Showing results for "Dave Gibbons" in Europe

Some 250 years after its first publication, Gibbon's Decline and Fall is still regarded as one of the greatest histories in Western literature. In Volume III (XXVII-XXXVI), Gibbon charts the fall of the Western empire. Starting with the reign of Emperor Gratian (d. 383) his survey moves to political and religious issues in the East and West before covering the increasing military power of the Barbarians.

Memoirs of My Life, published posthumously in 1796, wholly unveils the character of the world’s greatest historian in full candor and openness. We follow him from birth, through to his education at Oxford, to his time in Switzerland where he met Voltaire and fell in love with a Swiss girl. We accompany him on his travels through France and Lausanne, leading on to his eventual arrival in Rome, where he conceived of his epic Decline and Fall.

In Volume VI (Chapters LVII - LXXI), Gibbon ends his masterful history by charting the rise of the Turkish nation and the birth of the Ottoman Empire, which becomes an unstoppable force as it eventually captures the remains of the Eastern Empire. Weakened under the continuing schism of the Greek and Latin Christians, the strategically important site of Constantinople becomes an easy target for Sultan Mohammed II much to the consternation and apathy of the West.