I couldn't find the book. It was one in a stack, briefly shuffled through some months ago. Encyclopedic and jacketed, it opened to a wood-cut of Muslims torturing Christian slaves. The wood-cut, the book explained, was propaganda to generate Christian support for the Crusades. Elsewhere on the page came something like: "Conflict between Islam and the West began with the Crusades and continued through centuries, not truly ending until successful U.S. action against the Barbary pirates."

The conflict between the West and Islam ended when the first U.S. Marines fought pirates along "the shores of Tripoli"? Not long ago, that would have seemed true. (As for when the conflict began, ask the dust where there used to be thriving Christian communities in North Africa and the Middle East, conquered in the first waves of Islamic expansion centuries before the Crusades.)

The Crusades failed. Expansionist Islam peaked with the great Turkish sultans in a conquered Byzantium, and Christendom, divided by nascent nationalism, weakened by corruption, and torn by the Reformation, was no match for it. But Islam nodded, lulled into complacency, until even North African piracy could be suppressed by a brand new and underpopulated democracy on the other side of the world.

...

In 1565, Luther had been dead for twenty years and the Reformation had taken root. Queen Elizabeth (heresiarch) ruled England. As the Sultan mustered his forces in Constantinople, Shakespeare turned one. The Spanish Inquisition was nearly one hundred, and the Templars had long ago been wiped out in France.

Willocks has plenty to work with on every level: social, political, and religious. Drawing on all of these, he gives us Matthias Tannhauser. Born a Christian Saxon to a blacksmith father, he is taken by Turks at the age of twelve. The scene, as disturbing as any in the book, is in the prologue. The young Matthias is attempting to forge his first dagger when the mercenaries come. They kill his sisters and he watches them ...

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