The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the context of "Tamerlane"

Edward Gibbon FRS (/ˈɡɪbən/; 8 May 1737 – 16 January 1794) was a British essayist, historian and politician. His most important work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789, is known for the quality and irony of its prose, its use of primary sources, and its polemical criticism of organized religion.

The causes and mechanisms of the fall of the Western Roman Empire are a historical theme that was introduced by historian Edward Gibbon in his 1776 book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Though Gibbon was not the first to speculate on why the empire collapsed, he was the first to give a well-researched and well-referenced account of the event, and started an ongoing historiographical discussion about what caused the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The traditional date for the end of the Western Roman Empire is 476 when the last Western Roman Emperor was deposed. Many theories of causality have been explored. In 1984, Alexander Demandt enumerated 210 different theories on why Rome fell, and new theories have since emerged. Gibbon himself explored ideas of internal decline (civil wars, the disintegration of political, economic, military, and other social institutions) and of attacks from outside the empire.

Many historians have postulated reasons for the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Their conclusions usually belong in two broad schools: (1) external factors, such as military threats and barbarian invasions or (2) internal factors, such as a decline in "civic virtue" and military and economic capability. Most historians believe that the fall was due to a combination of both internal and external factors, but come down more heavily on one or the other as the most important cause of the fall. Modern scholarship has introduced additional factors such as climate change, epidemic diseases, and environmental degradation as important reasons for the decline. Some historians have postulated that the Roman Empire did not fall at all, but that the "decline" was instead a gradual, albeit often violent, transformation into the societies of the Middle Ages.

The growth of early Christianity from its obscure origin c. AD 40, with fewer than 1,000 followers, to being the majority religion of the entire Roman Empire by AD 400, has been examined through a wide variety of historiographical approaches.

Until the last decades of the 20th century, the primary theory was provided by Edward Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in 1776. Gibbon theorized that paganism declined from the second century BC and was finally eliminated by the top-down imposition of Christianity by Constantine, the first Christian emperor, and his successors in the fourth century AD.

An expurgation of a work, also known as a bowdlerization or fig-leafing, is a form of censorship that involves purging anything deemed noxious or offensive from an artistic work or other type of writing or media.

The term bowdlerization is often used in the context of the expurgation of lewd material from books. The term derives from Thomas Bowdler's 1818 edition of William Shakespeare's plays, which he reworked in ways that he felt were more suitable for women and children. He similarly edited Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. A less common term used in this context, also based on common editorial practice, is Ad usum Delphini, referring to a series of consciously censored classical works.