Conrad became a monk through trickery and against his will. So, it is fair to say that his heart isn't really in it. He is clever, charming, entirely self-serving and almost completely without scruple - but in Anglo-Saxon England, when the Danish invaders come calling, those are very helpful attributes to have as trouble lurks around every corner.

"Why is it so difficult to develop and sustain liberal democracy? The best recent work on this subject comes from a remarkable pair of scholars, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. In their latest book, The Narrow Corridor, they have answered this question with great insight." -Fareed Zakaria, The Washington Post From the authors of the international bestseller Why Nations Fail, a crucial new big-picture framework that answers the question of how liberty flourishes in some states but falls to authoritarianism or anarchy in others--and explains how it can continue to thrive despite new threats. In Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argued that countries rise and fall based not on culture, geography, or chance, but on the power of their institutions. In their new book, they build a new theory about liberty and how to achieve it, drawing a wealth of evidence from both current affairs and disparate threads of world history. Liberty is hardly the "natural" order of things. In most places and at most times, the strong have dominated the weak and human freedom has been quashed by force or by customs and norms. Either states have been too weak to protect individuals from these threats, or states have been too strong for people to protect themselves from despotism. Liberty emerges only when a delicate and precarious balance is struck between state and society. There is a Western myth that political liberty is a durable construct, arrived at by a process of "enlightenment." This static view is a fantasy, the authors argue. In reality, the corridor to liberty is narrow and stays open only via a fundamental and incessant struggle between state and society: The authors look to the American Civil Rights Movement, Europe’s early and recent history, the Zapotec civilization circa 500 BCE, and Lagos’s efforts to uproot corruption and institute government accountability to illustrate what it takes to get and stay in the corridor. But they also examine Chinese imperial history, colonialism in the Pacific, India’s caste system, Saudi Arabia’s suffocating cage of norms, and the “Paper Leviathan” of many Latin American and African nations to show how countries can drift away from it, and explain the feedback loops that make liberty harder to achieve. Today we are in the midst of a time of wrenching destabilization. We need liberty more than ever, and yet the corridor to liberty is becoming narrower and more treacherous. The danger on the horizon is not "just" the loss of our political freedom, however grim that is in itself; it is also the disintegration of the prosperity and safety that critically depend on liberty. The opposite of the corridor of liberty is the road to ruin.

A Source Book for Mediæval History is a scholarly piece by Oliver J. Thatcher. It covers all major historical events and leaders from the Germania of Tacitus in the 1st century to the decrees of the Hanseatic League in the 13th century.

GERMANY stands in the centre of Europe, and on her soil all the great international struggles have been fought, the Thirty Years' War, the early campaigns of the Spanish Succession War, the Seven Years' War, the gigantic wars against Napoleon. It is the custom for modern educators to recommend the study of the history of France as a guiding thread through the intricacies of general European history; but is this choice justifiable? The two great, omnipresent factors of the whole mediaeval period are the Papacy and the Empire; the Empire was German from the ninth to the nineteenth century, from the days of Charlemagne until the days of Francis II., and the Empire interfered in the affairs of the Papacy and of Italy far more than did France. When we come to the period of the Reformation, surely Luther and his kind were more prominent than the. French reformers, and the Emperor Charles V. had more to do with the affairs of Europe than any of the French kings. In the Thirty Years' War, larger interests were at stake than in the Huguenot struggles, and the German Peace of Westphalia necessitated a recasting of the whole map of Europe. Louis XIV., it is true, gave the tone to the high society of his age, and French was almost universally spoken and written at the German courts; but this influence was neither very deep nor very beneficial. Nor can it be denied that the French Revolution produced great results for Europe. Yet its effects, as far as Germany was concerned, have been overrated; the liberation of the serfs would probably have been accomplished without it, while constitutional government, popular representation, and trial by jury had still to wait for half a century...

The Sword Brothers have won a great victory and the implacable enemy of their order is dead. There is now nothing to stop the Bishop of Riga from marching north and seizing the whole of Estonia. But in the moment of triumph the seeds of future difficulties have been sown, for the bishop's German crusaders believe that the fight against the pagans has been won and thus there is no reason for them to stay in Livonia. Faced with a lack of holy warriors to complete his task, the bishop is forced to beg the ambitious King Valdemar of Denmark for military aid, a request that will have disastrous consequences.While he is away Conrad Wolff, now a veteran brother knight of the Sword Brothers, his reputation high among pagans and crusaders alike, is sent to Ungannia whose ruler Kalju is an ally of the Sword Brothers. There a trivial incident escalates into a full-scale war that results in a great barbarian horde sweeping into Livonia and threatening the very existence of the crusader state.Conrad is sent on a desperate mission to raise a ragtag army to delay the invaders long enough so Riga can summon crusader knights from Germany. Conrad and his companions soon find themselves battling Cumans, Russians, Lithuanians and Danes as their motley force - the Army of the Wolf - takes the field against the many enemies of Livonia.This, the second volume of the Crusader Chronicles, continues the story of Conrad Wolff and the Baltic Crusade in the first quarter of the thirteenth century.

Reproduction of the original: The Boys' Book of Famous Rulers by Lydia Hoyt Farmer