Cleaving of Christendom

The Cleaving of Christendom by Warren H Carroll, 744 pages

In the fourth part of The History of Christendom, Carroll covers the period from the beginning of the Protestant Reformation to the death of Cardinal Mazarin.  These years of war and struggle saw Muslim battle Catholic, Catholic battle Protestant, and Protestant battle Protestant.  It was an era of armies and armadas.  It was the time of Martin Luther, Henry VIII, John Calvin, Good Queen Mary and Bloody Bess, France's three Henrys, Thomas and Oliver Cromwell, Charles V and Philip II, Gustavus Adolphus and his daughter Christina, Cardinal Richelieu, and two False Dmitrys.

The Cleaving of Christendom follows seamlessly in the steps of The Glory of Christendom, in ways both good and bad.  Carroll deftly interweaves multiple narrative threads to bring unity to the historical record, distilling vast amounts of information into digestible packets.  At the same time, there is a tendency to focus on the purely political elements of history - understandable when discussing Christendom in the age of cuius regio, eius religio - and Carroll's definition of Christendom includes only those areas that kept the Catholic faith.