Death of Alexios I Komnenos

August 15, 1118

After thirty-seven years stitching the Byzantine Empire back together from the wreckage of Manzikert, the emperor who had summoned the First Crusade and then watched it march past him died in Constantinople. His daughter Anna began writing her account of his reign, the Alexiad. Her history, composed in classicizing Greek, remains the single most important source for the First Crusade from the Byzantine perspective.