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 70 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 70: Character and coronation of Petrarch—Restoration of the freedom and government of Rome by the Tribune Rienzi—His virtues and vices, his expulsion and death—Return of the popes from Avignon—Great schism of the West—Reunion of the Latin Church—Last struggles of Roman liberty—Statutes of Rome—Final settlement of the ecclesiastical state. The footnotes — Gibbon’s famous asides — are not in this reading. What you have is the narrative, in his own eighteenth-century English.