Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) was born at Putney, near London, and was briefly a student at Magdalen College, Oxford, where at sixteen he was received into the Roman Catholic Church; his father sent him to Lausanne, where under the Calvinist pastor Daniel Pavillard he returned to Protestantism and read widely in French and Latin. He served as a captain in the Hampshire militia during the Seven Years' War and sat in Parliament from 1774 to 1784. In his Memoirs he dated the idea of his history to 15 October 1764, while he sat musing amid the ruins of the Capitol in Rome as barefoot friars sang vespers. The six quarto volumes appeared in 1776, 1781 and 1788, and he died in London in 1794; his Memoirs were edited after his death by his friend Lord Sheffield.
Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire runs in seventy-one chapters from the age of the Antonines in the second century to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the condition of the city of Rome in the fifteenth century. The library holds a selection from the Milman edition, with Gibbon's footnotes and the added notes of the editors: Chapters I to III, the General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West that close the third volume, and Chapter LXVIII on Mahomet the Second and the capture of Constantinople.
