Sir John Julius Norwich is one of the most famous British historians, a specialist in the Italian Middle Ages and Renaissance, the author of the bestsellers History of Byzantium and History of the Venetian Republic. More than two hundred and eighty people sat on the Holy Throne from the time of St. Peter to the present day. Among them were saints and murderers, ascetics and libertines, unprincipled schemers and great political figures, obscurantists and free-thinking intellectuals. John Julius Norwich, in his brilliant study, does not disregard either the periods of the rise of the papacy or the periods of its fall and allows us to see the full picture of the history of the pontificate, the existence of which has been going on for almost two thousand years.