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Looks like there are some factional histories, Ill trust Gibbon until I see proof otherwise.

Get any decent Byzantine history from Amazon - I recommend Vasiliev or Ostrogorsky. Gibbon was a splendid writer and managed to impress and hypnotise readers with his vision. But at his time people in England knew squat about late antiquity or Christian East. And he had a Deistic pro-Muslim agenda. Read solid history on the subject and you will have many proofs.

Gibbon is a great writer to be valued for his ideas, not because his work was true in factual sense but was true as a didactic phantasy.

Its true he was "biased" to say the least against the Eastern Empire. He wasn't pro Muslim I read his stuff on Mohammed and he basically said Mohammed was a power hungry whackjob who united the Arabs under a barbarous religion, and that Islam was only peaceful until Mohammed had an army behind him( then he started preaching a much more militant and intolerant religion). I'll check those guys out at some hypothetical point where I have the time.