This is the third volume of Barbarism and Religion, a series intended to exhibit Edward Gibbon and his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in historical contexts to which they belong and which illuminate their significance. The two volumes so far published have brought Gibbon to the verge of writing his master work. The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon concluded with his intention to write a history which was to have been primarily a history of the city of Rome as it was deserted by its own empire, and only by degrees came to be intended as a history of that empire's decline and transformation. Narratives of Civil Government concluded with the prospectus Gibbon prefixed to the first volume of the Decline and Fall, and isolated as problematic a series of decisions then explicitly or implicitly announced, which were to determine the future character of the work. One of these was the decision to bypass the history of the Latin middle ages, already recounted by Robertson and Voltaire, and pursue the history of the eastern Roman empire to the Turkish conquest of 1453; perhaps the strangest of all Gibbon's decisions and that which perplexed him most.