often very different historical analyses: Decay due to general malaise Monocausal decay Catastrophic collapse Transformation Explanations attributing the decay to general malaise go back to Edward Gibbon, who argued that the edifice of the Roman Empire had been built on unsound foundations to begin with. According to Gibbon, the fall was – in the final analysis – inevitable. On the other hand, Gibbon had assigned a major portion of the responsibility for the decay to the influence of Christianity, and he is therefore often, though perhaps unjustly, seen as the first proponent of a monocausal explanation. On the other hand, proponents of a catastrophic collapse are convinced that the fall of the empire was not a pre-determined event and should not be taken for granted. Instead, they are convinced it was due to the combined effect of a number of adverse processes, many of them set in motion by the migration of peoples of the time, and that these processes together applied too much stress on the empire's basically sound structure. Finally, proponents of transformation as the cause challenge the whole notion of the 'fall' of the empire and distinguish between the fall into disuse of a particular political dispensation, which was in any case unworkable towards its end, and the fate of the Roman civilisation at the basis of the empire. These explanations are similar enough in reasoning to be considered a school of thought and draw their basic premise from the Pirenne thesis that the Roman world underwent a gradual (though often violent) series of transformations in morphing into the medieval world. The historians belonging to this school often prefer to speak of late antiquity instead of the fall of the Roman Empire. Decay owing to general malaise Edward Gibbon In the words of classicist James J. O'Donnell, the "long, long shadow" of Edward Gibbon "darkens our understanding of the Roman world." Gibbon said the fall of Rome was "the triumph of barbarism and religion." In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89), Gibbon dated the beginning of the decline of Rome to the year 180 after the death of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. The "long peace" that ended with Marcus, in his view, "introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire....The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of