The Glory of Christendom

The Glory of Christendom by Warren H Carroll, 713 pages

The third volume in Carroll's History of Christendom series begins with the first Cistercian monks building a monastery in the wilderness, and ends with an Augustinian monk nailing a manifesto to a door.  In between the Kingdom of Jerusalem evaporates, the Byzantine Empire declines and falls, the great Gothic cathedrals are built, universities and hospitals are founded, the plague kills, the Church is riven by schism, and Prince Henry the Navigator and Christopher Columbus open the Age of Discovery.  Throughout appear a leaven of saints, the commanding St Bernard and the scholarly St Thomas Aquinas, the militant St Joan of Arc and the equally fierce St Catherine of Siena, and above all the towering figures of Sts Dominic and Francis.

There are definite differences between this third book and its two predecessors in the series.  Carroll replaces the abundant notes that formerly closed each chapter with terser footnotes, yet the book is half again as long as the previous volumes.  More problematically for some readers, as the series progresses it increasingly becomes a specifically Catholic Christian history and decreasingly a generically Christian history.  Carroll is no simple-minded partisan, but he does wear his Catholicism on his sleeve.  Finally, although this book is half-again as long as its predecessors, there is no room in its packed pages for anything more than the most cursory summary of artistic and philosophical developments, due to its concentration on political and hagiographical material.

This is the central book in the six volume series, not only sequentially but thematically.