by Ted Stewart
© 2011 The Shipley Group Inc. and Brian T. Stewart.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Shadow Mountain®. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of Shadow Mountain.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stewart, Chris, author.
The miracle of freedom : seven tipping points that saved the world / Chris Stewart and Ted Stewart.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary: Examine seven important “tipping points” in history that were instrumental in the rise of freedom in the United States and the world.
ISBN 978-1-60641-951-9 (hardbound : alk. paper)
1. Miracles. 2. Europe—History—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Stewart, Ted, author. II. Title.
D24.S785 2011
940—dc22 2011005037
Printed in the United States of America
Publishers Printing, Salt Lake City, Utah
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
* * *
Also by Chris Stewart and Ted Stewart
Seven Miracles That Saved America: Why They Matter and Why We Should Have Hope
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
Two Gods at War
How the Greeks Saved the West
Miracle at the Bridge
The Battle That Preserved a Christian Europe
The Mongol Horde Turns Back
How the New World Saved the Old
The Battle of Britain
Conclusion
Bibliography
Preface
Many have asked us if this book is designed to be a follow-up to our previous book, Seven Miracles That Saved America. The truth is, it wasn’t our intention to write two books that were closely tied together.
The first book was an account of events in the history of the United States, with a particular eye toward answering these questions: Were there events in the history of this nation when God literally intervened to save us? Was there a reason for these miracles? Does God have a purpose for us still?
The theme of this book is very different. Rather than looking at miracles, we wanted to examine some of the most important events in the history of the world—epic and world-changing events—all of which were indispensable stepping-stones toward the miracle of expanded freedom and democracy in this day.
But soon we began to realize that there is a string that runs through history, a common thread that ties it all together in a manner that was not so obvious to us before. We began to see a magnificent sense of purpose—a sense of intention—in what might otherwise be considered a series of unrelated historical events. It was as if there was a plan, as if each step in human progress was not just a matter of chance or happenstance but was supposed to be.
A second idea also became very obvious.
We believe in the idea of American Exceptionalism. We make that very clear in the first book. America is an extraordinary nation. It has played, and will continue to play, a special role in the world. But it is also clear that America wouldn’t exist, indeed it couldn’t exist, without the foundation that was laid so many millennia before. This great nation, with the freedoms that we love, owes its existence to the events that are described in this book, some of which took place in modern day, some of which played out almost three thousand years ago.
So though it wasn’t our intention to write a follow-up book to Seven Miracles That Saved America, and in a greater sense we haven’t, many of the powerful themes that run through the first book can also be found here.
Regarding the title of this book: Some may wonder what we mean by the phrase saved the world.
Imagine a world without any freedom. Imagine a world with no democratic governments or rule of law, without justice or equality. Imagine a world without free nations willing to stand against the tide of hate and oppression that seems to be the natural tendency of man, a world without the immeasurable good that has been brought about by democratic governments.
Now take it one step further.
Imagine a world with the means of mass destruction—nuclear warheads, biological weapons, chemical and conventional attacks—held only in the hands of despotic men and governments.
Imagine a world, for example, with another Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin in command of much of Europe and all of Asia. Imagine such a man holding all this power, along with all of the other potentially destructive technological developments of the past forty years, without the counterbalance of free governments like those in Western Europe and the United States that have proven willing to stand up to tyranny and oppression.
Imagine tyrannical governments with the modern-day capability to monitor, track, harass, suppress, and persecute their own people, their neighbors, their enemies, all without a group of nations willing to stand as a light of freedom against oppressive leaders. Consider what our world might be like—what our world would be like—without the overwhelmingly positive influence of modern democracies.
Then ask yourself this question: Have democratic governments saved this world?
A world without free nations that were willing to sacrifice their blood and treasure to support the idea that men should be free would be a very different world from the one we live in today.
Regarding the idea of The Miracle of Freedom, some may ask, “Is the existence of freedom truly a miraculous event?”
To most people, the word miracle conjures up images of manna from heaven, the parting of the Red Sea, Muhammad riding a horse into the seventh heaven, or Buddha creating a golden bridge out of thin air.1 More personally, we think of miracles as those unexplainable coincidences that seem to shape the direction of our lives in subtle but powerful ways.
Yet when we consider the complicated and extraordinarily unlikely series of events that led to the existence of freedom in our day; when we consider the fact that freedom runs counter to what seems to be the natural order of men and that, as will be shown, an incredibly small percentage of human beings have had the blessing of living free; the widespread existence of freedom in our day does indeed seem to be a miraculous event.
In the following chapters, we hope to show how, at critical tipping points in world history, certain events took place so as to assure that freedom and democracy would be common in this day.
In telling these stories, we think it’s important to note that cultures of the past are very different from those of our day. When large majorities of people were simply fighting for survival, the norms of their behavior were different from what we have come to accept. People. Nations. Families. War. Mercy and compassion. Justice. Expectations of behavior. All of these have changed. Because of this, it may be difficult to categorize people and events into unambiguous groups that we would say are good or bad.
Complicating our evaluation is the fact that no individual, nation, culture, or institution was always virtuous. Every leader had weaknesses. And all of them were mere men, struggling to accomplish difficult undertakings that would alter the course of history. This being the case, would we expect that there would be no mistakes? And though it would be easy to emphasize their failings or character flaws, we have tried not to let their weaknesses diminish the extraordinary role they may have played.
Parts of these stories will be told in a historically accurate context portrayed fictionally through the eyes of certain participants; parts will be told through
pure historical narrative. We have chosen to tell the stories chronologically, although that is not necessarily what we would consider their ranking of importance.
Taken together, these stories show that the march toward freedom was never assured, that at any of these critical points in history, the tide of freedom might have been turned.
Note
^1. It’s interesting to note that a surprisingly large majority of Americans believe in miracles. A 2008 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life study (one of the largest ever conducted, in which more than thirty-six thousand adults were interviewed) found that nearly 80 percent of Americans believed in miracles. A 2010 Pew study found nearly identical results, with 79 percent of Americans believing in miracles (see www.pewforum.org). And Christians are not alone. Muslim theology accepts the reality of miracles, as do many other world religions.
Introduction
Along the Southern Nile River 1876 BC
Akhenaten Amsu was a strong man. At more than six feet and two hundred pounds, with the sharp face of his Philistine fathers and the olive skin of a mother whose ancestors had been lost in a thousand years of time, he stood above the other slaves in many uncomfortable ways. With the average Egyptian being just more than 150 pounds, it was obvious that Akhenaten Amsu had been taken care of, at least in the early part of his life, for he was not only tall but broad. And though the last few years had been terribly debilitating, he was still strong.
As he toiled, his back to the sun, the day passed exactly as the day before had passed. And though he didn’t realize it, this day was his seventeenth birthday. Had he remembered, he might have taken a moment to consider the life that lay ahead. Nothing but toil and work and death. A million tons of rock to cut and shape and move. Sometime around the age of thirty, he would almost certainly be dead.
Like a calf that had been fattened at the troughs of the king before being led to the slaughter, Akhenaten Amsu had spent his youth away from his family, fed and trained and strengthened in order to prepare him to spend his life as a quarry master, extracting and shaping stone. And that was all he would do now. It was backbreaking work, as crushing as the weight of the rock around him. Eighteen hours a day. Seven days a week. The heat of the Egyptian summer. The unrelenting whip of his taskmaster—a fellow slave who had murdered and extorted his way to the coveted position of overseeing his lesser brothers.
That was all that was expected of him now: ten or fifteen years of cruel labor. Cut the stone. Build the temple. Sacrifice his body to the pharaoh and his gods.
The irony wasn’t lost on Akhenaten Amsu, for he was not a stupid man. Tens of thousands of his fellow slaves would work until they died, all to build nothing but a temple in which they would bury another man.
And the reward for all his efforts? Life. Food. A little water every hour. Straw to make a bed when he was exhausted. A sparse whip if he was dedicated. A sharp-tongued crack if he was slow. Because he was strong, he would be forced to father children, all of whom would be committed to the same fate as his. All of his children and grandchildren would be born into a life of slavery and broken dreams.
Hearing sudden grunts of pain, Akhenaten Amsu lifted his eyes to see his master beating another slave. Taking advantage of the moment, he stood and stretched, twisting to lessen some of the ache in the muscle that wrapped around his spine. Looking at his hands, as rough as leather, and hearing the crack of joints up and down his back, he felt the early signs of aging. It made him cringe, seeing his body so abused.
Glancing quickly to the south, he saw a line of dust that followed the dirt road that led from the quarry to the site of the new temple, an unknown number of miles away. He hadn’t seen it, and he never would, but he had heard of its magnificence, a pyramid of carefully cut rock rising over the river. Between the quarry and the temple there was nothing but sand baking in the desert heat. Closer in, if he squinted, he could just make out the wadi where they threw the bodies of his fellow slaves when they were done, the heat and desert quickly stripping them to nothing but leather and bone. Looking west, he could see that the sun was just setting. Soon the torches that would allow them to continue their endless work would be passed around and lit.
Why? Akhenaten Amsu wondered for at least the thousandth time. Why have I been robbed of any hope?
He looked at the setting sun again. His masters worshipped many gods, but none more than the gods of the sky, and so they had become some of the greatest astronomers the world had ever seen. Having been taught a little from the masters, Akhenaten Amsu had a sense of space and time, a sense of his place in the world. And one thing was always certain. He would die a slave.
Yet sometimes he had to wonder.
Would men always live in such a world?
He turned back to his work, never knowing that more than fifteen hundred years later, on the other side of the world, a child would ask the same question as he did.
Hangchow, China 230 BC Just before the reign of Emperor Shih Huang Ti
Zhu Raun Sung was only twelve, but he already understood the most important lessons that life had to teach. He knew how to work. He knew how to get by on nothing but a daily bowl of rice with an occasional chicken foot or rat bone for sustenance. He knew when to talk and when to be silent, when to bow and when to run. He knew he would honor his father and their ancestors until the day that he died, just as his children would honor him even in his old age. He knew that in four years he would marry a girl he might care for or maybe not, the primary purpose of the marriage being to produce children who could labor alongside him on the ragged piece of land that they were tasked to work. He knew he would never own his own home or even an animal except for maybe a rabbit or a dog. Every piece of ground, every hut, every building, city wall, shop, water hole, and piece of furniture or food belonged to the royal family and no one else.
Most important, he knew that he and his family would always live to serve the royals and their warriors, surrendering everything they had, even providing their children as a human sacrifice if the occasion presented itself.
Had Zhu Raun been born in a more forgiving time, he might have risen to a position of favor or power, for he was handsome and intelligent and willing to take a chance. But that wasn’t to be. And Zhu Raun knew it. His expectations had been adjusted to the realities of his day.
Lying on the dirt floor, a cushion of cottonwood leaves for his bed, Zhu Raun looked around the one-room shack in the early morning light. His mother and father slept beside him, his younger brother and two sisters balled together at his feet. A couple of pigs had slipped through the open door and were sleeping in the slant of sunlight shining through the cracks in the thatch roof. The shack was situated in one of a dozen small villages half a day’s walk from the Great City’s outer wall. Three hundred thousand people lived inside the city, a number Zhu Raun couldn’t begin to comprehend, but he was not one of them. Indeed, he had been inside the city only a few times in his life. But having been inside the city, he knew that the nobles lived a life of luxury that was beyond his dreams.
Turning his head, Zhu Raun looked at the glistening goblets his father had created in the kiln that he and a hundred other farmers shared beside the communal well. His eyes grew wide as he stared at the beautiful creations. They were quite simply the most wonderful things he had ever seen. Brilliant, with red swans and purple wildflowers, the gifts represented at least a quarter of his family’s total wealth.
And today they would be given to the royal family and buried with the king.
The tradition went back an unknown number of generations. When a king died, hundreds—or, if he had been particularly powerful, thousands—of slaves and peasants were sacrificed and buried with him, along with the most valuable treasures the empire’s peasants could produce.
Today, along with their beautiful gifts, the village would offer up a child to be sacrificed to the king.
And though he didn’t know it yet, Zhu Raun was going to be that sacrifice.
Three hours later, his head bowed, his heart racing so hard he thought it might explode, Zhu Raun had a rope tightened around his neck and was led away.
As he walked, his hands bound, the biting rope making it difficult to breathe, he built the courage to glance back at his family. His mother was on her knees, weeping into her palms. His father stood beside her, one hand on her shoulder, his chest trembling with rage. His younger brother and little sisters had already been led away, protected from the terrifying scene by the kindness of friends.
As Zhu Raun nodded to his father, a sudden thought raced through his mind. Will it always be this way? he wondered in fear and grief.
Then the rope was tugged and he was mercilessly pulled away.
And because the world wasn’t ready yet, another eighteen hundred years would pass away.
Prague Czech State (Bohemia) Winter, AD 1696
The Jewish father pulled his son close as they huddled against the misty rain. The river was calm, as if it had stopped flowing altogether, pellets of rain creating a million tiny ripples to break the water’s surface. It was cold, the early winter deep and chill, and the young boy leaned into his father, feeling for the warmth of his coat.
They stared sadly at the statue that stood over the Charles Bridge, a beautiful Gothic overpass that spanned the Old Town and Mala Stranλ. The great king Charles, a powerful leader who had gone on to become the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, had commissioned the bridge almost three hundred years before. Guarded on both ends by thick stone towers, the Kamennϒ most, or Stone Bridge, as it had originally been called, was one of the great architectural achievements in the entire Bohemian kingdom, which had reached its crest of power now.