This is Sir Steven Runciman’s established and widely admired classic account of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, first published in 1968. The Great Church, as the Greeks called the Orthodox Patriarchate, was the spiritual centre of the Byzantine world. The Church’s survival during the four centuries of Turkish rule which followed the fall of Constantinople bore witness to its strenght and to the unquenchable vitality of Hellenism. Sir Steven Runciman’s history of the Great Church in this period is written with scholarship, sympathy and style.