[weikel]

I generally agree with Gibbon's intrepratation except for one thing. Theodosius "The Great" was a disaster for the Empire. He practiced a policy of appeasement( we won't even get into his Christian fanaticism which among other things he allowed a fanatical Archbishop to destroy the Great Library of Alexandria) which caused the Empire in the West to fall shortly after his death. The Ostrogoths and Theodoric's Visigoth's were fairly enlightened rulers. The Visigoth's in Spain generally were not. The Franks were savages but they tried the real destroyers were the Picts, Lombards, Spanish Visigoths, and Vandals( the Vikings later on Charlemagne almost managed to engineer a recovery but the Vikings stopped that after his death, then the Catholic church after the Viking invasions decided that it should rule Europe and horde knowledge which caused other problems).

[DeaconBenjamin]

The story that Theophilus destroyed a library is clearly a fiction that we can very precisely lay at the door of Edward Gibbon. It is in his monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that we first find the allegation made. Gibbon seems mainly concerned to clear the Arabs of the responsibility of destroying the library and allows his marked anti-Christian prejudice to cloud his better judgement. His excellent footnotes show he had exactly the same sources as we do but drew the wrong conclusions.

From The Mysterious Fate of the Great Library of Alexandria
http://www.bede.org.uk/library.htm