Explanation: The first sentence in the passage above talks about predicting the possibility of Mongolian domination and then the rest of that paragraph backs this prediction by outlining how weak or fragmented much of the world was. So the author was suggesting that the world seemed to be ripe for conquest.
The second paragraph makes reference to ignoring the latent forces of the Arabian Desert" because Arabia would have seemed what it had been for times immemorial, the refuge of small and bickering nomadic tribes. This reinforces the idea that no one would have predicted a new, powerful empire to emerge from Arabia at that time.
