An episode of Barbarians at the Gate
As featured eagle-hunting in the banner image above, the Khitan were a proto-Mongol people from regions of present-day Mongolia and Northeast China, whose history stretches back to the 4th century. In 907 they founded the Liao Empire, one of the first expansive empires in China to establish their capital in the area around modern Beijing. Two centuries later, caught between a rising Chinese empire in the Song (960-1279) and a new power in the Northeast, the proto-Manchu Jurchen, the Liao Empire fell in 1125 and the Khitan were scattered once more across Asia. In this old episode of Barbarians at the Gate, Jeremiah Jenne and James Palmer discuss the history of the Khitans, their empire and their legacy – helped along by analogies to the Godfather trilogy and Game of Thrones:
