Nicholas Morton's study of the first hundred years of the Teutonic Order focuses on the knights' activities in the Holy Land, although the Baltic region is not entirely neglected. There is a short chapter on the way in which the order's officers handled competing calls on their limited resources in the middle decades of the thirteenth century. But it is the Latin East that dominates, and here the order faced a number of big challenges. They flowed from the period's grim strategic scenario, the Holy Land's turbulent politics and the difficulty of creating a workable relationship between estates and personnel located in Europe and the brethren serving in the east. On all these aspects Morton is a sure-footed and reliable guide. His grasp of the issues is sound and his familiarity with both sources and bibliography hard to fault. He reaffirms the significance of Herman von Salza, the order's dynamic and ambitious first master. He charts the impact on the order of the conflict between papacy and empire during the regn of Frederick ii. And he has interesting things to say about the internal organisation and functioning of the order, and its management of its revenues in the east. Well-organised, comprehensive and judicious, Morton's book is a welcome addition to the literature on the military orders. Alongside accounts by Malcolm Barber on the Templars and Jonathan Riley-Smith on the Hospitallers, the appearance of this study means that we now possess full-length treatments in English of the three most important military orders that played major roles in the Holy Land.