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 65 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 65: Elevation of Timour or Tamerlane to the throne of Samarkand—His conquests in Persia, Georgia, Tartary Russia, India, Syria, and Anatolia—His Turkish War—Defeat and captivity of Bajazet—Death of Timour—Civil War of the sons of Bajazet—Restoration of the Turkish monarchy by Muhammad the First—Siege of Constantinople by Amurath the Second. The footnotes — Gibbon’s famous asides — are not in this reading. What you have is the narrative, in his own eighteenth-century English.