About this ebook
In 1203, eighteen-year-old Alexios escaped his uncle's prison and brought the stranded, debt-ridden Fourth Crusade an audacious offer: help restore his blinded father to the Byzantine throne, and he would deliver 200,000 silver marks, 10,000 troops, and Orthodox submission to Rome. They accepted.
What followed was nine months of escalating disaster. Alexios regained the throne but found the treasury empty. Payments failed. Three fires devastated the city. The population turned against their foreign-backed emperor. In January 1204, a palace coup overthrew him, and the young prince who had invited a crusading army to save him was strangled in a dungeon at twenty-two.
His death gave the crusaders the justification they needed.
This account reconstructs how one prince's impossible promises triggered the sack of Constantinople—the destruction of irreplaceable classical libraries, the desecration of Hagia Sophia, three days of violence that contemporaries condemned as worse than any Muslim conquest.
This is not a story of heroes. It is the anatomy of a disaster.
