[badminton1]

Because the Mongols destroyed them after they refused to pay tribute.

Knowledge is passed generation to generation, and if you interrupt that, it's hard to recover from. Mongols destroyed everything, including libraries and killed most scholars.

That void was filled with tribes that were not secular.

[asianthrowaway]

I think that's wholly simplistic. What about regions who beat off the Mongols, such as the Mameluks? Or people who weren't that affected, like the Ottomans.

For that matter, I'd be interested in your theory as to why the Ottoman empire failed to develop any intellectual tradition of note, while Europe was soaring.

Russians greatly suffered under the mongols but eventually became a superpower. China lost half its population but rebounded pretty quickly.

Edit: "Mongols destroyed libraries" afaik, they destroyed the library of Baghdad but that's about it.

Also, the Mongols were not the only ones to destroy libraries. Iirc the library of Cordoba, the biggest and most advanced of its time, was burned down by the Caliph because it was deemed too un-islamic.

[badminton1]

I am talking about the Siege of Baghdad (1258). You are talking about a period of time after the death of Kublai Khan (1294) where the Mongols were already divided into smaller regions.

Anyways, if you want to be a eurocentric revisionist, continue doing so. I don't care.

If you study the Latin translations of the 12th century you will see how significant part of the Reinassance could be attributed to previous civilizations.

[asianthrowaway]

Yeah, I understood you were talking about the Siege of Baghdad. If you think that the destruction of a single city is the reason for the middle east lagging behind the west over several centuries, then I reiterate what I said before, you have an extremely simplistic view of history. I don't consider myself particularly eurocentric, but you seem to be a middle eastern chauvinist. Projection, maybe?

Where did I deny that Europeans built on previous advances by other people? It's obvious they didn't exist in a vacuum. But europeans were the first to systematize the production and diffusion of knowledge. In a sense they invented what you could call the mass intellectual tradition.