The defenders of Nicea, meanwhile, had dispatched messengers to Kilij-Arslan, who was occupied with affairs on the eastern frontiers of his sultanate (presumably having believed that he had successfully dispatched with the Frankish threat by wiping out Peter the Hermit’s army). Hearing that his capital was in trouble, he returned quickly, arriving in the mountains around the city by Friday, May 14 (in 1097 that happened to be Ascension Day, the day that Christ rose into heaven), the day the siege proper began. According to Albert, immediately upon arrival Kilij-Arslan sent two spies, posing as Christians, to study the Latin armies and then to make their way into the city to prepare the citizens for a coordinated attack two days later on May 16. On that day Kilij-Arslan would lead a charge from the mountains on the south of the city, with all of the cavalry he had recruited (500,000 men, Albert recounted, with pardonable exaggeration), and the garrison should dispatch all of its men from the city gates. With surprise and numbers, they should be able to destroy this latest Frankish army just as they had done earlier with Peter the Hermit’s.4
The roads taken from Constantinople to Antioch
Presumably, the two spies posed as Greek or Syrian Christians and tried to integrate themselves into the 2,000 or so men whom Alexius’s advisor Tetigus had brought to the siege. The disguise didn’t work. A few of the pilgrims stationed around the camp’s perimeter spotted their approach, killed one of them, and captured the other. He was taken before Bohemond and Godfrey, and probably Tetigus, too, who barely had time to threaten the spy with torture before he was telling them all about Kilij-Arslan’s plans. The spy also promised, Albert said, to embrace Christianity—a point that Albert found puzzling. Surely the Muslims would be as passionate about their religion as were the Franks.
It is likely that the spy’s willingness to convert represented something other than fickleness on his part, something that Albert himself could not grasp. It was the story of Nicea writ small. The men whom Kilij-Arslan had sent out in advance likely spoke Greek and likely had, until recently, been subjects of Alexius Comnenus, just as Alexius himself had from time to time been allied with the Seljuk Turks. The Franks, now “in the land of Turks,” saw the world with moral clarity—good and evil, Christian and Saracen. Not so for this spy. For him, as for most of the Niceans, it was a world of shifting alliances. The question was not whether Christianity or unbelief would prevail, but whether they would stay with the new Turkish regime or return to their former Byzantine administrators. Tetigus and Bohemond understood these distinctions. The other princes may have as well. It is unclear how well the rest of the army realized them. The Franks at Nicea, who imagined themselves “armed with the sign of the cross” or “offering their bodies to the fates, joyfully seeking the prizes of death,” would have been displeased at the thought that their war was not about enacting God’s plans on earth but rather about restoring balance to the complex network of Byzantine-Turkish alliances.5
Setting aside politics, the princes moved quickly to meet the danger presented by Kilij-Arslan’s arrival. Immediately, they dispatched their own messengers back along the recently cleared pathway, decorated with crosses, to find Raymond of Saint-Gilles and his army and to urge them to hasten their march to the city. The messengers met up with the count, now traveling again with Bishop Adhémar of le Puy, who had been delayed at Thessalonica by illness for nearly four months. They were still about two days’ march from the city. Nevertheless, Raymond and Adhémar responded with due haste. They ordered their men to march through the night, and they arrived at Nicea the next morning, May 16, 1097. They were still in the process of establishing their camps on the south side of the city when Kilij-Arslan rode down from the mountains and the battle began.
It seems to have been quick and decisive. Kilij-Arslan was expecting to face a much smaller army. Raymond’s arrival, in fact, had probably doubled the size of the Frankish host. Kilij-Arslan had also been expecting to have a clear lane around the south side of the city. Instead, because of Raymond’s camps, his army was caught up in a fairly confined space. The Provençals were doubtless exhausted from the overnight march and were still in the process of setting up tents, but they managed to hold off the initial attack and to keep the Turks from encircling them according to their custom. Adhémar urged the Provençals on, delivering the first of many battlefield orations designed to remind them of who they were and why they fought: “Oh race of people dedicated to God, you have given up all of your riches for God’s love—your fields, your vineyards and your castles too! Now eternal life is at hand for you, indeed for anyone who might be crowned a martyr in battle! Go forth confidently against these enemies of the living God, and God will allow you today to achieve victory!” Godfrey’s army, encamped nearby on the eastern side of the city and expecting just such an attack, joined the fight quickly enough for some of his men to hear the bishop’s sermon. Within a short time, Kilij-Arslan’s cavalry was put to flight. Even Anna Comnena acknowledged that it was “a glorious victory” for the Kelts.6
More remarkable than the battle was its aftermath. Albert of Aachen reported that, in celebration, “the Christians cut off the heads of the wounded and the dead and carried them back to their tents tied to the girths of the saddles and returned joyfully to their companions who had stayed behind in the camps around the city, to keep the besieged from escaping.” If Albert’s numbers are correct, the Franks must have made a grisly spectacle. They had gathered together over one thousand heads to send back to Alexius as proof of their victory. Other heads they threw into the city to frighten the defenders into surrender. Anna Comnena did not recall the Franks using Saracen skulls for saddle decorations, but she did remember the decapitations: “The heads of many Turks they stuck on the ends of spears and came back carrying these like standards, so that the barbarians, recognizing afar off what had happened and being frightened by this defeat at their first encounter, might not be so eager for battle in the future.”7
In treating their enemies this way, were the Franks following the standard practices of eleventh-century warfare? This was, after all, a brutal time. Outside of the crusade, however, it is difficult to find evidence for Frankish warriors engaging in similar conduct. Questions of morality aside, desecration of the dead within Europe created bad publicity. William the Conqueror’s conduct following the Battle of Hastings provides a nice comparison. In the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, according to William’s biographer, it would have been fitting to leave the Anglo-Saxon dead unburied, “fodder for vultures and wolves. But to William such a punishment seemed cruel. He allowed anyone who wished freely to collect and bury the dead.” William himself disposed of his enemy King Harold’s body. He refused even to turn it over to Harold’s mother, apparently out of respect for the other dead Englishmen. It did not seem just, William felt, to give a proper burial to the man who had been responsible for such carnage.
In even the most savage conflicts in the Middle Ages—and Hastings was one of the worst—there were expectations about how to treat the enemy dead. By collecting heads from both the wounded and the dead, hanging them from saddles, and giving them away as presents, the Franks were challenging their own standards of conduct. And they did this for a reason: to inspire genuine horror among the enemy, to break its will to resist, and, for the pilgrims as much as for the Turks, to show that the old rules of war did not apply to the crusade.8
A Troubling Victory
The remainder of the siege of Nicea went more or less as Alexius would have wanted. The rest of the army arrived on June 3 and was able to close all land access to the city. But as long as the lake remained open, the city couldn’t be completely cut off from the outside world. There were only two options available for taking Nicea: to break down the walls or to establish a blockade on the lake.
Initially, the crusaders focused on the walls. The most direct approach was to charge the ramparts with siege ladders, with covering fire from catapults and archers, and to climb into the city. But with Nicea’s cunningl
y arranged towers, no one could get close to the walls, no matter the ballistic support. If the armies were to have any success, they needed some kind of protection—specifically, hard armored shells designed to cover small groups of soldiers, allowing them to approach the walls and carry out siege operations. The first model, built by German soldiers, was called a “fox.” Too heavy for its own good, the machine collapsed as it approached the walls, killing all twenty men beneath it. The second model, called, appropriately, the “tortoise,” was built by the Provençal soldiers and had more success. It got close enough to the walls to allow pilgrims to start battering and picking at the rocks, digging their way into the city. The Turks, however, simply piled up more rocks to fill in the places where the crusaders had dug. No matter how much the Franks succeeded in weakening or clearing out the wall, the defenders just as quickly reinforced it.
Eventually, the Turks unleashed a forceful assault against the tortoise and managed to set it alight with “a mixture of grease, oil, and pitch with coarse flax and burning torches hurled from the walls.” It was, in effect, a form of Greek Fire, perhaps the most feared and famous chemical weapon of the Middle Ages. Common as it was in the East—Alexius had vessels rigged up with terrifying animal heads that would spit Greek Fire at enemy ships—this was probably the crusaders’ first direct experience of it. Its exact composition was a guarded secret (there certainly was more than one recipe), but its destructive effects were legendary. Not only was Greek Fire resistant to water; it could even burn on water. The tortoise never stood a chance. Those not killed by the fire were shot down with arrows or crushed by stones hurled from defenders on the city walls.9
Finally, a Lombard engineer boasted that for a price he could bring down one of the towers. In exchange for “fifteen pounds of the coins of Chartres,” he designed and assembled a type of “tortoise,” with walls that sloped at such an angle that none of the enemy’s weapons could stick to it. Whatever the enemy threw against it, even Greek Fire, rolled off harmlessly. Directing operations from below the tortoise, the engineer had a group of sappers dig beneath the tower walls, putting wooden beams into place as others removed the earth, so that the structure would not collapse on top of them. “Now that a truly great cave had been dug, in width and length,” the Lombard engineer directed the men to fill the spaces between the beams and the tower foundation with kindling and then to set it alight. The flames rapidly grew in strength, consuming all of the beams that the engineer had set in place and, with the foundation suddenly gone, the entire structure collapsed. Darkness fell before the army could take advantage of this good fortune, and anticipating the worst, Kilij-Arslan’s wife slipped out of the city, hoping to escape danger via the Ascanian Lake. Inside Nicea, the defenders worked through the night, moving the rubble of the tower around in such a way that, by sunrise, the entry to the city was again blocked. Even so, at this point the Niceans must have begun to suspect that their city was lost.10
And the situation was worse still, as Kilij-Arslan’s wife may have been the first to learn. Her attempt to escape via the lake was foiled when a Christian ship intercepted her boat and imprisoned her. While most of the Franks had been working so hard to bring down the walls of Nicea, the army’s leaders had been exploring the other possible route to victory: shutting down the lake. They had sent word to Alexius, who was keeping an eye on the siege from the nearby city of Pelekanum, and explained that they needed boats if they were to complete their blockade. Alexius readily agreed and arranged to have several large ships sent to Civitot. From there a contingent of knights and foot soldiers collected the ships and, through the use of ropes, carts, oxen, and horses, carried the vessels seven miles overland and over mountains to put them on the Ascanian Lake. The Niceans thus awoke to find that one of their walls had been seriously compromised and the lake and all of their supplies had been cut off. Kilij-Arslan had left them to their own devices. Surrender was inevitable. The only question was how to handle it.11
Alexius made the decision easy. He sent Boutoumites, one of his generals, accompanied by a band of his Turcopoles, to make contact with Nicea’s leaders. Boutoumites was armed with a chrysobull—an impressive imperial document usually sealed in gold and written in purple ink—that assured the Turks of merciful treatment and an abundance of gifts. Alexius promised his erstwhile enemies immunity from Byzantine justice, and, more importantly and immediately, protection from the Franks, who were, he seemed to indicate, the greater cause for worry. The Turks were likely beginning to realize that the emperor was right: The Franks were not Byzantine mercenaries. They were instruments of divine wrath who viewed Muslims as God’s enemies. If they took the city, a general slaughter would surely follow. The Turks therefore did the only sensible thing and surrendered to the Greeks.
According to Anna Comnena, there was one final bit of stagecraft to be managed, mainly for the benefit of the Franks. Boutoumites, no doubt in collaboration with Tetigus, had told the Franks that there would be a final attack against the city on the morning of June 19. The Franks would strike from the ground and the Greeks from the sea. With the Turks, meanwhile, Boutoumites arranged to have the city’s gates thrown open immediately so that his armies could enter safely and unopposed while his supposed allies were otherwise engaged. It was to be, she said, a “drama of betrayal carefully planned by Alexius” and deliberately concealed from the Kelts. The next day, trumpet blasts sounded and the Franks charged the ramparts. But they had barely begun to fight when imperial standards appeared on the ramparts. Nicea had fallen, and the Franks were still shut outside its walls. Alexius ordered the Turkish leaders shuttled out of the city after nightfall, lest the Franks capture them, and taken to Pelekanum in small groups, lest they have the opportunity to escape, reorganize, and cause him further grief. In Pelekanum he received the prisoners a few at a time and accepted terms of surrender from them. In sum, he treated them exactly as he had the Frankish leaders upon their arrivals at Constantinople.12
The quick victory was evidently a surprise for the Franks. Reactions were mixed. By and large the leaders were pleased. According to the knight Anselm of Ribemont, on June 19, 1097, the citizens of Nicea, making a circuit of the walls and carrying crosses and imperial banners, “reconciled the city to the Lord, as Greeks and Latins inside and outside walls shouted together, ‘Glory to you, Lord!’” God had won a great victory, and the Frankish princes had won more treasure. Alexius invited them to an imperial residence on a nearby island and conferred with them about the next stages of their journey, rewarding them with still more treasure. To the knights he gave “gold, jewels, silver, cloaks, horses and such,” and to the foot soldiers he distributed ample food or else a few bronze coins.
But not everyone was impressed by this generosity; a lot of potential wealth had been lost because the army hadn’t plundered the city. As the Provençal priest Raymond of Aguilers observed caustically, “After Alexius had accepted the city he showed so much thanks to the army that for as long as he lives the people will always curse him and declare him a traitor.” Some further grumbled about the wide disparity between the treasures being given to the rich and the alms being distributed to the poor. These complaints also led to what appears to be an outlandish conspiracy theory: The emperor had spared the citizens of Nicea so that he might one day arm them and use them to attack the Franks and bring their pilgrimage to an end. Beyond these grievances, many pilgrims would have been angry simply because there was not enough time for them to visit Nicea and pray in its churches. They would spend no more than ten days before its walls, and since Alexius would only allow them to enter the city in small groups, just a few hundred of the 100,000 pilgrims would have had a chance to view the magnificent old city. Simply put, something about this victory didn’t smell right.13
On a more fundamental level, the Frankish warriors wanted blood. After seven weeks of often-brutal combat, they needed to take some measure of revenge. The Niceans had massacred the armies of Peter the Hermit and left their bod
ies at Nicomedia to rot. They had used a makeshift grapple that could reach down over the ramparts and pluck up Christian bodies from the ground by their chain mail armor. They hung one long-dead Norman from a noose in sight of the armies, as if executing him again. These sacrifices cried out for vengeance—never mind that the Franks had also made a habit of decapitating dead Turks and making sport with their severed heads. But vengeance would have to wait while Alexius fêted the crusade leaders and the Turkish generals in turns.14
Even Fulcher of Chartres, normally a sympathetic reporter of Greek affairs, felt that something had gone awry at Nicea. After the Franks had worn the city down with a long siege “and made the Turks frightened with our frequent attacks, talks were opened through envoys with the emperor, and they cunningly handed the city over to him, although it had almost been brought down through strength and cleverness. And then the Turks allowed entry into the city to Turcopoles sent by the emperor.” Alexius, in sum, had gotten what he had wanted and the Turks had gotten to keep their lives. The Franks had gotten almost nothing. True, Alexius had enriched their princes, but he had given only a pittance to everyone else. He had also, true to his word, given the Latins further advice on how to fight the Saracens, urging them to begin negotiations with the enemy. Specifically, he advised them to send a legation to Egypt since these infidels, who were Shi’i, were the confirmed enemies of the Turks, who were Sunni. The Franks accepted his advice and sent at least three envoys to Egypt, hoping that the caliph would join them in their fight and would, perhaps, embrace Christianity. The story of their mission survives in the historical record in only the faintest of outlines, probably a sign of the ambivalence, or embarrassment, that the strategy inspired among the army in general.15
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