army, perhaps distracted by the wonderful views, developed second thoughts and refused to sail to Constantinople. They marched to the other side of the island, a sort of self-imposed crusading time-out. Alexius and the crusading leaders confronted the defectors, knowing the loss would cripple their limping army. They begged, groveled, cried, and drooled. The defectors agreed to stay, but in the true spirit of the Fourth Crusade, they wanted to make another deal. They would stay only until Christmas, and then they would be free to advance on Jerusalem. The crusading leaders agreed. Alexius was pleased to report to the doge that the debt-relief plan was still in place.
Jubilant at surviving yet another near-death experience, the army set sail and reached the outskirts of Constantinople by late June 1203. They had never seen anything like it, as they stared in awe at the monstrous walls of the great city before them. With its population of 400,000 people, Constantinople dwarfed anything in Europe. The defending walls were tall and thick, and seemed to go on forever. The crusaders looked at their small force of about 20,000 men and wondered what they had gotten themselves into. Besides its enormous size and wealth attained by being the trading center of the world, the city boasted a powerful military tradition.
The political infighting that ravaged the empire in the previous decades, however, had eaten away at the city’s military strength and the fighting spirit of its citizens. Despite knowing for months that the crusaders were coming, the emperor, Alexius III, took few steps to defend the city. The once-mighty Greek fleet was rotting and incapable of any serious naval action; the city’s protective walls were actually in need of repair. But perhaps most important, the army lacked any fighting spirit. Its core consisted of thousands of mercenaries, primarily the Star Trek-oid Varangians, who were hard-fighting Scandinavians. The weaknesses of the Greek army were temporarily obscured by its sheer size.
Constantinople sits on the western — European — side of the Bosporus, a narrow channel of water separating Europe from Asia. The crusaders set up camp on the eastern — Asian — side of the Bosporus, where the emperor had allowed huge supplies of food to accumulate, apparently unaware that this might somehow help his enemy. The emperor arrayed his army along the European bank to repel a beach invasion.
To spark a coup against the emperor and avoid a fight, the double-deal-making doge took his young prince Alexius and paraded him on the prow of a ship sailing before the walls of Constantinople. Surely, the doge thought, the people of the city would identify their true leader and quickly rally to him and depose Alexius III, the false emperor. Wrong! No one in the city even recognized the prince. The little expedition returned to camp on the other side of the Bosporus completely deflated. The crusaders gulped hard as this latest stratagem from the doge failed, knowing their only option now was to conquer the massive city. The emperor’s army filled the beach below the massive city walls.
On the morning of July 5, 1203, the crusaders, with the blind doge in front, landed on the beach within sword’s length of the emperor’s massive army. The crusading knights galloped off their state-of-the-art, specially designed ships outfitted with landing ramps. The shocked and awed Greeks turned and fled. The emperor took flight so quickly he was forced to abandon his tent full of personal possessions. Building on this success, the crusaders soon crashed through the chain that protected Constantinople’s inner harbor, the Golden Horn, and penetrated the city’s weak spot.
Despite some successes at scavenging for supplies, the crusaders were running out of food. Now camped just outside of the city’s north wall, they knew they had to act quickly and either capture Constantinople or retreat. On July 17 the crusaders made their move. They split into two groups, with the more numerous French attacking from the land, and the Venetian knights assaulting the city walls from their ships. Time after time the Greeks threw back the attackers on both fronts. Sensing his army’s fading chances, the doge ordered his ship to charge toward the city. His reckless charge rallied the crusaders. No one wants to be outbraved by a blind old man. They rushed onto shore, and the Greeks turned and fled into the city through the gates, followed closely on their heels by the Venetians. Emperor Alexius III threw his army against the Venetians inside Constantinople. As the crusaders withdrew toward the gate, they set a fire to protect themselves; it quickly grew to engulf a large swath of the city, shielding the Venetians and allowing them to cling to a section of the city wall.
Finally, the shaky emperor Alexius III suddenly developed some moxie. He poured his army out of the city to crush the French crusader camp. Their numbers dwarfed the small band of crusaders who realized their slim chances to survive; they were running out of food, far from home, and facing ridiculous odds. The two armies closed and waited. A group of the crusading knights, breaking ranks, having endured humiliation, the pope’s anger, the fires of hell, and that persistent debt, dashed, forward to attack with desperate élan. There were no more than 500 of them, shining in their armor, including Baldwin of Flanders, one of their founding leaders. On they dashed, almost reaching the Greek lines. They stopped at a small river. Everyone waited. Surely, the Greeks would surge forward and overwhelm the small group of knights, sending the rest of the crusaders in retreat. As the tension mounted and the crusaders pondered their next move, Alexius III turned gutless once again and ordered the Greeks to do what they did best: turn and flee. The crusaders watched in awe as their huge enemy filed back into the city, the knights shadowing close by to drive home the humiliation. Emperor Alexius had blown it.
That night the emperor grabbed some gold, abandoned his wife, and with a coterie of associates fled the city. The Byzantine emperor, one of the two most powerful leaders in the Western world, ran away in disgrace with his army still undefeated and largely untested in battle.
As July 18 dawned, Constantinople found itself emperor free. Fearing the total destruction of the open city, the Greek leaders pulled the former, now blind, emperor Isaac, the father of Prince Alexius (and brother of Alexius III), from his basement prison and installed him as the new emperor, perhaps the quickest promotion from prisoner to emperor in history. At the crusader camp they clucked at their great fortune. They could now simply install the young prince to the throne with his father, collect their money, and put their murderous skills to better use capturing Jerusalem and killing Muslims.
A delegation of crusaders quickly trooped in to visit Isaac in his splendid palace, privately informing him of his son’s agreement — the one that brought them to Constantinople. Although shocked by the debt now owed by his young son, the new emperor, like fathers forever, had no choice but to bail out his free-spending son. Refusal would have unleashed another crusader assault, and with the emperor’s political base so weak, he was unsure how the army would respond. The Greeks threw open the city’s gates, and Alexius strode in. He was crowned Alexius IV, co-emperor with his father. The Greeks lavishly supplied food to the crusading army, which now graciously retired across the Golden Horn. Mission accomplished!
While the crusading nobles wandered the city gawking at the treasure trove of amazing religious artifacts, the Venetians sized up its profit-making potential. The father-son rulers started the usual work of a new regime, such as emptying the jails of enemies of the former rulers. This crowd, unfortunately for them both, included one Alexius Ducas, known as “Unibrow.”
To honor his agreement, the freshly crowned Alexius IV paid a large chunk of money to the crusaders, and they started mapping out the last leg of their circuitous trip to the Holy Land. A subprime borrower with debt management problems, Alexius could not pay the rest of his debt to the crusaders. To raise money he desperately ordered sacred religious objects, the envy of the Christian world, stripped from churches and melted down, a sacrilegious act in the eyes of the Greeks. Also, he was having problems quickly mustering the army he had promised to the crusaders. And, because the Greeks viewed him as a crusader puppet, he realized that without their army his days in power would be numbered. He needed time and was willing to plunge into a deeper debt hole to buy some.
He made the crusader leaders another offer they couldn’t refuse. He would pay the rest of what he owed, plus finance the fleet until September 1204, a year longer than the Venetians had agreed to hang around, and supply the crusader army. All they had to do was hang around until the following spring. By then, the co-emperor reasoned, he would have a firm grip on his empire. His Byzantine mind failed to register that it was perhaps unwise to have the crusaders stay longer when they were the cause of the resentment his people felt toward him.
Like the first deal, this one caused a rift among the crusader leaders. The deal-loving doge — surprise, surprise — said take the deal. The usual dissenters made the picayune point that Alexius still had not paid fully on his first promise. The doge and his crowd thought of the free supplies and the extra money the emperor would pay them. And he pointed out if they sailed right away they would reach the Holy Land at the start of winter, an acknowledged poor time to start killing Muslims. The doge then closed the deal by agreeing to keep his fleet teamed with the French until Christmas 1204. The crusaders doubled-down their investment on the young em peror.
Now fully invested in Alexius IV, the crusaders worked hard to ensure his success, but it was turning into a tough slog. A huge fire torched chunks of the city that hadn’t already been burned and which the devastated
