[The_Reader_David]

Do you call the current city on the site Byzantium or Istanbul? If you want to insist on calling it by something other the then current name when it was the Imperial capital, I presume you will be just as insistent now that it is a major city in the Turkish republic.

And have you read my posts? Or are you just grinding Gibbon's old axe as you insistence on calling Constantinople "Byzantium" suggests? I guess you think a plague, bad harvests, and trouble on all the borders is 'nothing'. Can you pull a quote from any of my posts which says 'nothing happened to the Empire'? No. But I assert rightly that the old social and political order persisted, that classical learning was not lost.

How about you just concede those two points and that the mosaics of Justinian and Theodora in San Vitale in Ravenna really were made after 540 and we call it a day?

I return, I'll expicitly concede that things were really tough inside the Empire due to a plague, bad harvests and trouble on all the borders with the Persian, the Slavs, the Avars and the Arabs, and remained so into the next century.

[muawiyah]

Gibbon pretty much blamed the whole thing on invading barbarians. Subsequent research has demonstrated the barbarians were pretty civilized, didn't destroy the Western Roman Empire economy, and had nothing to do with the climatic catastrophe that precipitated the Dark Ages.

Gibbon was also soft on the idea that the Eastern Empire suffered.

Given that you and Gibbon are in lockstep agreement on all the major points, why are you complaining about Mr. Gibbon?