Published in two volumes, it totals over 2,000 pages in length and includes approximately 2,700 images.

Hundreds of these images are published here for the first time. It is also the only easily available reference source to include photographs of the badges of many Orders.

Includes detailed studies of the honours of every country that confers Orders or similar awards on its citizens, enabling the reader to compare different systems across the world.

Examines the histories of famous chivalric institutions such as the Orders of Malta and Saint John as well as the great Orders given by reigning monarchs and the heads of former reigning houses.

The appendix includes a detailed exposure of the activities of the many “self-styled” Orders given by pseudo princes and lists more than two hundred such bodies that pretend to be genuine Orders of Knighthood or Merit.

More than 40 authors have assisted in the production of this work, including two eminent British historians, Jonathan Riley-Smith and D’Arcy Boulton, who have contributed important studies of the religious military Orders and Monarchical Collar Orders.

Includes a particularly detailed section on Portugal and its historic honours, written by Dr José-Vicente de Bragança, recently retired as Secretary-General of the presidency of the Portuguese republic.

Michael Medvedev, a distinguished Russian heraldist and authority on heraldic, chivalric and nobiliary institutions has contributed a valuable section on the modern republican and imperial Russian Orders. The study of the Russian Imperial Orders includes a discussion of the present heir to the Romanov dynasty, and places these Orders in their European context.