness and military ability, Qaidu’s reign has often been misportrayed as an effort to seize the title of the Great Khan. His main focus however, was securing the position of the descendants of Ogedai within a fragmenting Mongol Empire.       Chinggis Khan had granted parts of eastern Kazakhstan, Xinjiang and western Mongolia as personal ulus, or territory, to his son Ogedai, serving as a base for Ogedai’s family until the 1250s. The Toluid Revolution, which by now you should know very well, saw the seizure of the throne by the sons of Tolui, away from the line of Ogedai following the death of the final Ogedeid Great Khan, Guyuk, in 1248. After Tolui’s eldest son Mongke became Khan in 1251, he discovered an alleged conspiracy against him by Ogedai’s family. This served as pretext for a purge of the Ogedaids, killing many and confiscating their lands and armies, effectively dissolving the Ogedaid ulus, as explained back in episode 21 of this series. Those few who survived, such as the young Qaidu, were granted distant lands to appease them but which were too poor to serve as a base for resistance. Born only around 1235 or 6, Qaidu was only just entering manhood when Mongke carried out his purges, deemed too young to be a threat. In proper Ogedeid fashion Qaidu’s father, Ogedai’s fifth son Qashi, drank himself to an early death shortly before Qaidu’s birth, leaving Qaidu’s early years to quietly rule over what little people, herds, pastures and towns Mongke Khaan had allotted him around Qayaliq, in what is now southern Kazakhstan. We can only imagine Qaidu’s frustration and anger, a sense that everything that was his by right had been taken from him, anger at the theft by the house of Tolui- not of the Great Khanate, which Qaidu was unlikely to have ever inherited, but of the ulus of Ogedai itself, the personal territory Chinggis Khan had granted that line of the family. One tradition from Qaidu’s earliest youth that survives, recorded by Jamal al-Qarshi, is that Ogedai Khaan once held the young boy and was so impressed with the 5 year old, that he stated Qaidu would one day succeed him and ordered his every need to be provided for. Even if the