I mean to be… uh… fair??? the Mongols didn’t quite end the Islamic Golden Age; they simply shifted it East where Muslim Central Asia thrived under Mongol rule. This would pave the way for the eventual end of the Islamic Golden Age in a butterfly effect kind of way, but I think it’s unfair to blame the Mongols for ending the Islamic Golden Age when the Timurid Renaissance was right there. It’d make more sense to blame the Ottomans for that, if anything.
While I’d love to be the “Mongols did nothing wrong” guy, the siege of Bagdad and the destruction of the house of wisdom was fucking horrid. Even in terms of strategy and whatnot, since the information in the house of wisdom could have made the empire even stronger.
Oh I’m not denying any of that. Obviously the Mongols were brutal, and the siege of Baghdad ended the Golden Age in that part of the Muslim world. What I’m saying is that decline in West Asia was matched by equal progress in Central Asia and had little to no effect on Al-Andalus, so the Golden Age was still going strong after Baghdad fell.
I mean to be… uh… fair??? the Mongols didn’t quite end the Islamic Golden Age; they simply shifted it East where Muslim Central Asia thrived under Mongol rule. This would pave the way for the eventual end of the Islamic Golden Age in a butterfly effect kind of way, but I think it’s unfair to blame the Mongols for ending the Islamic Golden Age when the Timurid Renaissance was right there. It’d make more sense to blame the Ottomans for that, if anything.
While I’d love to be the “Mongols did nothing wrong” guy, the siege of Bagdad and the destruction of the house of wisdom was fucking horrid. Even in terms of strategy and whatnot, since the information in the house of wisdom could have made the empire even stronger.
I might be biased, I learnt it from the documentary “Pleiades’ Dust” by Luc Lemay, et al
Oh I’m not denying any of that. Obviously the Mongols were brutal, and the siege of Baghdad ended the Golden Age in that part of the Muslim world. What I’m saying is that decline in West Asia was matched by equal progress in Central Asia and had little to no effect on Al-Andalus, so the Golden Age was still going strong after Baghdad fell.