The Mongols Helped Shift the Global Center of Power From the Middle East to Europe
Perhaps the Mongols’ greatest and longest lasting impact was their role in shifting the global balance of power from the Islamic world to the West. The 1200s started well for the Islamic world. The Crusaders had been defeated and Jerusalem recently recovered, much of the Arab Middle East was unified in the Ayubbid Dynasty, and a powerful Khwarezmian Empire had emerged in Persia and Central Asia.
The latter region was the Islamic world’s center of gravity at the time, and it was flourishing culturally and economically. Difficult to imagine, looking at today’s bleak and backwards Stans, stretching from the former Soviet Islamic republics to the Indian Ocean. However, that region was once the world’s most prosperous, with an unrivaled economic, intellectual, and cultural scene. It was the equivalent of today’s California and New York, plus Detroit in Henry Ford’s day, all rolled into one.
The first and immediate consequence of the Mongol conquest was a population collapse in that Islamic heartland. Throughout much of the region, the Mongols engaged in wanton massacres, even genocide. Many of those not killed outright starved to death in the howling wastelands left in the conquerors’ wake. Many more, weakened by hunger, fell prey to the waves of epidemic diseases the swept the Medieval world after the Mongols brought the far flung parts of Eurasia into regular contact for the first time. The Black Death did only strike Europe: it began in China, and swept through the Islamic world. There, it encountered a population eking a living in a devastated landscape, surrounded by destroyed infrastructure.
Another impact was economic. The Islamic lands conquered by the Mongols had been economically vibrant, but that vibrancy depended upon a sophisticated infrastructure which the Mongols destroyed. The economic foundation, both agricultural and urban, depended upon a network of underground aqueducts known as qanats. That network transported water over long distances for use in agriculture and to satisfy the needs of the region’s teeming cities. The network required regular maintenance and upkeep by skilled workers and engineers, paid for and supervised by a governmental bureaucracy that understood the work’s importance.
During the Mongol invasions, many of the qanats were deliberately destroyed, and many of the skilled workers who maintained the water network were either killed, enslaved and taken prisoner, or fled. The Mongol conquerors had little understanding of or interest in infrastructure projects such as the qanat network. So the new rulers invested little time, effort, and resources, into restoring the underground water system. By the time Mongol rule came to an end centuries later, most of the qanats had been ruined, the engineering and artisan skill sets to restore them to their heyday had been forgotten, and new economic patterns had been established.
Another impact was cultural. The new Mongol rulers differed greatly from their predecessors. They spoke a different language, hailed from a very different culture, and possessed a world view alien to their subjects. In the centuries preceding the Mongol conquest, the Persian parts of the Islamic world had experienced a great cultural flowering. With the patronage of discerning Persian speaking rulers, literature and poetry reached a peak with figures such as Ferdowsi, who composed Persia’s national epic, the Shah Namah.
Mongol rulers, who spoke no Persian, or learned it only haltingly, had little interest in patronizing Persian poets and men of letters. And when they did, they seldom knew enough of the language’s nuance and linguistic intricacy to discern excellence from schlock. As a result, Persian culture went into a centuries long decline. It was an experience similar to that of the Arabs, who flourished for centuries, only to go into a cultural decline after they came to be dominated by Turks who neither understood nor cared much for their arts and literature.
The region never recovered from the adverse impacts of the Mongol invasion. By the time the locals shook off the Mongol yoke, or absorbed and assimilated their conquerors, centuries had passed. During that time, Western Europe had experienced the Renaissance, was beginning the Age of Discovery and Exploration – and taking the first steps towards eventual global hegemony. The Islamic world never caught up.