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peninsula from the mainland of Thrace, were the celebrated walls built by Theodosius II in the fifth century: four and a half miles long, and elaborately constructed in four lines of defence – moat and three walls. Then all along the shoreline, enclosing the entire peninsula, a sea-wall protected the cityagainst amphibious attack. Some four hundred towers commanded these encircling defences, and behind them underground reservoirs, granaries and innumerable windmills made the city self-sufficient for months of siege. A huge chain, controlled by a winch on a hill above, blocked the entrance to the Golden Horn. The imperial army was concentrated within the capital, and at the core of it was a formidable praetorian guard of Danish and English mercenaries, the Varangian guard.
    Nobody had ever cracked these defences. For a thousand years they had kept the barbarians at bay. Six times Muslim armies had been beaten back from them; Goths, Huns, Hungarians, Bulgars, Serbs had all been repulsed. No wonder the Crusaders eyed the walls of Constantinople thoughtfully as they sailed by. ‘There was indeed no man so brave and daring,’ says Villehardouin convincingly, ‘that the flesh did not shudder at the sight…’
    The fleet anchored on the other side of the Bosphorus, on the Asian shore. The army encamped itself at Scutari, now Usküdar, where Florence Nightingale had her hospital six centuries later and where now, from the big turreted railway station on the waterfront, the trains run away to Anatolia, Aleppo, Baghdad and Teheran. The soldiers looted the surrounding countryside for victuals and souvenirs: the leaders of the Crusade took over one of the Byzantine Emperor’s several country palaces. It was an ominous scene from the battlements of Constantinople, across the water. You can easily see from one shore to the other, and the huge encampment on the foreshore there, its smoke in the daytime, its lights at night, the forested riggings of its ships off-shore, must have cast a chill in the heart. What was that great host preparing? Was it merely passing by, or was it inexplicably, beneath the banner of the Cross, about to attack this ancient fortress of Christ?
    The emperor did not wait to find out. His fleet, ramshackle in the Golden Horn, was in no condition to tackle the Crusade, but within a couple of days a squadron of his cavalry did ride down upon the Scutari encampment, being humiliatingly driven off. Two days later the Crusaders declared their purpose. They put Young Alexius on the deck of a warship, and displayed himbelow the walls of the city. They had come, they shouted, to place him upon the throne, since he was the true king and natural lord of Byzantium. ‘The man you now obey as your lord rules over you with no just or fair claim to be your emperor, in defiance of God and the right. Here is your rightful lord and master. If you rally to his side you will be doing as you ought, but if you hold back, we will do to you the very worst that we can.’
    These were specious arguments (long-winded, too, to be yelled into the wind from the deck of a galley) and the people’s predominant response, as they looked down at the Young Alexius, was ‘Never heard of him!’ Succession by coup or revolution had always been a feature of the Byzantine monarchy, and it was the accepted form for the populace to transfer their loyalties to a new emperor, however bloodily he had come to power. There was no suggestion that the people of Constantinople thought of Alexius III as an unlawful usurper. Hardly a single citizen defected from the imperial cause to join the pretender, just as nobody tried to rescue his blinded father Isaac, now old and derelict, from the dungeons in which he had so long been immured.
    So it had to be done by force. On 5 July 1203, the first assault ships crossed the Bosphorus, each galley towing a transport, and made for the mouth of the Golden Horn. Most previous assaults on Constantinople had been from