This book represents a revision of the author's doctoral thesis, completed at the University of Birmingham. He claims that it offers the first and only study of relations between the Ottoman central administration and the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchates of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria. Its chief value lies in the fact that the author has made use of unpublished and previously unexplored Ottoman archival documents, notably the Prime Ministerial Ottoman Archives in Istanbul which contain the correspondence between the central administration and the Eastern Patriarchates.

Çolak begins by quoting a passage from Steven Runciman's ‘seminal’ book, The Great Church in Captivity (1968):

All scholars since Runciman, says Çolak, have accepted this model without question, which is apparently why we still have no history of the Eastern Patriarchates in the early modern Ottoman Empire. He proceeds to demonstrate that the Eastern Patriarchates were (sometimes) able to operate independently of the Constantinople Patriarchate, that they (sometimes) enjoyed a direct line to the central administration, and that the authority of the Ecumenical Patriarchate over them was (to some extent) limited. What he omits to say is that Runciman's agenda was different, that his primary focus was on the Great Church, that the Constantinople Patriarchate was indisputably the senior throne, and that from that perspective the other patriarchates were indeed subordinate, (for the most part) subservient, relatively impoverished, and the guardians of much smaller flocks.

‘As late as 1964’, writes Çolak, ‘Ware [in his book Eustratios Argenti: A Study of the Greek Church under Turkish Rule] did not talk about such a subordination of the Eastern Patriarchates to the Great Church even though he referred to the millet system to explain the status of the Patriarch of Constantinople under Ottoman rule’ (p. 15). Indeed he had no reason to do so there, but in his earlier, much more comprehensive book, The Orthodox Church (1963; 3rd edition 2015, pp. 22–5), written incidentally five years before Runciman, he carefully explains how the heretical positions adopted by the Churches in Antioch and Alexandria were resolved by a series of Ecumenical Councils in the fourth and fifth centuries and that, following their resolution, ‘a settled order of precedence was established among them: in order of rank, Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem’. And of Constantinople in particular he writes, ‘The Patriarch of Constantinople is known as the “Ecumenical” (or universal) Patriarch, and since the schism between east and west he has enjoyed a position of special honour among all the Orthodox communities, but he does not have the right to interfere in the internal affairs of other Churches. His place resembles that of the Archbishop of Canterbury in the worldwide Anglican communion’ (p. 7). Of course all this happened a very long time before the period that Çolak is interested in, but the Councils established the fundamental tenets of Christian doctrine, Orthodoxy sets great store by tradition, and it is not without reason that Runciman should write as he did.

That said, Çolak provides some extremely interesting material on patterns of relations between the Eastern Patriarchates and the central administration in the early modern period, much of which will be new to historians of the Church. He shows that they often did not need the mediation of the Constantinople Patriarchate to obtain access to the Sublime Porte. The part played by the Catholic missionaries and their access to provincial authorities in the Ottoman Levant is analysed, as is the close co-operation between the Phanariots and the Ottoman central administration in Istanbul. Especially revealing is the case of the long-reigning Patriarch Silvestros of Antioch (1724-66) which is the focus of the author's study of the Greek Orthodox retaliation against Catholic infiltration among the people and clergy of the Patriarchate of Antioch. The news that a rival Catholic Patriarch named Kyrillos had been appointed with the support of the Jesuit missionaries and the citizens of Damascus (in which city the Patriarch resides) was greeted with unholy fury by the Holy Synod in Constantinople: ‘May they [the supporters of Kyrillos] be excommunicated by the holy, consubstantial, life-giving and indivisible Trinity and may they be cursed, unforgiven and unloosed eternally, after death. The stones and iron may be freed but they may never. May they inherit the leprosy of Gehazi and strangling of Judea, groaning and trembling on earth, just like Cain, and may their share be with God-fighting Judeans, and crucifying the Lord of glory. . .’ Interestingly, it took the Papacy twenty years to ratify Kyrillos's election. Meanwhile the French ambassador to Damascus argued that ‘putting Catholics on patriarchal thrones was not the best way to advance Catholicism there’.

The second half of the book, which is concerned with the eighteenth century, reads much better than the first and appears to have benefited from the attentions of a native English speaker (though it would have been better still for being copy-edited). Chapter 1, on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, clearly received no such attention: sentences are long, syntax goes astray, and the meaning is often obscure. Revision of the thesis seems to have been somewhat perfunctory and much of the signposting has been left in the text. Nor is it without error. J. M. Neale, for example, staunchest of Anglicans, is unaccountably described as ‘a Catholic Englishman’. Neale had been two years in his grave before Chrysostomos Papadopoulos (Archbishop of Athens, 1923–38) was born, and yet they are treated by Çolak as contemporaries.