Chronicles, or lengthy narratives of historical events as they unfolded, are a lost art. Throughout history, monks and court officials spent countless hours in solitude committing the past to parchment with a simple goal: to remember history in all its colorful essence, listing kings and battles, popes and treaties, empires and wars. In modern times, a more thematic history, often much narrower in scope and time, has replaced the massive chronicle. Now the age of Wikipedia and, in recent months, A.I. has allegedly diminished the value of encyclopedias and of books dense with facts. You want to know who Enea Silvio Piccolomini was? Ask Siri. Curious about Hadrian and his male lover? Claude may have a view on the sundry details.

But there is still a place for books of massive erudition. This is certainly what former newspaper publisher Conrad Black must have thought as he wrote the second of his three-volume Political and Strategic History of the World. The book is not for the faint of heart or feeble of arm. It is an imposing ocean of typography, an impressive testament to the author’s energy and learning, ranging from A.D. 14 to 1661 in 1,200 pages—and that is only Volume II.

The book begins with Tiberius, the adopted son of Augustus, and ends with the Stuart restoration in England and Scotland. In between, the reader encounters a relentless sequence of Roman emperors, barbarian tribes, the rise of Christianity, the Carolingian renewal, Byzantine decay, Mongol incursions, Ottoman sultans, and so on, until the wars of the 17th century. The focus is on events and leaders with scant attention to cultural developments. It is not an intellectual history but, as the title clearly states, a political and strategic one.

The action in Black’s history comes from the events rather than ideas. It is a refreshingly old-fashioned history in which the reader can traipse through 16 centuries of decisions regarding war and peace. The lengthy chronicle is enlivened by sparks of humor. Pope Pius II, the above-mentioned Enea Silvio Piccolomini, was “slippery as a suppository” (using Saul Bellow’s words). Hungarians will not be happy to read that early 14th-century Hungary was in a condition similar to the sheriff in the 1939 Western Destry Rides Again, a drunk who knew that he had to “choose between the bottle and the badge.” Emperor Claudius is also compared to that hungover sheriff.

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The underlying theme is Christianity. Unlike the first volume that covered all the B.C. centuries, this one can be read as a political and strategic history of Christianity as it starts from the birth of Christ under Caesar Augustus. These are Anno Domini millennia. In the several pages on Jesus’ life, Black recounts at length the relatively few events that have been described in the Gospels: Jesus’ carpentry work with his father Joseph, the gathering of his disciples, his crucifixion and death, and his (alleged, for unbelievers) resurrection and several appearances after it. Undoubtedly the power of Christianity lies in the encounter with Jesus, the Son of God, and in the belief that the Word became flesh. Black is not wrong to privilege this historical event. Without Jesus’ life on earth there would be no Christianity, and even Saint Augustine argued that history—the material existence of the world and of man in it—is how salvation occurs. Christianity is irreducibly historical because God entered time and was recorded in it.

For Black, Christianity has been a source of renewed vigor in history. He disagrees with Edward Gibbon who, in his mellifluous style, blamed Christianity for the decay of the Roman Empire: legionnaires became monks, generals became bishops, and the converted people were gazing into the city of God rather than manning the frontier. Black has none of that. The cause of the empire’s decline was the Romans themselves who did not accept Christianity as a font of social order. In fact, the mistake of the emperors was that they did not fully embrace Christianity earlier, rejecting dead pagan cults that carried little, if any, appeal. Christianity was, contra Gibbon, a powerful force “mobilizing human souls for its defense against armed and dangerous massed heathens.” That phrasing alone will not win Black much favor in today’s academia, where it is considered inappropriate to call somebody a barbarian much less a heathen. And the argument will upset Gibbon’s many fans. But Black is right, Gibbon and modern academia wrong.

Black is unapologetic, too, about the superiority of Christian civilization, especially over the uncivilized heathens flowing from the Asiatic plains into the Roman Empire from the 4th century on. Similarly, the later Ottoman Empire was “an essentially barbaric state” that ruled from Asia Minor to the Adriatic. If you’re in doubt, ask the Venetian Marcantonio Bragadin, skinned alive by the Turks in 1571.

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At the thousand-year mark after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in A.D. 476, Black inserts a rare summary and evaluation. The 15th century is the age of the Renaissance, which “reinvigorated the spirit of man,” a somewhat progressive view of history, in which the Middle Ages are seen as centuries of darkness and the collapse of the Roman Empire as a setback in civilizational advancement. For Black, the Renaissance’s humanist spirit reversed the negative trends, restoring history’s upward path. In the 16th century, the Reformation added an additional powerful impulse to human progress. “A long time of tentative and plodding progress,” Black writes, “had suddenly uplifted man to a sunlit upland.” The past was left behind: “Liberated from historic shackles, Western man suddenly contemplated a future beyond the scope of his previous dreams.”

These are surprisingly Whiggish interpretative touches. One can argue, after all, that the medieval cathedral was not inferior to the Renaissance palace. The new “positive and artistically sophisticated attitude” of the 16th century did not produce Dante’s inspired verses or Augustine’s wisdom. And the modern state was hardly a moral improvement on the city-states of ancient Greece or the medieval communes. The “sunlit upland” of the 16th century and beyond continued to be characterized by brutal wars, ugly polities, and evil leaders. After his analytical excursus praising the progress of the Renaissance and the Reformation, Black himself returns to recounting political and military history: the bloody years of Oliver Cromwell; the global rivalry between Spain, Britain, and France (not to mention the persistent Turk); and the devastating Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). Clearly, the blood spilled does not represent a dramatic improvement over previous centuries.

What’s more, the Reformation led to an irreparable division of Christendom. Its negative effects were masked by the great European expansion across the oceans. The Age of Discoveries was indeed a feast of Western greatness: missionaries went to the far reaches of the earth, oceans now turned into great arteries of global commerce, and immense wealth flowed back to the imperial capitals. But the Thirty Years’ War reduced large swaths of Central Europe into a wasteland, opening the door for Russian expansion. There was also a gradual erosion of any common moral authority that could restrain the ambitions of princes and nations. The development of international law or the humanist spirit could not replace it. In short, progress was doubtful and the last chapters of the book indicate as much, contradicting a bit the optimistic parenthesis on the 16th century.

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Sadly, the tome’s visual presentation does not match its erudition and wisdom, and for that the publisher deserves a reprimand. The font is tiny and grows even smaller in block quotations, only increasing to a more humane size for the summary chapter on the Renaissance and the Reformation, which ironically opens with the invention of movable type by Johannes Gutenberg. The geographic scope covered is not helped by the few small maps included. One, on Trajan’s 2nd-century Dacian wars, is taken from National Geographic but is poorly cropped with part of the legend missing. A modern chronicle deserves beautiful font and good illustrations, like the illuminated manuscripts of our distant past.

Despite these shortcomings, the book remains an accessible, sweeping history of the political and military events that defined the first 16 centuries of the Christian era. Read it whole or in part and you will no doubt learn something.