The struggle and care of the hero to master in some degree the wide welter of barbarism surging around him, he never recognised.

It is a spot on Gibbon's fame.
Dean Milman considers that Gibbon's account of the Crusades is the least accurate and satisfactory chapter in his history, and "that he has here failed in that lucid arrangement which in general gives perspicuity to his most condensed and crowded narratives." This blame seems to be fully merited, if restricted to the second of the two chapters which Gibbon has devoted to the Crusades.

The fifty-eighth chapter, in which he treats of the First Crusade, leaves nothing to be desired.

It is not one of his best chapters, though it is quite up to his usually high level.

But the fifty-ninth chapter, it must be owned, is not only weak, but what is unexampled elsewhere in him, confused and badly written.