4. Genghis Khan’s Impact on the World’s Trajectory
It is possible that Genghis Khan’s greatest and longest-lasting impact was the role that the Mongol conquests initiated by him had in the shifting of the global balance of power from the Islamic world to Europe and 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 Mongols wrecked it on a massive scale.
