How did Edward Gibbon describe the fall of Constantinople in 1453?

In his seminal work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the British historian Edward Gibbon provides a "brilliant and moving story" of the final siege and capture of Constantinople in 1453.12

While Gibbon’s broader narrative is characterized by his view of the Roman Empire as being in a state of "undeviating decline" due to moral and political decay, his treatment of the Byzantine Empire in the second half of his work is noted for its complexity. Although he was generally unsympathetic toward Byzantine civilization and lacked access to the full range of Greek sources available to later scholars, he marshaled the forces that led to the city's fall with "masterly lucidity".12

Ultimately, Gibbon framed the collapse of the city as part of the "triumph of barbarism and religion," a phrase he used to epigrammatically summarize the causes of the Greco-Roman world's decay. His account remains a significant, albeit debated, historical perspective on the end of the Byzantine Empire.1