 Pope John XXIV is a Machiavellian Yorkshireman, who allows the cold war to heat up as a Malthusian plot to resolve Europe's population growth – the church has access to bacteriological warfare as an alternative to birth control, whose prior papal prohibition John XXIV opposes.The book's coda, set in 1991, fifteen years after the events of the main body of the book, reveals that events have turned out as the Pope planned.Europe's surplus population has become cannon fodder for the war, which ended in a narrow victory, despite mention that the Ottoman Empire got as far as Brussels.