Quote:
Originally Posted by shousa
As I understand it, it is still the main textbook on this subject even though it was written in the 1800s.
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Not really; it still has this role in the popular imagination insofar that deals with the "decline" of the Western Roman Empire, but most of its theses have been thoroughly rebuffed and discredited. It's still an entertaining read as historical fiction and attack on Christianity, but not if you want to understand the complicated history of those times.
And the dismissal of Byzantium (a vibrant Christian civilization that stood against terrible attacks for a very long while) is nothing short of ignorant and prejudiced. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 under the Islamic Jihad of the Ottomans after being severely weakened by the Catholic Crusades of the "Franks" (after all the Byzantines were infidel dogs or unrepentant heretics) was nothing short of cataclysmic and represented the final fall of Rome in many eyes.