Edward Gibbon, an English historian, published The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. This is Chapter 47 of that work. He follows Rome from the prosperous age of Trajan and the Antonines, around the year 100, through the fall of the West and on to the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453.

Chapter 47: Theological history of the doctrine of the Incarnation—The human and divine nature of Christ—Enmity of the patriarchs of Alexandria and Constantinople—St. Cyril and Nestorius—Third General Council of Ephesus—Heresy of Eutyches—Fourth General Council of Chalcedon—Civil and Ecclesiastical Discord—Intolerance of Justinian—The Three Chapters—The Monothelite controversy—State of the Oriental sects:—I. The Nestorians—II. The Jacobites—III. The Maronites—IV. The Armenians—V. The Copts and Abyssinians. The footnotes — Gibbon’s famous asides — are not in this reading. What you have is the narrative, in his own eighteenth-century English.