Sir James Cochran Stevenson Runciman, one of the foremost aristocratic gentleman academics of the early twentieth century, delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of St Andrews in 1960 and 1961. Runciman used his extensive wealth and contact to spend time within archives across Europe, and his gift for languages ensured he brought a wealth of material into English across his long career. The book here is a split volume collecting the Gifford Lectures he delivered as well as the 1966 Birkbeck Lectures he delivered at Cambridge in 1966.