The fall of Visby: The Baltic shadow- book one

Visby, July 1361. The Danish fleet is in the harbor.

Erik Larsson is twenty years old, a merchant's apprentice in the richest trading city in the Baltic. When King Valdemar's professional army lands on Gotland, the city council makes a calculation: negotiate, not fight. The city watches from its limestone walls as eighteen hundred farmers die in the fields outside.

It is the most important thing Erik will ever witness — and he records every word.

Over the next nine years he follows the Hanseatic system into its inner machinery: from Lübeck's counting houses to a Novgorod fur market to the back offices of the peace negotiations at Stralsund. He learns what the League runs on, what it cannot count, and what it costs to work inside something you cannot entirely approve of.

The Fall of Visby is the first volume of The Baltic Shadow — a trilogy set in the world of the Hanseatic League, medieval Europe's most powerful institution.

For readers of Bernard Cornwell and Hilary Mantel.