How Mighty was the Khan in Middle Ages? (Quora)

Q

Was Khan the most powerful person of the middle age since he linked Europe and Asia?
https://www.quora.com/Was-Khan-the-most-powerful-person-of-the-middle-age-since-he-linked-Europe-and-Asia/answer/Hans-Georg-Lundahl

Answer requested

by Yvan Testu

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Self Employed at Writer and Composer

Answered 43m ago

No, the Khan was not “the most powerful person of the Middle Ages”, since Europe was clearly outside his jurisdiction.

He might have had the widest geographical spread of his power in the time, but before that fact could make him “more powerful than Holy Roman Emperor” or “more powerful than King of France” one would need HRE or King of France to feel his power, which they never did.

Poles did in a way, but fought him off.

In Asia for those centuries, including much which is now considered European Russia, things may be otherwise : but for that geographic era, the word Middle Ages is anyway not very meaningful.*

Your question is a bit like asking whether Alexander the Great was the mightiest person of the times of the Zhou dynasty : where he was mightiest, the chronology of the Zhou dynasty was irrelevant. Where the chronology of Zhou dynasty was relevant, he was irrelevant.

Yvan Testu

24m ago

But the History shows that an isolated Europe fall in the Dark Ages since European elite welfare has always been dependant of the trading of Chinese and Indian products namely spice, silk etc but also papyrus and paper for books that gives an important status to the man who can provide an Eurasian Pax

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Just now

“an isolated Europe fall in the Dark Ages since European elite welfare has always been dependant of the trading of Chinese and Indian products”

• Are you sure you are sober?
• Did you get all your info in Middle Ages from schoolbooks in the seventies?
• Supposing you had been right, which you are not, what has trade got to do with political power?

“but also papyrus and paper for books that gives an important status to the man who can provide an Eurasian Pax”

• Paper was perhaps initially traded, but so was very soon the secret of making it. China may have invented it, but Europeans got it from Arabs in the Crusades, well before the Khan. This means Europe was selfsufficient in paper, not relying on Asia for it.
• The Khan most certainly was not providing an Eurasian Pax : in relation to Europe he was providing either nothing (beyond safe trade routes, which were not that important) or failed attempts of conquest (and I feel like citing Jeszcze Polska nie zginela to honour those who fought him as well as later in 1920 Red Army off).

Polish National Anthem - "Jeszcze Polska Nie Zginęła" (PL/EN)
jamesblitz90 | Ajoutée le** 22 nov. 2011
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdYCbAjgfh4

Footnotes

* Or at least "Middle Ages" is a very different kind of concept for Russia than for most of Europe, closest counterpart perhaps Spain before the Reconquest - but in Spain 1500 saw the reconquest already finished, in Russia, 1500 saw it just beginning.

** It is French and means "added on".