Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism.

Gibbon contrasts material deprivation with political autonomy, suggesting that those with little to lose are harder to coerce. The line argues that despotism most effectively governs through attachment: the more people crave comforts, status, and property, the more leverage rulers gain via taxation, confiscation, patronage, and fear of losing what one has. “Desires” are paired with “possessions” to show that bondage is psychological as well as economic—ambition and appetite can make subjects complicit in their own subjection. The claim is not a romantic praise of misery so much as a warning that luxury and acquisitiveness create vulnerabilities that power can exploit.