Hell, at that point, even the Eastern Roman Empire was struggling.
And eventually the doom and gloom that came afterwards was overcome fully with new civilizations, countries, etc... And by the 1800s the Western world and the European countries were so far ahead of anyone else that it's silly to even compare them to the rest of the world at that point in history in regards to reason, law, economy flow, technology, science/math, music, theater, culture, ideas, etc.
By your logic I could point out that China before the mid-point of last century was a 99% peasant-class country full of hardship and misery, and make the argument that you are using - wiping out all their previous culture and accomplishments.
We have to look at this from the totality point-of-view.
It kind of sounds like you might be using a very geographically restricted classification.
By the year 1000 AD the Europeans had already built the most grandiose of structures that rival today’s standards, had the most extensive networks and cities, filled entire libraries with books on all manners of philosophy and science, explored all corners of the world, and so on and on.
And it wasn't until about the 1900s (about 1920-1960), when the Western World (that primarily consisted of those same groups of people) exported its knowledge and technology (via a combination of globalism/capitalism + sharing + altruism) - that started to change the subsistence living conditions for everyone else to at least something higher.
If something was not invented by the Europeans, it sure as hell was revised and improved to such a degree that you can't equate the two in any meaningful way.