The brother was now in power and the nineteen-year old Prince Alexios was after revenge. No promise was too outlandish for him to make, and so it was with a straight face that he had approached the leaders of the Fourth Crusade with an offer to pay them two hundred thousand silver marks, provide a permanent garrison of five hundred knights to the kingdom of Jerusalem, and bind over the city of Constantinople to the religious authority of the pope in Rome—if they would just place him on the throne from which his father had been toppled.
