Foreword to A Century of Giants

The first point most readers will notice about this volume is its size. Where the eight that preceded it all ran to 288 pages, this one is more than twenty percent larger and runs to 352. It has fourteen chapters where the earlier volumes usually had ten. It also covers a much narrower time frame, a span of one hundred years, where the time frames of all the earlier volumes, except the first and third, were much longer. Enlarging the size enlarged the cost as well as lengthening the time it took to produce the book, roughly nine months against an average seven months for five of the first six.

This was predictable. Humanity records its past in even hundred-year parcels called centuries, but what actually happens inside those neat packages is by no means evenly apportioned. As with our personal lives, where some years are almost uneventful and others bursting with change and activity, so too with history. And the sixteenth is a very eventful century indeed, when change was so explosive that we are still living with the results of it.

The fact that this explosion turned into a cosmic quarrel between Christians made the job of describing it an especially formidable challenge. Our goal is not to write a Catholic history, nor a Protestant history, but a Christian history in which both sides of the quarrel are represented as fairly as possible. In doing this, we have been greatly helped by our academic consultants. True, one Catholic academic felt we were far too influenced by the Protestant view of history, and one Protestant saw us as far too uncritically admiring of individual Catholic heroes, but with the criticisms coming from both sides, we concluded that we must be doing something right. Whether our readers agree, they will judge from the pages that follow.

My own most perceptive critic, namely the one I married sixty-one years ago, who has been editing and otherwise contributing to all these volumes, remarked rather dryly that I had personally failed to conceal either my “affection for Martin Luther” or my “fascination with the Jesuit order.” Both charges are probably accurate; she is almost always right.

The only hero I consciously cherished, however, was the emperor Charles V, whose story leads the volume. For it was Charles, and sometimes Charles alone, who perceived what most others did not—namely, that the greatest threat to Rome was not Protestantism, and the greatest threat to Protestantism was not Rome. Both of them arguably were about to be destroyed by the Muslim Turks, who were moving down upon them with the most technologically advanced military machine in the world. To meet this threat, Charles struggled vainly to resolve the Catholic-Protestant conflict, even to the point of fighting wars, first against the Protestants and later against the papacy (although he himself was a devout Catholic). In the end his efforts at reconciliation did not succeed, and he died a failure in his own eyes, quite possibly even foreseeing the hideous catastrophe this conflict between Christians would inflict upon Germany in the coming seventeenth century.

But against the Turks the emperor was more successful. He united Catholics and Protestants long enough to save Vienna, though in the next century the Muslims would be back again at the city’s gates. Moreover, at the Battle of Lepanto on the Mediterranean, thirteen years after Charles’s death, his illegitimate son, the famous Don Juan of Austria, ended for good the threat of a massive seaborne Turkish invasion of southern Europe. This did not end the threat of terrorism, however. For another two hundred years and more, Muslim pirates wrought slaughter upon the coastal towns of Christian Europe, enslaving the marketable population and killing anyone else they could.

All of which might prove instructive to Christians facing renewed Muslim terrorism of another kind in our present century. For to extract from the past what may apply to the present is one of the things that history is about.

Ted Byfield