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
Fall of the Western Roman Empire of Commodus, after a number of introductory chapters. Arnold J. Toynbee and James Burke argue that the entire Imperial era was one of steady decay of institutions founded in republican times, while Theodor Mommsen excluded the imperial period from his Nobel Prize-winning "History of Rome" (1854–56). As one convenient marker for the end, 476 has been used since Gibbon, but other key dates for the fall of the Roman Empire in the West include the Crisis of the Third Century, the Crossing of the Rhine in 406 (or 405), the sack of Rome in 410, and the death of Julius