Sir John Julius Norwich is one of the most famous British historians, a specialist in the Italian Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the author of the best-selling books “History of Byzantium” and “History of the Republic of Venice.” More than two hundred and eighty people have sat on the Holy See from the time of St. Peter to the present day .There were among them saints and murderers, ascetics and libertines, unprincipled intriguers and great politicians, obscurantists and free-thinking intellectuals. John Julius Norwich, in his brilliant study, does not ignore either the periods of the rise of the papacy or the periods of its fall and allows us to see the full picture the history of the pontificate, the existence of which has lasted for almost two thousand years.