Every respectable account of early-modern history spotlights the global range of the missionary orders, especially of the Jesuits, who “preached and argued, taught and counselled everywhere from Prague to Paraguay to Peking.” In speed and extent this expansion of Catholicism dwarfed even the explosion of Islam out to Iberia and Transoxania in the century after the death of Muhammad. The Catholic Church was the preeminent international institution of the era, as even contemporaries recognized. One French cynic quipped that the Swedish Queen Christina had converted to Catholicism – under Jesuit influence – only because of that faith's convenience for travellers. Thomas Macaulay later explained why international Catholicism enjoyed strategic advantages over the national churches of Protestantism: “If a Jesuit was wanted at Lima, he was on the Atlantic in the next fleet. If he was wanted at Baghdad, he was toiling through the desert with the next caravan.” In contrast, Macaulay held that “the Spiritual force of Protestantism was a mere local militia, which might be useful in case of an invasion, but could not be sent abroad, and could therefore make no conquests.” The Jesuits enjoyed what might be called a system of “compensation” whereby when one mission failed, its missionaries could be transferred to another.