By the winter of 1090, Constantinople hung on by a thread.

To say that times had been hard of late for the great city, still the largest and arguably the most magnificent that the world had ever seen would be a colossal understatement.

Ever since the catastrophic defeat at Manzikert in 1071,

against the Seljuk Turks,

and the even more devastating two decades-long civil war

that had followed in its wake,

the empire had lost the vast majority of its territory in Asia Minor,

lands that had been held by the Romans

since the days of Julius Caesar over a

thousand years before. By 1080, an estimated 78,000 square kilometres of Imperial territory

had gradually seen itself chipped away by the efforts of usurpers, regional strongmen, and invading

Turkic tribesmen. By 1090, just a scattering

of mountainous holdouts in the interior, and a few imperial enclaves on the Black Sea, remained

as an ever precarious bulwark against total Byzantine eviction from Asia Minor.

For the first time in close to 400 years, the great

city itself now stood on the very front line of enemy attack. The only consolation being that

for the very first time in five decades, an effective military commander, an able-bodied

administrator, sat on the imperial throne.

The young general, Alexius Comnenos, himself originally a usurper, had successfully

seized power in 1081, and since that time had made it his mission to save the empire.

He'd been fighting the Seljuks in the field since the age of 14, the Normans since his

early 20s, and by 1090, he'd been forced to put down innumerable other internal rebellions

...