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 59 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 59: Preservation of the Greek Empire—Numbers, passage, and event, of the Second and Third Crusades—St. Bernard—Reign of Saladin in Egypt and Syria—His conquest of Jerusalem—Naval Crusades—Richard the First of England—Pope Innocent the Third; and the Fourth and Fifth Crusades—The Emperor Frederic the Second—Louis the Ninth of France; and the two last crusades—Expulsion of the Latins or Franks by the Mamelukes. The footnotes — Gibbon’s famous asides — are not in this reading. What you have is the narrative, in his own eighteenth-century English.