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 56 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 56: The Saracens, Franks, and Greeks, in Italy—First adventures and settlement of the Normans—Character and conquest of Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia—Deliverance of Sicily by his brother Roger—Victories of Robert over the emperors of the East and West—Roger, King of Sicily, invades Africa and Greece—The Emperor Manuel Comnenus—Wars of the Greeks and Normans—Extinction of the Normans. The footnotes — Gibbon’s famous asides — are not in this reading. What you have is the narrative, in his own eighteenth-century English.