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If our Bernard Cornwell ranking and series guide are your speed — visceral battle scenes, morally grey protagonists, real historical events treated with real research — Conn Iggulden is the next name to know. He writes the same kind of historical fiction across a wider map: Rome, the Mongol steppe, and 15th-century England. Here’s where to actually start, series by series.
The Emperor series: Julius Caesar’s Rome
Five books following Julius Caesar from childhood through his rise and assassination. This is the most Cornwell-adjacent of Iggulden’s series — if Sharpe’s Napoleonic battles are your thing, Caesar’s Gallic and civil wars will land the same way.
Emperor: The Gates of Rome (Book 1) — Check price on Amazon →
Start here, not with a “best of” pick partway through — the Emperor series is a continuous coming-of-age-to-empire arc, and Gates of Rome sets up the relationships (especially Caesar and his lifelong friend-turned-rival Brutus) that pay off across all five books.
Prefer to commit up front? The full 5-book Emperor collection →
The Khan Dynasty (Conqueror): Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire
A four-book arc spanning Genghis Khan’s rise from an exiled boy on the steppe to the founder of the largest contiguous land empire in history, continuing into his descendants’ campaigns. This is Iggulden’s most ambitious series in scope — decades and thousands of miles per book, not the tighter single-campaign focus of Emperor.
Genghis: Birth of an Empire (Book 1) — Check price on Amazon →
Genuinely start here even though the series’ UK/US book titles and numbering have shifted across editions and caused real reader confusion online — “Birth of an Empire” is the correct first chronological entry regardless of which title a given edition uses.
Conqueror: A Novel of Kublai Khan — Check price on Amazon →
Wars of the Roses: Stormbird and the fall of Lancaster
A four-book series covering the same 15th-century English civil wars that inspired much of the political maneuvering in fiction like Game of Thrones — real history, with the same appetite for betrayal and battlefield consequence.
Wars of the Roses: Stormbird (Book 1) — Check price on Amazon →
Stormbird opens with Henry VI’s fragile peace with France already cracking — less battlefield-dense than Emperor’s opening book, more court intrigue, closer in tone to reading a slow-building tragedy than a war novel, at least until the second half.
Full 4-book Wars of the Roses collection (Stormbird, Trinity, Ravenspur, Bloodline) →
Which series should you actually start with?
Coming from Sharpe or The Last Kingdom specifically for the battle scenes: Emperor. Caesar’s campaigns are the closest match in pacing and violence.
Want the biggest, most sweeping single story: the Khan Dynasty books. Nothing else on this list covers this much time and territory.
Prefer political intrigue over battlefield action, at least at first: Wars of the Roses. Stormbird rewards patience before it turns into a war series.
Related HistoryBookTales guides
- Bernard Cornwell Books Ranked: Every Series from Best to Skip
- Bernard Cornwell Series Guide: Where to Start
- Best Historical Fiction of 2026
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