The nearly total destruction of Egypt’s trading and industrial structure, the disappearance of the Mongols from the world stage, and the withdrawal of China from the Indian Ocean created a vacuum that Europe—the last man standing, if just barely—filled only too happily. Yersinia pestis, which had helped smooth the way for the rise of Muslim power by attacking the Byzantine and Persian empires in the sixth and seventh centuries, greased the skids of Islamic decline in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
