Armies of Heaven (18 page)

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 cunningly 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 bodies 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.
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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.
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Alexius also took advantage of these gift exchanges to wring a few final concessions out of the Franks—namely, he forced Bohemond's nephew Tancred and a few other recalcitrant leaders to take an oath of homage to him and to swear to return all of the former Byzantine territories to his control. Tancred again resisted, believing that giving cities to the Greeks was no better than giving them to the Turks. Sounding like a Roman senator (or at least that is how his classically trained biographer wanted him to sound), he argued that he could not serve two masters, the Christian republic and the Greek king. He fumed and trembled and raged like a bull, but in the end, under compulsion, he took the emperor's hand and agreed to help Alexius provided that Alexius at some point fought alongside the Franks. “If you wish to dominate,” he advised Alexius pedantically, “then you must strive to serve.” Alexius tried to win Tancred over in the same way as he had done with his uncle Bohemond—with bribes. But Tancred refused the emperor's money, asking instead for his tent, a structure of magnificent workmanship that was the size of a city. Alexius refused the request, seething with anger. As they parted company, Tancred observed to Alexius, “I deem you worthy of being my enemy, and not a friend.” He may have lost his battle of wills with the emperor, but he had at least preserved his dignity.
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Thus, despite a close alliance between Alexius and the princes, despite the oaths taken at Constantinople and afterward on an island several miles removed from Nicea, despite the significant military achievement that the victory of Nicea represented, there were significant rifts within the Frankish army, as well as uncertainty as to what the crusaders were doing
and how they should be conducting their mission. For most observers looking back over the first six months of 1097, the time with the emperor was a shameful topic and the siege of Nicea a mixed and muted victory.

The ambivalence about these accomplishments is perhaps best expressed in an anecdote of Albert of Aachen's. After news of the surrender spread through the crusader camps, the Niceans unexpectedly began releasing prisoners from Peter the Hermit's armies, captured during the early battles of Civitot and Nicomedia. Among the freed captives was a nun from Trier, who, according to all reports, was a great beauty. Upon being captured, as she tearfully told the crusaders, she had been forced into “loathsome sexual acts” with a particular Turk and with others as well. Among the nobles she recognized a knight named Henry of Esch, most recently famous for having helped to finance the disastrous “fox” siege engine. The nun must have known Henry while in Europe since he had accompanied Godfrey's army, not Peter's, to Constantinople. (Esch, in modern Luxembourg, is relatively close to Trier, making it likely that Henry's family and the nun's moved in similar aristocratic circles.)

She called Henry by name and asked him “in a low and tearful voice” to speak on her behalf with whatever cleric should assign penance to her. Henry took her case to Duke Godfrey, who in turn spoke on the nun's behalf to Bishop Adhémar. He, conferring with a priest, decided that her penance for this “unlawful copulation” should be alleviated, though not eliminated altogether—an act of mercy for which there was ample spiritual precedent—because “she had unwillingly and under duress endured this foul rape from wicked and criminal men.”

But the story was not as straightforward as it seemed. The Turk who had claimed possession of her body had been taken prisoner by the emperor. Only one night after his capture, and from his supposed Greek prison, he sent a message to the nun asking her to come back to him. “The same Turk burned because of her incomparable beauty, and he bore the loss of her quite badly; for he had promised her, who still occupied his thoughts, many rewards, so that she might return to that wicked marriage.” He had even pledged, Albert said, to convert to Christianity if she would only come back. Of course, neither Albert nor his sources could have known any of these details for certain. They knew only that almost as soon as Christians had rescued her from her “wicked spouse and adulterous
marriage,” deceived by flattery or vain hope, moved by some unknown cunning or lechery, or perhaps just driven by lust, she returned to her Turkish husband.
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