Good point about the colonization. One thing I was surprised to learn when I researched the conquistadors stuff is that Muslim merchants, fleets, armies, and rulers had penetrated into India, Indonesia, all around the indian ocean, and even into China I think by the time the Portuguese showed up. Malacca was ruled by a Muslim for example. And yeah, no doubt this led to a lot of resources flowing back towards the middle east.
How much damage did the Mongols do to Muslim science? My vague guess would be, quite a lot? Perhaps this is also relevant.
How much damage did the Mongols do to Muslim science? My vague guess would be, quite a lot? Perhaps this is also relevant.
Both the capture of Cordoba in 1236 and the capture of Baghdad in 1258 seem relevant to me; both were home to some of the aforementioned Muslim paragons of science, and we don’t see any further paragons after that period (until the Timurid Renaissance, which I view as mostly having regional paragons instead of global ones, and so was more akin to the Carolingian Renaissance in terms of broader historical impact than the European one).
This is perhaps more evidence for the “centralization decreases robustness to disruption” theory; the House of Wisdom in particular was an attempt to gather all of the intellectual wealth of the empire into one place, which then meant that if it’s burned down and the scholars murdered, there’s not much to start over from.
Good point about the colonization. One thing I was surprised to learn when I researched the conquistadors stuff is that Muslim merchants, fleets, armies, and rulers had penetrated into India, Indonesia, all around the indian ocean, and even into China I think by the time the Portuguese showed up. Malacca was ruled by a Muslim for example. And yeah, no doubt this led to a lot of resources flowing back towards the middle east.
How much damage did the Mongols do to Muslim science? My vague guess would be, quite a lot? Perhaps this is also relevant.
Both the capture of Cordoba in 1236 and the capture of Baghdad in 1258 seem relevant to me; both were home to some of the aforementioned Muslim paragons of science, and we don’t see any further paragons after that period (until the Timurid Renaissance, which I view as mostly having regional paragons instead of global ones, and so was more akin to the Carolingian Renaissance in terms of broader historical impact than the European one).
This is perhaps more evidence for the “centralization decreases robustness to disruption” theory; the House of Wisdom in particular was an attempt to gather all of the intellectual wealth of the empire into one place, which then meant that if it’s burned down and the scholars murdered, there’s not much to start over from.