“Battle of Nicaea (1097)”, Igor Dzis
The first challenge
It was only on 15 May that the Franks found out why, when
two Turkish spies were caught in the Frankish camp masquerading as Christians.
One was killed during capture, but the other was immediately taken for
interrogation. Threatened with torture and death, he quickly confessed
everything. Kilij Arslan had returned from the east. Having finally realised
how dangerous the crusaders might be, he had gathered a large army from across
the sultanate of Rüm, and was even now camped in the steep hills to the south
of the city, planning a counterattack the very next day. Contact had already
been established with the Turks in Nicaea – hence their change of heart – and
these two spies had been sent to observe the Frankish army and then carry final
battle instructions to the garrison. Kilij Arslan’s plan was to charge out of
the southern hills at the third hour after dawn, enter Nicaea through the
unblockaded south gate, regroup and then launch an immediate combined
counterattack. Having told this story, the Turkish spy pleaded for his life,
weeping, begging and even offering to convert to Christianity should he be
spared, and eventually the princes took pity on him.
The princes reacted quickly to these shocking revelations.
They knew that Raymond of Toulouse and the Provençal army were already en route
to Nicaea, and were, at that very moment, perhaps less than a day’s march away
to the north, along the road from Nicomedia. As dusk approached, messengers
were dispatched urging haste, and the Frankish host kept nervous watch through
the night. Finally, at dawn on 16 May, Raymond’s men appeared out of the north.
The crusaders’ careful preparation of the old Roman road had paid off – news
had reached the Provençals quickly and they had then been able to march along
the clearly marked route through the night. In fact, Raymond of Toulouse
arrived just in time. His army was still in process of setting up camp before
Nicaea’s southern gate when, just as the spy had predicted, Kilij Arslan’s
forces came pouring out of the hills.
He had come prepared for victory – his men carried ropes
with which to bind the crusaders once they were taken captive – but, even
without the Provençal reinforcements, Kilij Arslan would have been hard pressed
to overcome the massive Latin army. With Nicaea’s southern gate blocked, his
troops were both outnumbered and isolated. He led an archetypal Seljuq Turkish
army: thousands of lightly mounted, fast-moving archers, armed with powerful
bone-and-horn composite bows. Faced with staunch resistance from the Provençals
led by Raymond and Baldwin of Boulogne, hemmed in by the lake to the west and
struck in the flank by Godfrey’s and Bohemond’s fierce cavalry charge from the
east, the Turkish attack soon faltered. Realising that he was hopelessly
outnumbered, Kilij Arslan fled the field south. It would be his only attempt to
break the siege of Nicaea. In the days that followed, the renegade Turkish spy,
whose predictions had proved to be accurate, went through a ritual of
conversion and became a regular guest of the Frankish princes, to whom he was
an intriguing curiosity. Soon his guards became relaxed in his company and in
one careless moment took their eyes off him. Instantly seizing the opportunity,
he ‘flew across the city moat with a nimble-footed leap’ and was soon pulled
over the walls on a rope.
In spite of this minor betrayal, the crusaders’ first battle
with a Muslim force had been a resounding success. Even Anna Comnena, not
usually given to praising the Franks, described it as ‘a glorious victory’. In
truth, although the crusader defence had been well co-ordinated, Kilij Arslan
escaped with most of his army intact. The real damage was done to his military
prestige and the morale of Nicaea’s garrison. In the aftermath of the fighting,
‘the Christians cut off the heads of the dead and wounded and as a sign of
victory they brought them back to their tents with them tied to the girths of
their saddles’. Some were stuck on the ends of spears and paraded before the
city walls, others were actually catapulted into the city ‘in order to cause
more terror among the Turkish garrison’. One Latin contemporary even suggested
that a thousand Turkish heads had been sent to Alexius as a sign of victory.
Any medieval army knew the profound significance of morale
amid the slow grind of siege warfare, and exchanges of horrific acts of
brutality and barbarism were commonplace. For its part, the Turkish garrison
soon retaliated, adopting a rather macabre tactic. The crusaders began to lead
direct assaults upon the city and inevitably sustained some losses. One Latin
eyewitness was disgusted by the Turks’ treatment of these dead: ‘Truly, you
would have grieved and sighed with compassion, to see them let down iron hooks,
which they lowered and raised by ropes, and seize the body of any of our men
that they had slaughtered in some way near the wall. None of our men dared, nor
could, take the body from them.’ These corpses were robbed and then hung from
the walls to rot, so as ‘to offend the Christians by this inhuman conduct’.
Closing in
With the first threat from Kilij Arslan repulsed, the
crusaders sought to prosecute a direct assault. This would be a dangerous and
exhausting process for defender and aggressor alike, and we hear that in the
midst of the fighting, ‘often, some of the Turks, often, some of the Franks,
struck by arrows or by stones, died’. When early attempts to storm Nicaea’s
defences with ladders had failed, the crusaders concentrated their efforts
almost exclusively upon creating a physical breach in the city’s walls. This
could be achieved through a variety of means. The safest, but technologically
most advanced, was bombardment from a distance. The Franks built some
stone-throwing machines, known as petraria or mangonella, which propelled
missiles through the use of torsion or counterweights. Powerful machines could
hurl massive rocks against their target, eventually causing walls to buckle and
collapse, but at Nicaea the crusaders lacked the skills and craftsmen to build
engines massive enough to damage the city’s stout walls. Their bombardment was
designed, instead, to harass the Turkish garrison and provide covering fire,
under which they could employ a second technique.
If a besieging army could not topple walls from a safe distance,
then the only alternative was to get in close and undermine the defences by
hand. Just approaching the walls was, however, a lethal affair. The Turkish
garrison had ballistae – giant crossbow-like devices used to hurl stones – and
archers with which to defend their city: ‘The ballistae of [Nicaea’s] towers
were so alternately faced that no one could move near them without peril, and
if anyone wished to move forward, he could do no harm because he could easily
be struck down from the top of a tower.’ One crusader knight, Baldwin of
Calderun, who had made many ‘daring and rash’ attempts to assault the city,
‘breathed his last when his neck was broken by the blow of a hurled stone’.
Another, Baldwin of Ganz, died during ‘a careless rush at the city, his head
pierced by an arrow’. If a crusader did, somehow, manage to reach the foot of
the walls alive, he then faced an onslaught from above, as defenders atop the
battlements gleefully rained rocks and a burning mixture of grease, oil and
pitch down upon his head.
The Franks experimented with a range of devices to combat
these problems of direct assault, with varying degrees of success. Two
prominent Latin lords, Henry of Esch, a member of Godfrey’s contingent, and the
German Count Hartmann of Dillingen, who had participated in the Jewish pogrom
at Mainz, approached the challenge of this first crusader siege with
enthusiasm. They pooled their resources and built what one contemporary called
a vulpus or fox, to their own design and with their own money. This was apparently
some form of bombardment screen, constructed of oak beams, under which infantry
troops could advance on the walls, protected from Turkish missiles. Henry and
Hartmann shrewdly decided to sit out the first test run of this contraption,
and had to look on in horror as twenty of their men were crushed to death when
‘the beams, the uprights and all the bindings came to pieces’ and the vulpus
collapsed at the foot of the walls.
The Provençals adopted a more professional approach. Raymond
of Toulouse employed a master craftsman to design and build a testudo or
tortoise, a much sturdier, sloping-roofed bombardment screen. Under this
protection, southern French crusaders were dispatched to undermine a tower on
Nicaea’s southern walls. One eyewitness described how, when they reached the
fortification, ‘sappers dug down to the foundations of the wall and inserted
beams and pieces of wood, to which they set fire’. If carried out correctly,
the siege technique they were attempting – that of sapping – could be extremely
effective. The idea was to dig a tunnel beneath a section of wall, carefully
buttressing the excavation with wooden supports as one went along. Once
complete, the void was packed full of branches and kindling, set alight and
left to collapse, thus bringing down the wall above it. Raymond’s sappers
managed to bring down a small section of one tower as night fell on around 1
June, but the Turkish garrison worked through the night to rebuild the defences
so that by daybreak ‘there was no chance of defeating them at that point’.
In the end, the crusaders’ best efforts at assault were
thwarted by Nicaea’s almost impregnable fortifications and the sheer energy and
ferocity of the Turkish defence. Even Raymond of Aguilers, a chaplain in the
Provençal army, was forced to admit that the Muslim garrison had made a
‘courageous’ effort. We hear, for example, of one unnamed Turkish soldier who
went berserk and continued fighting, peppered with twenty crusader arrows. Even
after 3 June 1097, when the Latin army was further strengthened by the arrival
of the northern French, under Stephen, count of Blois, and Robert, count of
Flanders, the city still refused to fall.
By the second week of June, the crusaders realised that a
new strategy was needed. Up to this point they had encircled Nicaea’s three
landward walls, but the fourth, westward face of the city, on the banks of the
great Askanian Lake, lay open and unblockaded. The sheer size of this lake
meant that its banks could not be effectively patrolled, and it became apparent
that Turkish boats were bringing all manner of supplies into Nicaea without
fear of attack. If this situation persisted and the city’s walls held, Nicaea’s
garrison might realistically hope to hold out indefinitely. Around 10 June, the
crusader princes met in council to discuss this problem, and within hours a
messenger had been sent to the Emperor Alexius, carrying an audacious proposal.
Control had to be taken of the Askanian Lake, but no navigable river offered
ships access to its waters. The princes’ solution sounded simple: if vessels
could not be sailed to the lake, they would have to be carried. In practice, of
course, the process of portaging large sailing boats almost thirty kilometres
from the coast at Civetot to the shores of the Askanian Lake was no mean feat.
Alexius agreed to supply the boats, under the command of Manuel Boutoumites and
manned by a force of Turcopoles – well-armed Byzantine mercenaries of
half-Greek, half-Turkish stock. Special oxen-drawn carts were constructed to bear
this strange cargo through the hills of Bithynia. Late in the day of 17 June
they reached the lake, but waited until the following dawn to set sail so that
a combined lake- and landbased attack could be launched on Nicaea. The plan was
to terrify the Turkish garrison into submission, driving home their isolation
and the utter hopelessness of continued resistance. To this end, Alexius
equipped the small Greek flotilla with more standards than were usual – so that
the boats might appear more numerous than they really were – and a selection of
trumpets and drums with which to create an intimidating racket. One Latin
eyewitness described the scene:
At daybreak there were the boats, all in very good order,
sailing across the lake towards the city. The Turks, seeing them, were
surprised and did not know if it was their own fleet or that of the emperor,
but when they realised it was the emperor’s they were afraid almost to death,
and began to wail and lament, while the Franks rejoiced and gave glory to God.
The shock broke the Turkish garrison’s will, and within hours they were suing for peace. After holding out for five weeks, Nicaea capitulated on 18 June. It was, however, the emperor’s men, Manuel Boutoumites and Taticius, who actually took surrender of the city and raised the imperial standard. After all their efforts, the crusaders were left waiting outside the walls. Byzantine Turcopoles were set to guard the city’s treasury and the crusaders were denied any chance of plunder. It was a precarious moment for Alexius’ envoys: they may have had nominal authority over the campaign, but they were outnumbered both by the barely subdued Turkish garrison inside the city and by the acquisitive Frankish horde without. Had either side chosen to rebel, the Greeks would have been annihilated. As it was, the crusader princes kept their promise to return the city to the emperor, and the leading members of the Turkish garrison were quickly ferried out in small, manageable groups to Constantinople. There were some complaints among the Latin rank and file, worried that the captured Turks would soon be ransomed and thus free to fight the crusaders on another day, but even these were quickly silenced by the emperor’s extravagant largesse. He knew only too well how to keep this ‘mercenary’ crusading army under control. One Frank recalled that, ‘because he kept all, the emperor gave some of his own gold and silver and mantles to our nobles; he also distributed some of his copper coins, which they call tarantarons, to the footsoldiers’.
The fall of Nicaea was a product of the successful policy of close co-operation between the crusaders and Byzantium. The Franks would probably have enjoyed little success without Greek aid, while Alexius had needed the might of the Latin army to overcome Kilij Arslan’s capital. One contemporary, reflecting upon the siege, wrote, ‘Now that the storm of war had thus abated . . . the army of the living God spent the day in great rejoicing and exultation right there in the camp, because everything so far had gone well for them’. Their success had, however, been bought at a price. Many crusaders died in battle or from illness during the campaign. An eyewitness in Bohemond’s army recalled that ‘many of our men suffered martyrdom there and gave up their blessed souls to God with joy and gladness, and many poor starved to death for the Name of Christ. All these entered Heaven in triumph, wearing the robe of martyrdom.’ Even at this early stage in the expedition to Jerusalem it seems that the crusaders believed that fighting and dying in the name of God cleansed them of sin and brought the gift of everlasting life.
