Alexios IV Angelos
Alexios IV promised the Fourth Crusade 200,000 silver marks to put him on the throne and was strangled six months after getting it. He was the son of Isaac II, who had been deposed and blinded by his own brother in 1195, and he escaped from confinement to the west in 1201 to look for someone to restore his father. He found the crusade at Zara, already diverted from Egypt and in debt to Venice, and made an offer no one in that position could refuse: the money, 10,000 troops for the campaign in Egypt, 500 knights permanently in the Holy Land, and the submission of the Greek church to Rome. He had no way of delivering any of it and appears to have believed the population would rise for him. The fleet arrived in June 1203, the usurper Alexios III fled, and the blind Isaac was brought out of prison; Alexios was crowned alongside his father in August. He then had to pay. He stripped the churches of plate, melted icons, and taxed a population that had not asked to be restored to him, and had raised perhaps half the sum by winter while camping the crusaders outside the walls where a fire had already destroyed a large part of the city. The court and the streets turned on him. Alexios Doukas Mourtzouphlos seized the throne in January 1204 and had him strangled in prison, and the crusaders sacked the city in April. He is the most consequential incompetent in Byzantine history. The crusade would have gone to Egypt or nowhere without his offer, and the sack of Constantinople destroyed the empire as a Mediterranean power four centuries before the Ottomans finished it.
- Lived: 1182 CE – 1204 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state
