The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was just one part of a sea change in how writers in Western and Central Europe thought and wrote about history. Histories produced before Gibbon in the Christian Middle Ages were often written by members of the Church clergy. With some exceptions, many of these works were chronicles of local cities and regions that attempted to record facts or histories of the world, beginning with the creation of humanity as described in the Book of Genesis from the Bible and ending with the author’s own time. These histories tended to take for granted the total reliability and authority of both the Bible and ancient sources, and were much more concerned with communicating moral and religious truths to the reader than what we would consider historical analysis today. Even when these works were written by people outside the Church, they still often wrote with the idea that historical events were directed by God, and that major events came from the accomplishments and virtues or the crimes and failings of great individuals.

With the rediscovery and new translations of the works of pre-Christian historians, such as the Greek historian Thucydides and the Roman biographer Suetonius, this approach to history began to give way to new trends.