Decline of the Byzantine Empire of Constantinople in 1453. The process by which the empire waned, and from when its decline can be traced, is a matter of scholarly debate. In some cases, the entire history of the Byzantine Empire has been portrayed as a protracted period of decline of the Roman Empire. This holds especially for Enlightenment era writers such as Edward Gibbon, author of "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789, whose view was coloured by pro-western or anti-clerical biases, and tended to see the whole ten-century empire as merely a
Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (French: "Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence") is an 18th-century book written by French political philosopher Montesquieu. First published in 1734, it is widely considered by scholars to be among Montesquieu's best known works and was an inspiration to Gibbon's more extensive "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". In 1734, the book was first published anonymously as an octavo by Jacques Desbordes