Frederik of Denmark, the son of King Christian IV, is the new governor of the new province of Westphalia and harbors the dark suspicion that the Swedes who now dominate central Europe deliberately designed the province so that he would not succeed in his assignment, thus undermining his father’s position. Problems are everywhere! Religious fragmentation, cities demanding imperial status, jurisdictional disputes among the nobility and between the nobility and the common folk—there’s no end to it.

And then matters get still more complicated. Annalise Richter, a student at the famous Abbey of Quedlinburg, wants Frederik to correct an injustice. Her mentor, the Abbess of Quedlinburg, is being prevented from running for a seat in the House of Commons because she is, well, not a commoner. Surely Frederik can do something to fix this wrong! The prince is of two minds. On the one hand—being very much his father’s son—he has developed a great passion for the marvelous young woman. He is determined to marry her. On the other hand . . . she’s Catholic. A bit of a problem, that, for a Lutheran prince. But there’s worse. She’s also the younger sister of Gretchen Richter. Yes, that Gretchen Richter.

"In the world the West Virginians of Grantville came from, the borderlands between France and Germany had been a source of turmoil for centuries. In the new universe created by the Ring of Fire, the situation isn't any better. The chaotic condition of the German lands has been ended--for a time, at least. And the near-century long war between Spain and the Netherlands has finally been resolved.

But now France is unstable. The defeat of Richelieu's forces in the Ostend War has weakened the Red Cardinal's grip on political power and emboldened his enemies, Foremost among them is King Louis XIII's ambitious younger brother, Monsieur Gaston. An inveterate schemer and would-be usurper, Gaston's response to the new conditions in France is to launch a military adventure. He invades the Duchy of Lorraine. Soon, others are drawn into the conflict. The Low Countries ruled by King Ferdinand and Duke Bernhard's newly formed Burgundy, a kingdom-in-all-but-name, send their own troops into Lorraine. Chaos expands and spreads up and down the Rhine.

It isn't long before the mightiest and most deadly army enters the fray--the legions of pestilence. Bubonic plague and typhus lead the way, but others soon follow: dysentery, deadly and disfiguring smallpox, along with new diseases introduced by the time-displaced town of Grantville. The war is on. All the wars--and on all fronts. Can the medical knowledge of the up-time Americans be adapted and spread fast enough to forestall disaster? Or will their advanced military technology simply win one war in order to lose the other and much more terrible one? "

Ever since the assassination of King Louis XIII and the overthrow of his chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, France has been in political and military turmoil. The possibility—even the likelihood—of revolution hovers in the background. The new king Gaston, whom many consider an usurper, is no friend of France’s Protestants, known as the Huguenots. The fears and hostility of the Huguenots toward the French crown have only been heightened by the knowledge brought back in time by the Americans of the town of Grantville. Half a century in the future, the French king of the time would revoke the Edict of Nantes of 1598, which proclaimed that the rights of Huguenots would be respected. At the center of all this turmoil is the universally recognized leader of the Huguenots: Duke Henri de Rohan. He knows from the same up-time history books that he is “scheduled” to die less than two years in the future and he has pressing problem on his hands. His estranged wife and brother are siding with the usurper Gaston and plotting against him. Still worse, his sole child and heir is his nineteen-year-old daughter Marguerite. He believes he has less than two years to find a suitable husband for her—but acceptable Calvinist noblemen, French or foreign, are sparse at the moment. What’s a father to do?

How to succeed at spying without really trying

Pranksters and scammers from way back, Paolo Fucilla and Carlo Rigatti fought for Spain at the Wartburg and survived.

Curious about the people who had beaten them so handily, they went to Grantville. Whatever their other faults, they were serious about keeping their oaths. When they promised not to take up arms they meant it. In Grantville, they got in trouble again and skipped town.

Looking for a job that didn’t include being shot at with napalm, they decided to try their hand at spying. It was a “Here, hold my beer and watch this” inspiration. It wasn’t their first, and it wouldn’t be their last.

They went to work for the Archbishop of Salzburg. But spies need cover stories, so they decided to sell office supplies. It was supposed to be a single job, so they didn’t bother to tell the manufacturer that they were now the sales reps for Vignelli Business Machines.

Watch as Paolo and Carlo demonstrate the kind of trouble they can get into.

The Ring of Fire that transported the town of Grantville from West Virginia in the year 2000 to the region of Thuringia in the middle of Europe in the year 1631 produced an enormous cascade of changes in world history. Some of those changes were big, others were huge—and some were more modest in scale. Modest, at the least, to the universe, if not necessarily to those immediately affected.

Count Ludwig Guenther of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt builds a Lutheran church on his own land, not far from Grantville, and calls in a Saxon pastor of a Phillipist bent to serve the Lutheran refugee population of the area. Shortly thereafter, in April 1634, the pastor's older daughter meets and elopes with a Catholic up-timer, which prompts Kastenmayer to get Lutheran girls to marry unchurched up-timers and thereby recruit them into the parish.

In the years that follow, Pastor Kastenmeyer copes with both existing ecclesio-political strands of down-time religion (from Stiefelite Lutheran heretics to Flacian Lutheran ultra-orthodox) and the strange new up-time world of shorts, blue jeans, and unknown religious denominations. His struggles and travails have a surprisingly revolutionary impact on seventeenth-century Lutheranism—perhaps to no one’s greater surprise than the pastor himself.