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 9 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 9 takes up the state of Germany till the invasion of the Barbarians in the time of the Emperor Decius. The footnotes are not in this reading; what you have is the narrative.