In the month of April (1203) the fourth Crusade set sail in one hundred and seventy large vessels, and some smaller ships, for Constantinople. Alexis awoke from his dreams to find that a score of worn triremes was all the navy he possessed, and he must resign himself to meet a siege of his capital. The vivid story of the fall of Constantinople cannot be told here. Toward the end of June the Crusaders landed near Chalcedon and gazed with covetous eyes, most of them for the first time, at the innumerable spires of churches--schismatical churches, and therefore fair prey--that rose above the clustered houses, the princely villas that shone between the cypresses in the wealthier suburbs, and the bronze roofs and marble walls of the superb palaces which glittered in the sun among the vast imperial gardens on either side of the Sea of Marmora. When the news of their sailing had reached Alexis he had made it a table joke; now he and his trembled within the walls of their capital. By the middle of July the Crusaders were encamped outside the land walls; the Venetians lay beneath the walls which girt the shores; and the great assault began. Alexis, from a tower of the Blachernæ palace, saw the double-edged axes of the brave English Varangians scatter the Germans and Italians, but he learned that the Venetians had broken in. Packing his treasures and his money, he took ship at dawn of the following day, with his daughter Irene, and fled to Thrace, where a retreat had been prudently prepared for such an emergency. George Acropolites, whose chronicle now opens, says that he took Euphrosyne, but Nicetas, an eyewitness, more correctly observes that the imperial egoist deserted his wife, his city and his Empire.