Armies of Heaven (17 page)

Nicea—the town of Iznik in modern Turkey—is one of the most storied locations in Christian history. It was the site of the first ecumenical council convened by the Emperor Constantine in 325 AD, where some of the most fundamental tenets of Christianity were worked out. Until recently, Nicea had been part of the Byzantine Empire. Now the Seljuk Turk Kilij-Arslan ruled it as the sultan of Rûm. Given Nicea's history and importance, it was the perfect testing ground for the new vision of the crusade promoted by Alexius and embraced, apparently, by most of the Frankish leaders. A recently held Greek capital with great spiritual significance, it gave the pilgrim armies a chance to strike a blow for Christianity while at the same time reversing Byzantium's territorial losses to the Turks. If all went well, Nicea would enable the development of a more controlled form of holy war: Frankish power mixed with Greek strategy and seasoned with just the right touch of militant piety.

But a holy war is difficult to control. Even though the armies of Peter and Emicho had been decimated, their influence survived. Emicho's lieutenants had signed on with Hugh the Great. A few hundred survivors from Peter's armies and Peter himself were continuing to Nicea, probably having joined either Godfrey or Bohemond. Untold numbers of crusaders still had crosses branded on their bodies as a sign that God had chosen them specially to carry out His work. The Frankish princes and Alexius may have settled on particular strategies and approaches to the crusade, but these other visions remained. The right combination of provocations
and events might yet unleash them. At Nicea the apocalyptic crusade was largely kept in check, but the release of its energies may have begun there—if not at the city itself then during the march to it.

On May 30 Stephen and Robert's armies stopped at Nicomedia and found a grisly spectacle—the remains of dozens of Peter the Hermit's followers, massacred by the Turks and apparently brutalized after death: “Oh, how many severed heads and how many bodies of the slain we discovered lying in the fields near the sea around Nicomedia! In that year the Turks had annihilated our people who were ignorant of the arrow and new to its use. Moved by pity at this sight we shed many tears.” The warriors further promised, “with God's help, to avenge their blood.” [Plate 4]

The armies ahead of them on the way to Nicea would have necessarily seen these bodies, too. Godfrey, Tancred, Hugh, and Robert of Flanders had actually camped in Nicomedia for three days. The road beyond proved too narrow for all of the pilgrims, who at this point would have numbered close to 40,000. Godfrey therefore dispatched 3,000 men to cut a path with axes and swords, as the rest of the army waited, decomposed Frankish bodies scattered around their camp. Perhaps, like Fulcher, they wept over the dead, marveled at the cruelty of the Saracens, and vowed revenge. It is remarkable that no one seems to have thought to bury them, though it may have been a deliberate decision, intended to inflame the passions of the rank and file. As the armies marched along the mountain path cut by Godfrey's men and marked by crosses made of iron and wood, they would have ample time to ponder the black hearts of their enemies, who were filling heaven with new Christian martyrs and who were crucifying Christ anew every day in Jerusalem.
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Nicea presented a formidable challenge. The city's fortifications had stood since the fourth century AD and had been regularly updated and strengthened by Byzantine emperors. The walls were probably a little over thirty feet high, and the towers (of which there were more than one hundred) were about twice that height. A ditch filled with water ran around the city, making the walls still more difficult to attack. If anyone did succeed in getting past the ditches to the walls, the towers were so cleverly positioned
that one could barely avoid missiles fired from their heights. Finally, the city was impossible for a land army to encircle. The circuit of the walls was a little over three miles long, and for about half of that distance Nicea directly abutted the Ascanian Lake. As a result, the Turks were able to bring in by ship, almost at will, food, weapons, supplies, fresh soldiers, and even merchant vessels laden with goods. Barring a naval blockade, no army could cut off the city's supplies and starve it into submission. And even with naval support, Nicea seemed to the Franks “hardly conquerable by human powers.”
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The soldiers who began to arrive on May 6 did not feel cowed by these great defenses. Confronted with the city's formidable walls and towers, according to Albert of Aachen, “they were incapable of feeling any fear. Instead, driven by every sort of heroism and knightly instinct they rushed to the city and attacked. Some of them provoked the city's defenders to battle, charging in on foot; others used bow and arrow. But many of those, who recklessly and blindly tried a sudden attack on the walls, were struck down under the heavy bombardment of spears hurled down from above.” Seeing the uselessness of such assaults, the princes began organizing for a longer siege.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.