Letters

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) was a sickly child from a wealthy English family. At sixteen he converted to Catholicism at Oxford, and his father sent him to Lausanne, where he returned to Protestantism and educated himself in history and languages. In Rome in 1764, sitting among the ruins of the Capitol, he conceived the idea of writing about the city's decline.

The six volumes of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published between 1776 and 1788, cover more than thirteen centuries, from the Antonine emperors to the fall of Constantinople, in a famously elegant and ironic style. His chapters on the rise of Islam were remarkably sympathetic for their time.