That explains why the Emperor and his army were in tents—knowing that the Crusader attack was going to be directed against the Galata Tower, they had been deployed on the north side of the Golden Horn to protect it.
On the morning of July fifth, it’s no secret that the Crusaders are about to attack. We—the Emperor’s army—are fully geared up, the tower full of archers. On the hillside going down to the Bosporus are thousands of Byzantine soldiers fully armed and ready for the Crusaders to attack. None of them were really worried, because when you’re looking at that intense Bosporus current, it seems obvious that the Crusaders could not cut directly across in those particular ships—those ships weren’t built for the Bosporus, they were built for Alexandria, they were never supposed to be anywhere near Constantinople. Even if they could get across, they would have to anchor in that current, which would be extremely challenging, and then disembark without first being picked off by our archers. That was not going to happen. They were sailing into their own destruction. Of course, I knew better, but I kept my mouth shut and just let it all happen.
So the Crusader ships approach us. The Emperor gives the order for my contingent of VGs to reinforce the archers up in the Galata Tower. By the time I and my guys are up to where we have a decent vantage point, the archers in the tower are barraging the ships with fire-arrows, regular arrows, stones, we’re so sure we’re going to annihilate them and litter the Bosporus with their shit-stained armor.
But then something happened: the sides of the Crusaders’ ships broke open and thousands of knights on horseback came leaping out of the holds, straight into the water. In that moment of the Byzantines’ amazement, the archers on the boats began to shoot at us. After loosing one flight of arrows, they jumped into the water, ahead of the horses, with their bows and quivers held up over their heads, and as soon as they were in water shallow enough to keep their bowstrings dry, they began to shoot up the hillside. In full chain mail and some plate armor. As I said, this was my fourth Strand so I’d already seen it three times, but it was an astounding thing to watch. Makes footage of the Normandy landings look like nothing special.
Then the same thing happened that had happened on every Strand: the Emperor turned and fled, and most of his army fled with him. There wasn’t a battle, it was just them getting chased by the Crusaders along the shore of the Golden Horn, about a mile inland, where there was a bridge across the water that the Emperor’s army crossed over and then burned behind them.
The only part of the Emperor’s army that didn’t flee was the tower garrison, which was largely Varangian Guards but also partially local conscripts. I was still there. The whole hillside, including the imperial camp, was emptied. I knew I had about an hour and a half before the Crusaders returned. So I fulfilled my DEDE—went into the Emperor’s abandoned tent, got the relic, put it into the other tent so that it would be found by somebody we need it to be found by. So the DEDE was accomplished without incident just as on the other Strands.
Now I just had to wait to rendezvous with a KCW, and since I know how things pan out, I know there will be a KCW in the Crusaders’ army who can Send me back tomorrow. That’s what I had done the first three Strands. I just have to survive through the rest of what’s to come, without accidentally telegraphing anything to any of my cohort.
So I re-enter the tower. Approximately one hour later, as I knew, the Crusader army comes back and tries to get at the mechanism releasing the chain, but we have shitloads of arrows and, more important, fire-arrows. More specifically, fire-arrows made with Greek fire, which burns more when it touches water, so we’re making them weep down by the casing to the chain-release. Their squires are holding shields over their heads to protect them, with water-soaked hides over them, and we’re lighting the fucking shields on fire.
Their leader, the Marquis, finally calls them off. They pillage the Emperor’s camp (and the right guy finds the relic I moved, so my DEDE is officially a success despite what happened next) and spend the afternoon and evening hollering up to us in every language they can think of, trying to bribe us to just give up the tower. Obviously we don’t. So eventually they get drunk and squat in the Emperor’s camp for the night, celebrating. They know there’s only a couple dozen of us in the tower, and once they take us down, then they’ll have Galata, which means they’ll get into the harbor, which means they’ll get into the city. They know tomorrow is theirs.
But what they don’t know is that all through the night, what looks like regular ferry traffic across the harbor is actually thousands of armed soldiers, disguised like ragmen and coal sellers and Jews and fishermen, sneaking across from the walled city, up the hillside by Pera and into the tower. By dawn we are all packed in like anchovies. It’s a miracle nobody accidentally castrates anyone else, and the stench of all those bodies is so intense, it’s almost psychotropic.
The Crusaders think there’s approximately thirty soldiers inside, when it’s now nearly a hundred times that. In the morning, we wait for the moment when the Crusader knights are getting geared up with their squires’ help, and the grooms are saddling the horses—they all do it at the same time, which is ill-considered, because right at this moment, when they are all vulnerable, we hurl open the gates of the tower and a thousand soldiers burst out and rush the Crusaders, swords and axes swinging, spears flying—and at the same time, thousands more are shooting fire-arrows down the slope at everyone on the ships, who thought they weren’t even in the game today. We had a catapult on the roof of the tower that hurled boulders down into the Bosporus—they didn’t hit any of the ships but they made waves big enough to capsize the smaller ones. The whole Crusader army was almost literally caught with its pants down.