Empire of Silver

by Conn Iggulden

Reviewed by Coral

In the two years after Genghis Khan’s death, his son and heir Ogedai has built a capital city for the nomadic empire of the Mongols. Calling the tribes to his city to swear the oath of loyalty to him, Ogedai must prepare for treachery from his older brother Chagatai.

Once sure he would be named their father’s heir, Chagatai is determined to claim the position he believes is rightfully his, even at the cost of the lives of both his younger brothers and their sons.

The Mongol empire continues to grow, as the great general Tsubodai sweeps west through Russia and Hungary. But as Tsubodai grows older, he faces subtle rebellion from Batu, the son Jochi didn’t know he had.

I enjoyed this book, even though I thought it had some of the same problems as I found in the previous books; mainly that a lot of focus seems to be on “newer” characters while some of the characters we’ve followed from the beginning get left out of the story.

A lot of time was spent with Batu and, while I’m glad he was written out of the story considering his historical importance, I felt it came at the cost of other character’s development. I felt like Kachiun and Khasar were barely in the story. Temuge’s actions at the end of the book felt like they came out of nowhere, probably because he also wasn’t in the book a lot.

I would have liked more time spent with Ogedai’s son, Guyuk. I thought a potentially interesting storyline was hinted at, but it went nowhere.

Having the story told from both sides can be interesting, but I felt like all of the non-Mongol characters that we are introduced to follow the same pattern: they arrogantly believe there is no way the Mongols can defeat them and then they end up losing to the Mongols. I think the book is too short to really delve into these characters (again as it also ends up short-changing characters we’ve been following for four books or characters who may be important later on).

The Cumans were interesting to me, mostly because I didn’t know a lot about them. I did some quick research about them afterwards and the book didn’t really seem to follow history with regards to their king at the time.

 Grade: B