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
Historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire survived with borders essentially intact for several centuries (until the Muslim conquests), the Empire as a whole had initiated major cultural and political transformations since the Crisis of the Third Century, with the shift towards a more openly autocratic and ritualized form of government, the adoption of Christianity as the state religion, and a general rejection of the traditions and values of Classical Antiquity. While traditional historiography emphasized this break with Antiquity by using the term "Byzantine Empire" instead of Roman Empire, recent schools of history offer a more nuanced view, seeing mostly continuity rather than a sharp break. The