Greeks blamed on the crusaders. To add to the mix, father and son emperors started fighting among themselves. The aging Isaac, never known for his sharp mind, became even more irrational, inspiring ridicule and hatred from his people. He and Alexius squabbled as each tried to gain the political upper hand. The people, humiliated by defeat, debt, destruction of many of their religious icons, fire, and failed leaders, grew to hate the both of them, nearly as much as they hated the crusaders.
Exploiting this anger was Unibrow, leading the throw-out-the-crusader wing of the Greeks. Bowing to this growing pressure, Alexius stopped payments to the crusaders. In December the crusaders met with Alexius in his palace. Before the city’s nobles they harshly demanded he pay his debt or they would attack again. Insulted, Alexius had no choice but to reject the deal. To bow to the crusaders in front of the city’s nobles would have meant political suicide and probably assassination. The hostility was so great the crusader delegation fled the city in fear.
Hoping to avoid conflict and restore the flow of funds into his pocket, the now-triple-deal-making doge secretly met with Alexius. For a year the old man had nourished Alexius, carried him to the throne on his own ships, and honored every commitment he made. He simply wanted Alexius to honor his debts in return. But he could not, Alexius told the doge. Angry at the betrayal, and perhaps shamed that he had put so much faith in Alexius, the doge now turned on his protégé and vowed to destroy him.
He had a lot of help. Fed up with Alexius and his inability to stop the crusaders’ more frequent armed foraging into the countryside, crowds demanded the city’s leaders elect a new emperor. They chose a young noble, Nicholas Kannavos, and appointed him emperor on January 27, 1204. He never wanted the unenviable job.
Desperate, young Alexius, now sharing the throne with a third emperor, turned to his former friends/current enemies — the crusaders — for help. He proposed yet another deal. If the crusaders drove out Kannavos, he would give them his palace as security that he would honor his second pledge to honor his first pledge to pay them money and raise an army for them. This move to ally with the hated crusaders inflamed his people even further. Unibrow whipped up the anticrusader forces, and now the only option Alexius had to stay in power was pleading for the crusaders’ help.
That night it all crashed down on the twenty-two-year-old Alexius. Unibrow secured the treasury and the army, snuck into Alexius’s room, and took him prisoner. The next morning Unibrow was crowned the fifth living emperor of the tottering empire and the fourth alive in the city — three of them having recently been in prison. Unibrow then set out to winnow the crowded field of emperors. He sent his minions to Isaac’s house; here they either found the blind man dead or helped him along on his journey. One down. Within days Unibrow seized the unlucky Kannavos and threw him into prison, where he quickly died. Alexius IV was the only competitor left. Unibrow then turned his wrath toward the crusaders and stopped the flow of supplies, and locked them out of the city.
Unibrow turned up the pressure a notch on the crusaders by leading raiding parties against them. But the Greeks, as had become their habit, turned and fled when confronted by a group of knights. Being new to the emperorship and not having learned yet how to retreat correctly, Unibrow lost the emperor’s standard and one of the leading Christian religious icons he took into battle. The crusaders paraded these precious items before the city to mock Unibrow’s failure. Sensing his troops were not equal to the task of facing down the battle-hardened crusaders, Unibrow called a parley with the doge to work out their differences. The doge demanded that Unibrow release Alexius and honor all the young man’s commitments. Unibrow found himself pushed into a corner. If he fought the crusaders it would be an uphill struggle with his underpowered, prone-to-flight army. Within the city he ruled over a divided populace with Alexius still retaining some support. If he eliminated Alexius, however, it would only further provoke the crusaders. He had no winning hand. Still, he had to take some sort of stand, so he took a leap into the unknown: on February 8, 1204, he visited his rival in prison and stabbed him to death. Another emperor bites the dust. Having slain Alexius did not stop Unibrow from mourning sorrowfully at the state funeral he organized to bring the city together in grief under his leadership. But Unibrow’s power play had ended all chance of reconciliation with the crusaders. With Alexius alive the crusaders still held out hope he would honor his debts. With his death the money and any hope of finishing the crusade with a happy ending in Jerusalem was gone. Unibrow now had to pay one way or another.
The frustrated crusaders found themselves once again outside the city walls, far from home, unable to reach Jerusalem, and faced with the job of attacking the great city for a second time. They were no closer to Jerusalem than when they started two years earlier. They readily preferred death in combat to eternal humiliation. So they prepared for a war.
As the crusaders spent the next two months preparing their ships and siege machines, they also took the equally important step of splitting in advance the anticipated booty. As might be expected, the triple-deal-making doge walked away with the lion’s share of the loot, three-quarters of every cent until they added up to 200,000 marks. Even at this late date the doge was unwilling to relinquish any of his bar-gained-for money for the good of the crusaders. The invaders also agreed to stay for another year in Constantinople so that the new emperor, to be selected later, would have time to stabilize the security situation in his new prize. Jerusalem would have to wait yet again. They agreed to sack Constantinople, the greatest of all Christian cities, but agreed to not touch the women and churches. Unibrow feverishly built the mighty walls even higher and prepared his army.
On the morning of April 9, 1204, the crusaders launched their assault. They attacked the walls with fury but faced a deadly torrent of rocks from the Greeks. Having made no progress and with casualties mounting, the crusaders turned back. The Greeks celebrated their rare victory over the knights by mooning their enemy.
Dejected from the defeat, Boniface, the doge, and the other crusading leaders turned to the Church leaders to rebuild morale among the shattered troops. They succeeded brilliantly by denouncing the Greeks as worse than Jews. As a final step of purity before God to guarantee victory, the crusaders cast out their prostitutes from the camp. Such self-sacrifice had rarely been endured by crusading armies.
The crusaders launched their second assault on the morning of April 12, from both land and sea. The battle grew in intensity as both sides poured in more troops. The crusaders catapulted pots of flaming liquid at the Greeks, who countered with rocks, arrows, and fire of their own. Despite their determined fury, the crusaders could not penetrate the city’s massive walls. Then fortune blessed the crusaders. The wind shifted, pushing the doge’s ships flush against the city’s walls. Knights, fighting with the fury of the desperately indebted, leapt from the ship’s attack bridges, nearly one hundred feet above the water, onto the city’s walls. The Greeks slashed to death the first leaping knight. The second one, however, withstood the Greeks’ battering, rose to his feet in full armor, and as had become their trademark, the Greeks turned and fled. Other crusaders quickly followed, and a section of the wall was securely in crusading hands. With the same daring the crusaders soon conquered other sections of the great city’s wall.
While focused on this threat, the Greeks took their eyes off perhaps their most vulnerable point. Along the water’s edge, the city’s walls had gates, which in peacetime were used for loading and unloading merchant ships. These gates were sealed when the crusaders first approached the city in 1203. But apparently this work was not as sturdy as the regular sections of the wall. Focusing on this vulnerability, groups of Special Forces knights hacked away at one gate with swords and picks while other knights defended them from barrages of stones and boiling pitch. The ferocious knights now punched a small hole in the wall. They peered through and saw swarms of Greeks awaiting them. Whichever knight dared to go through first was on a sure suicide mission. One of the crusading churchmen, Aleumes, dove through the tiny opening and emerged in the city. He charged at the Greeks, a lone fighter with a sword, not even a knight, and, lo and behold, what surely has become an enshrined custom by this time, the Greeks turned and fled. More knights seeped through the opening, and soon nearly three dozen crusaders were inside the city. Unibrow led a charge to throw them out, but as he approached the knights he stopped, carefully considered the situation and — can it be true? — turned and fled. A handful of crusading knights had scattered the mighty Greek emperor and his troops.
Knights now flooded into the city. They fanned out and headed to Unibrow’s headquarters. His loyal guard caught one glimpse of the bloodthirsty crusaders… and turned and fled. In fact, with the wholesale flooding of knights into the city, the Greek custom of turning and fleeing reached an impressive scale.
That night, realizing that his position was untenable, Unibrow followed the well-trod path of prior emperors and fled the city. As the city’s elite awoke the next morning, April 13, they heard the news of the emperor’s defection. To organize resistance, they drew lots to select the new emperor because no clearheaded person was even willing to volunteer for the job. The unfortunate winner was Constantine Lascaris. He urged everyone to resist the crusaders. But at the first sight of the knights just limbering up for the day’s fight, the Greeks turned and fled. Their new emperor joined them in hastily abandoning the city, the second emperor in a day to flee and the third in
