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 64 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 64: Conquests of Zingis Khan and the Moguls from China to Poland—Escape of Constantinople and the Greeks—Origin of the Ottoman Turks in Bithynia—Reigns and victories of Othman, Orchan, Amurath the First, and Bajazet the First—Foundation and progress of the Turkish monarchy in Asia and Europe—Danger of Constantinople and the Greek Empire. The footnotes — Gibbon’s famous asides — are not in this reading. What you have is the narrative, in his own eighteenth-century English.