Short answers, pulled from the story.
It is a six-volume work by Edward Gibbon covering the period from 98 to 1590 CE, examining the peak of the Roman Empire, the rise of Christianity as the state religion, the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the rise of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, and the fall of Byzantium. Gibbon's central thesis is that the gradual loss of civic virtue, accelerated by the spread of Christianity, was a primary cause of Rome's collapse.
Volume I was first published in February 1776 by William Strahan and Thomas Cadell. Volumes II and III appeared in 1781, and the final three volumes (IV-VI) were issued together in 1788. The work was revised and reissued in six editions between 1776 and 1789.
Gibbon argued that Christianity contributed to Rome's fall by diverting wealth to the Church, encouraging monasticism over civic participation, and promoting pacifism that weakened military recruitment. Critics attacked him as a "paganist", and the book was temporarily banned in the Kingdom of Brazil in the early nineteenth century as containing dangerous ideas.
In 1779, Gibbon published A Vindication of Some Passages in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper called its success "immediate and complete" and described it as "one of the decisive battles of literary history."
No. Gibbon's central argument that Christianity caused the fall of Rome is not widely accepted by scholars today. Specific claims, including that the empire's religious shift dramatically redirected wealth and that Christian pacifism meaningfully reduced military effectiveness, have been challenged on the grounds that the evidence does not support the scale Gibbon implied.
The title's structure directly inspired works including Jefferson Davis's The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Isaac Asimov acknowledged that his Foundation series was written with what he called "a tiny bit of cribbin' from the works of Edward Gibbon."