I was wondering...

[Meneldil]

lol, this topic is full of clichés about the mongols and Ghengis Khan.

It's a common idea that Mongols were a bunch of barbarians who did nothing to civilisation except burning cities, killing people and so on, but that's totally untrue.

In fact, when they first heard about Ghengis Khan, europeans thought he was a foreign christian prince who would help them defeating the muslims.
During the 13th and 14th century, mongols khanates (sp?) were far more advanced than many european countries, mixing all sort of cultures (from China, India, Middle-east). Just read a translation of Marco Polo's travel to Karakorum (sp), and you'll understand that mongols were at least as civilised as christians and muslims (in fact, mongols kinda thought they were more civilised than others)
I seriously doubt Ghengis Khan/mongols hindered western culture as much as you seem to be thinking. Still nowadays, we can't say if mongols' impact on Russia was neither negative nor positive.

I don't want to say that they haven't done horrible things, but only that our opinion about mongols is quite biased, probably because back during this time, people used to call "barbarian" everything they didn't understand.