In early May 1097 about two-thirds of the crusading army set
out for Nicaea. The forces led by Godfrey, Robert of Flanders, Hugh of
Vermandois, and the southern Italian Normans, currently in the care of Tancred,
first congregated at the town of Nicomedia. Here they were joined by Peter the
Hermit, beleaguered leader of the People’s Crusade, who had been eking out an
existence around Constantinople and Bithynia since October 1096. Peter must
have been glad to approach Nicaea from the north, rather than retrace his
ill-fated steps from Civetot – a group of crusaders who took that route some
weeks later were horrified and saddened to discover ‘many severed heads and
bones of the dead lying on the plains near [the] sea’, the unholy graveyard of
Peter’s followers. Coming from Nicomedia, the main army chose to follow the
ancient Roman road running south over the mountains to Nicaea. This route was
direct, but heavily overgrown, so 3,000 men were sent ahead to clear the way
with axes and swords, and then mark the route with crosses, establishing a
well-defined line of communication back towards Constantinople. On 6 May
Godfrey and his companions reached Nicaea, but even at this late stage, as the
crusaders approached their first Muslim target, they were woefully unprepared
for what one contemporary would later call ‘the first storm of war’.
Serving the emperor
The crusade was still operating as a rough conglomeration of
Latin armies, with little or no central co-ordination, much less organisation.
Godfrey, Hugh, Tancred and Robert of Flanders seem to have moved on Nicaea
without establishing a coherent plan of action, and their arrival was badly
mistimed. When the city was reached on the 6th, their forces were left camped
before it, isolated and inert, for eight dangerous days. It was not until the
14th, by which time Bohemond had arrived to solve the initial logistical
problems surrounding the supply of food, that the crusaders moved in to lay
siege to Nicaea. Even then they were fighting under strength, and it would be
another two weeks before the full complement of the First Crusade’s armies was
brought to bear. This rather ramshackle, piecemeal deployment was extremely
risky. Only Kilij Arslan’s continued absence prevented an uncomfortable delay
from becoming a potential disaster. The crusaders’ lack of co-ordinated action
and purposeful leadership was to some extent a symptom of their relationship
with Byzantium.
In besieging Nicaea, the crusaders were carrying out the
emperor’s will. They had come to Constantinople with half-formed ideas of
aiding the eastern Churches and marching on Jerusalem, perhaps expecting the
emperor himself to take personal command of the expedition. Alexius had other
ideas. He certainly wanted to direct and make use of the crusading armies –
after all they had come east, at least partially, in response to his call for
military aid – and his primary goal was the recovery of Nicaea. The Seljuq
capital was far too close to Constantinople for comfort, but the city had
stubbornly resisted all of Alexius’ attempts to recapture it. Indeed, one Greek
source even suggested that ‘the emperor, who had thoroughly investigated
Nicaea, and on many occasions, judged that it could not possibly be captured’.
His plan was to throw his new weapon, the crusading horde, against the city,
and then watch what happened from a safe distance. Alexius had absolutely no
intention of leading the campaign in person, judging the ‘barbarian’ Franks to
be too unpredictable and suspecting that this weapon might turn on its master.
By avoiding direct involvement, Alexius was also able to maintain a thin façade
of impartiality, leaving a door open for diplomacy and détente with Kilij
Arslan should the siege fail. So it was that Alexius, ever the shrewd and
calculating politician, established his camp at Pelekanum, to the west of
Nicomedia.
It is true that the emperor put the interests of his empire
above those of the crusade, even that he coldly exploited the Franks to further
his own ambitions, and, on this basis, most modern historians have painted a
picture of immediate tension and distrust when characterising the crusaders’
relationship with Byzantium at Nicaea. This image has been shaped by eyewitness
sources, who wrote with the benefit of hindsight, knowing how later events
would poison relations. In reality, the siege of Nicaea was a largely
collaborative venture, in which Latins and Greeks co-operated effectively, and
the crusaders willingly fought for the Byzantine Empire. Even though Alexius
refused to participate in person, it was of course in his interests to see the
crusaders succeed at Nicaea. To this end, he nominated military advisers to
support and oversee the Franks. Manuel Boutoumites, one of his most experienced
lieutenants, accompanied Godfrey and the first group of crusaders to arrive at
Nicaea. Indeed, Manuel was initially granted entry into the city to discuss a
negotiated surrender, but, when this fell through, he lent his military
expertise to the Latin siege preparations. A few weeks later, a second adviser,
Taticius, arrived at the head of 2,000 Byzantine troops, to command the Nicaea
campaign. Later he would become Alexius’ chief representative among the
crusaders. Taticius was an interesting choice; a member of the imperial
household and experienced in battle, he was reportedly ‘a valiant fighter, a
man who kept his head under combat conditions’, but he was, at the same time, a
eunuch. He had an excellent knowledge of Nicaea’s defences, having led the last
Greek assault on the city more than a decade earlier. Taticius was a striking
figure – born of half-Arab, half-Greek parentage, his nose had been cut off
earlier in his military career and he wore a metal replica in its place.
Alexius also took steps to ensure that the crusaders had
ready access to food and supplies. On his orders, the poorer Franks were given
money and free provisions. Merchant ships were brought from across the
Mediterranean to set up markets at the port of Civetot, where corn, meat, wine,
barley and oil could be bought, while the traffic along the road back to
Nicomedia must have been nearly constant. The Greeks were obviously committed
to this complex web of logistical support, because, in spite of the immense
size of the crusader army, we hear few reports of severe shortages or starvation.
Later sieges would not always be so efficient.5
Even with Byzantine support, Nicaea’s defences presented a
formidable challenge. Today the ancient city has crumbled to become little more
than a backwater village. Iznik, as it is now named in modern Turkish, is still
surrounded by decrepit fortifications, but its quiet, unassuming pace of life
gives little sense of its place in history. It is hard to imagine that this was
once one of the great cities of Rome and Byzantium. In 325 CE the first Christian
emperor of Rome, Constantine the Great, held a monumental Church council at
Nicaea, attended by more than 300 bishops from across the known world, at which
the Nicene Creed, which still serves to define the Christian faith, was
adopted. When the First Crusade arrived in 1097 Nicaea remained an imposing
stronghold. One Frankish eyewitness later recalled:
Nicaea [was] a city well protected by natural terrain and
clever fortifications. Its natural defences consisted of a great lake lapping
at its walls and a ditch, brimful of runoff water from nearby streams, blocking
the entrance on three sides. Skilful men had enclosed Nicaea with such lofty
walls that the city feared neither the attack of enemies nor the force of any
machine.
Located in a fertile basin, surrounded by hills, Nicaea lies
on the eastern shore of the massive Askanian Lake, which stretches to more than
forty kilometres in length. To the north, east and south a defensive wall, five
kilometres long, enclosed the remaining three sides of the city, reaching to
ten metres in height, punctuated by more than a hundred towers, and reinforced
by a double ditch. Its capture would be no simple task, but the crusaders had
one major advantage – sheer weight of numbers. When the siege began, in
mid-May, the Franks were able to blockade only the city’s northern and eastern
gates, but by early June, with the majority of the crusader forces now
assembled, it became possible to encircle Nicaea’s land walls.
In command of the masses
This was the first time that the main army of the First
Crusade had come together. Franks, Greeks and Muslims alike were awestruck by
the spectacle. One Byzantine contemporary described the crusaders as ‘a
countless multitude of locusts, so great as to resemble clouds and overcast the
sun when it flew’. A Latin eyewitness recalled, ‘Then the many armies there
were united into one, which those who were skilled in reckoning estimate at
600,000 strong for war. Of these there were 100,000 fully armed men [and a mass
of] unarmed, that is clerics, monks, women, and little children.’
Medieval writers were notoriously poor judges of manpower,
and these figures were probably a gross exaggeration, wild guesses designed to
convey the enormous scale of the army. Even so, the First Crusade did represent
the largest single mobilisation of European troops in centuries. At our best
estimate, some 75,000 Latins gathered at Nicaea, of whom perhaps 7,500 were
fully armed, mounted knights and a further 5,000 were infantry. This was, of
course, a composite force, one mass made up of many smaller parts. All shared a
common faith – Latin Christianity – but in other ways they were quite
disparate, drawn from across western Europe, born into diverse political and
cultural surroundings. Many had been enemies before the expedition began. They
even faced a profound communication barrier: Fulcher of Chartres remarked, ‘Who
ever heard such a mixture of languages in one army, since there were French,
Flemings, Frisians, Gauls, Allobroges, Lotharingians, Allemani, Bavarians,
Normans, English, Scots, Aquitanians, Italians, Dacian, Apulians, Iberians,
Bretons, Greeks and Armenians? If any Breton or Teuton wished to question me, I
could neither understand nor answer.’
To make matters worse, the crusade had no single leader. The
pope’s legate, or representative, Adhémar of Le Puy, could claim spiritual
primacy, but overall strategic command could be contested by up to seven of the
most powerful crusading lords, or princes. By the dictates of military logic,
this would appear to have been a recipe for disaster. At Nicaea, the crusaders
were, for the first time, forced to confront this problem. The Emperor Alexius
might be the nominal leader of the campaign, but he had absented himself from
the siege and, while his lieutenant Taticius was the official
commander-in-chief, in practice he never wielded total power. From Nicaea
onwards, the crusaders were forced to feel their way towards an organisational
structure, through a process of experimentation and innovation. Within a few weeks
they instituted a new decision-making structure – a council of princes – in
which the highest echelon of crusade leaders, men such as Raymond of Toulouse
and Bohemond of Taranto, met to discuss and agree policy. On the whole, this
system was remarkably successful. One of its first pronouncements saw the
creation of a common crusader fund through which all plunder could be
channelled and redistributed.
It was the council of princes that decided to adopt what
might be termed a combined siege strategy to overcome Nicaea’s defences. In
this method two styles of siege warfare were deployed simultaneously. On the
one hand, the Franks sought to blockade the city, cutting it off from the
outside world and grinding it into submission through physical and psychological
isolation, in a close-encirclement siege. At the same time, the crusaders
actively pursued the more aggressive strategy of an assault siege. This
involved building various machines of war – catapults, battering-rams,
bombardment screens – which might allow them literally to bludgeon their way
into the city through direct attack. On 14 May 1097 Bohemond and the southern
Italian Normans made camp before Nicaea’s northern gate, while Godfrey of
Bouillon and Robert of Flanders were deployed to the east, and work began on a
series of siege engines.
The crusaders’ arrival terrified the Turkish garrison of
Nicaea. The city would probably have been manned by no more than a few thousand
troops, each aware that Nicaea offered irresistibly ripe pickings to the
massive Frankish horde. Kilij Arslan’s capital stood not only as a bastion of
the sultan’s military and political pride, it was also home to his treasury.
Under these circumstances, the garrison rightly judged that the crusaders would
throw every resource into the siege. Against such odds, the Turks could not
hope to prevail, and so in the second week of May they came close to agreeing
terms with Manuel Boutoumites, the emperor’s envoy. But, suddenly, they changed
their minds and expelled him from the city.
