Soldier of Crusade (12 page)

What saved them was the length of the pikes, not long enough to get the ladders past the point of balance. Robert and his men got to the bottom and began to run as a hail of stones came down to try and crown them, the last act of the
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being to push the ladders so they fell backwards, saved for the next time they would be needed. Then they too bolted, dragging their canvas behind them, only one suffering from a rock that hit his head. Collapsed he was hauled out of danger.

‘They fought like wolves,’ Robert explained, making his report to the Council of Princes, the same he had made to Bohemund and Tancred. ‘If they are to be judged by the fire in their bellies and the look in their eye then their spirit is high.’

‘One attack,’ was the response of Raymond of Toulouse, ‘cannot be counted as a failure. We must keep up the pressure and see it we get a like result.’

‘It is for you to choose,’ Bohemund replied, slightly put out by the word failure; to his mind the Apulians had been as successful as was possible. ‘It is your turn next, Count Raymond, and perhaps your knights can show we poor Apulians where we went wrong.’

Raymond knew he was being addressed ironically and that showed in his reddening face, which was enough of a high colour to begin with. Here was what Adémar feared: that men of such known ability would not stand to be diminished publicly, regardless of the high standing of their peers. He was about to intervene when Godfrey de Bouillon spoke, making his point for him.

‘It can only be assessed when we have all tried. It may be, Count Bohemund, that your men met the very stiffest resistance, the best men in the garrison.’

‘Perhaps,’ Bohemund responded, forcing a smile. He was well aware of Godfrey’s deliberate attempt to ease matters;

when it came to pride, that sin so quickly identified by Bishop Adémar, the Duke of Lower Lorraine seemed to suffer from it the least. It was rapidly being acknowledged that he was a good man, the very antithesis of his brother Baldwin, and one whom everyone present was coming to respect for both his sagacity and his genuine godliness and crusading zeal.

‘Possible,’ Raymond acknowledged, likewise obliged to react with grace by Godfrey’s intervention.

Raymond made his attempt two nights later and for his men the cost was higher. On the south side of Nicaea, which he now occupied, the Turks had ballistae, huge catapult-like machines firing rocks from adjoining towers that created a killing ground between them that extended far beyond the ditches. His men got onto the walls, as had the Apulians, in the same manner and they suffered a few casualties there, but it was in seeking to withdraw that their losses were greatest as the catapults, able to swivel, bombarded those who had survived, one knight having his head removed completely by a boulder.

The other contingents had to make an attempt in their own section: Lotharingians, Normans and the French, and if they all managed to get up to the battlements, none could hold there, so stalwart was the defence. Matters were made more deadly with the Turks now alert to what might be coming, nullifying any advantage of surprise. If the results were the same, if the death rate compared to the Provençals was diminished, the conclusion was that advanced by Robert of Salerno: the Turks were in good heart, determined to defend their city and had to sustain them the previous failures of Byzantium.

There was another more telling reason for their confidence: the besiegers could not seal the side of the city which bordered on the lake, which supplied them with ample water, taking away thirst as a weapon, one of the staples of this form of warfare. Worse, even in daylight if they wished, the Turks could bring in more defenders as well as food and the Christian host had no means of stopping them, for they had no boats. This did not induce any sense of impossibility; well-supplied fortresses had fallen before and if it took numbers and courage, then that was outside the walls of Nicaea in abundance.

There was other activity over the following weeks, the mangonels firing stones that crested the battlements to drop on and catch the
unwary sheltering behind them, the less cheering fact being they were too small to fire anything that would do damage to the walls and the means to construct bigger weapons was lacking. Two German knights were busy making what they called a ‘testudo’, consisting of baulks of timber bound together by lashed and tarred ropes in an attempt to emulate the Roman legionary tactic of advancing under linked shields like a tortoise.

That they did this without asking permission from the Council of Princes mattered not; that was a body quite willing to allow individual initiative, and when it was finished and ready to be employed the leaders all gathered to see how it performed as it inched towards one of the gates, there being a causeway across the double ditch. It was just as well the men who had set the idea in motion decided to let others test their plan, for the contraption turned out to be weighty for those who were under it and the bindings were too feeble to stay unbroken once the Turks began to rain down heavy stones.

It only took one rope to part and that put excess strain on the rest, not helped by flaring torches thrown onto the flat top surface where they set alight any strands of the tarred ropes. For a moment it looked as if the men bearing it would not only get to the gate but also be able to stay there and seek to set it on fire. But it was not to be; when another main rope parted it was only a matter of minutes before the whole thing began to come apart, individual baulks of timber falling to the ground to expose the men underneath.

What came down next was a potent mixture of burning oil mixed with grease and pitch that stuck to each and every body so that the fighters caught by it were turned into screaming, staggering torches that provided easy targets for the salvoes of arrows that followed. Few came back from that disaster and worse was to follow: those
by the gate who had died or were wounded too badly to move were hooked by grappling irons and hauled up to the top of the towers, there to be stripped and mutilated before their cadavers were hung from the battlements, gut and entrails exposed, to tell the attackers what fate to expect if they too fell into Turkish hands.

Raymond of Toulouse spotted the flaw in the design the two German knights had used and he set his men to building a protective bombardment screen in the shape of a pitched roof, sloped at both sides so that anything striking would bounce off and away. Raised up it could be moved, static it could be dropped to the ground and provide total cover to those underneath. Following on from that which had preceded it there was no rush of volunteers and Raymond had to offer a money reward to see the execution of his experiment.

Again the leaders gathered and watched as the Provençal ‘volunteers’ inched forward. There was a small body of knights under the screen but the main party carried shovels, not swords, and had also a cart loaded with baulks of dry and turpentine-soaked timber, as well as planks to cross the ditches. It was obvious they were having more success because they got to the walls and remained there, seemingly impervious to all that was cast down upon them: the same combination of rocks, which bounced off, and flaming combustibles, which slid harmlessly to the ground while failing to set alight freshly cut timber lathes that made up the roof.

This allowed the diggers, and it took much time to achieve this, to attack the base of the stonework, their aim to create a deep hole and expose the underside of the foundations, into which they jammed their well-soaked baulks as supports. The rest of the dry timber was stuffed in and just before the bombardment screen withdrew it was set alight. Now the defenders had a dilemma: try as they might, no
amount of water seemed to be able to reach and extinguish the blaze, which left the only option a sally out from the nearest gate to seek to put it out by hand, an eventuality covered by Raymond, who had mounted knights waiting to deal with such an attempt.

Every Christian eye was on that conflagration and so were those of the Byzantines, for here was a key that might unlock Nicaea. Smoke billowed up from the base of the wall, but inside that could be seen, very clearly, a red and orange inferno. Then a crack appeared above and it began to spread and fracture. With a mighty roar a section of the wall collapsed, stones tumbling as the mortar that held them gave way, the roaring sound of that overborne by the cheers of the besiegers. Half the stonework filled the ditch, the rest forming a pile that would have to be climbed to get at the defence.

Immediately preparations were put in place to launch an attack on that breech at dawn the next day but that only brought disappointment. Sunrise revealed that if the ditch was still full of stones, somehow, in darkness and without alerting their enemies, the Turks had managed to effect enough of a repair to close that breech to an assault that would have any chance of success.

R
aymond’s sloping bombardment screen was used more than once and each time it made the walls it seemed to achieve a result, if not one as successful as the first. Every time Acip Bey’s Turks made good what the base fires had destroyed, and if there was frustration for that there was also a sneaking admiration for the man in command as well as those he led, who were showing a fortitude that was worthy of respect.

Baldwin of Boulogne tried a moonlight attack after another section of the wall had been damaged and that, always a risky venture, was repulsed. Climbing the steep fallen screed even in daylight gave advantage to the defence and the Turks, in lighter clothing that allowed easier movement, especially in poor light, fought off the mail-clad Lotharingians by flaying the slope with arrows fired blind, before closing in with daggers used to cut leg tendons rather than kill.

If casualties were slight there still emerged a steady stream of men
heading back to Civetot to either convalesce or, if they were too badly wounded to recover, to seek passage home to whichever part of Europe from whence they had come. Also there were a mounting number of graves, each with a cross above it and a burnt-in inscription giving the name of the martyred victim and the legend that for his service to Christ his soul had ascended to heaven, where he now sat at the right hand of God.

Less to be regarded were those whose faith was too weak to keep going; they too left, to go home, no doubt to ridicule for their failure to maintain their vow. That did not mean a diminution of numbers; if some weakened in the face of the task there were more pilgrims, both knights and commoners, who were arriving in dribs and drabs to join the Crusade, the most welcome a company of Genoese crossbowmen who, with their deadly weapons, could outrange the arrows from any ordinary bow. Looking out from the walls of Nicaea, if they were counting, their enemies were getting stronger, not weaker. In addition, and less welcome, were the hordes of pilgrims, men, women and children, including Peter the Hermit, who had come to join the host on the route to the Holy Land, few of them the type to fight, so that here existed a large camp of useless mouths and it was growing by the day.

The time had come to employ the now completed siege tower – another was already under construction – and the bombardment screen was put to another use, this time to fill in the ditches with stones and earth so that it could be rolled close enough to the walls. Knowing what this portended part of the garrison, for the first time, sallied out to seek to destroy the screen, only to find themselves in fierce combat with the Provençals, set in place to contest such an eventuality. In this the advantage lay with the better-armed knights,
and despite all attempts to hold open a corridor back to the gate from which they had essayed, the defenders were caught in the open and annihilated, none willing to surrender given they knew their fate was death, which they could face with equanimity; they too believed that to die for their cause was to be given entry to paradise.

Any siege tower had to be tall enough to overreach the battlements against which it was employed. It was faced at the top with a hinged platform, sharp-spiked at the base, that would be dropped to allow the first party of knights to cross and engage, hopefully killing some of the defenders who had taken up too forward a position, while above their heads was another level containing the newly arrived crossbowmen who would be tasked to force enough of a gap to get the knights over the top of the walls and onto the parapet that ran along the inner side.

In the tower, a series of internal ladders ran from the ground, up through the various floors, to the fighting platform, and once it had been rolled into place the reinforcements would rush to ascend and back up the leading knights. There was no lack of guesswork as to how the defenders would react; fire was a potent weapon, if one that would take time to get a hold on main timbers that were freshly cut and thick.

The problem was the tinder-like brushwork panels protecting the floors from arrows, both flamed and unlit, so there would follow in the wake of the mailed men
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bearing tubs of water with which to douse any blaze, this thrown onto the tight-bound reeds to prevent them flaring up, because that alone could ignite the main beams. Others, and this was a dangerous task, would have to move out to each side, where they would be exposed, to put in place the long outriggers that would anchor the tower and stop the Turks
from toppling the finely balanced structure with ropes and grappling irons.

Raymond, given the tower had been constructed with his lines, claimed the right to man it with his men, for to partake in a fight from such a construct was seen as one of the highest points of honour for a knight, second only to single combat with a mounted foe. But carefully worded questioning established that the Count of Toulouse had never led an assault using such a weapon, whereas both the Apulian leaders had. For once, Bohemund, who usually kept a tight control of his counsel at the meetings of the princes, spoke with boldness and insisted it should be put, like the dawn assaults, to a ballot.

It was unfortunate, given the person who proposed it, that the Apulians once more drew the marked spill of paper. There was a moment when the florid-faced Provençal Count seemed set to vocally object against a policy mutually agreed – his high colour deepened remarkably – but a look from Adémar, who had been, after all, in his company all the way from his homeland and had his respect, stilled his protest.

‘It would please me, Count Raymond,’ Bohemund said, seeking to sweeten his disappointment, ‘if my Normans occupied only the fighting platform. We would be more than content that any second wave should come from Toulouse.’

Godfrey de Bouillon cut in. ‘As well as some from my Duchy of Lorraine.’

‘France must have the honour also,’ cried Vermandois.

That had all eyes on the Duke of Normandy; surely he too would protest that his knights must take part and they waited for his outburst, only to receive a dispassionate response, which had about
it a reference to the fact that he held himself as titular suzerain to the Apulian Norman knights.

‘Someone must plan for success. I suggest that with our cousins to the fore, that will serve well to represent my duchy. For my own knights, they will be mounted and ready to seize any opportunity that is presented.’

Was that the indolence for which Robert of Normandy had already been noted, or was it good sense? The object of the assault, made close to one of the gates, was to seize the nearest stone tower, each of which contained a stairwell, then fight a way down to the ground and drive off the defenders from the rear of the gate. If that could then be opened, a force of mounted knights charging through that could do great execution in the narrow streets of Nicaea, even more when backed by the crusading
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who would follow them on foot.

Not that it would be easy, as Bohemund was keen to point out; several siege towers might achieve such a result because they split a defence who had no idea where the main blow would fall, but experience indicated that with only one, and the Turks packed at the point of attack, all a single engine could hope to do was to deplete the numbers – a decisive victory could only come from a stroke of luck or a collapse of the defenders’ morale. The best outcome to hope for was partial success, which might point a way to a solution to the taking of the city, for in truth no other avenue showed any promise.

With honour at stake, the others fell to bargaining for their place, which required much intervention from Bishop Adémar to prevent any of the point-making from descending into an open quarrel. Observing this, Bohemund was made even more conscious of what he had already surmised and imparted to Tancred: there could not yet be a single commander. Perhaps in the future a set of circumstances
would change that, but that could only be, he thought, when failure of the entire Crusade was a risk.

Right of this moment there was a chance for glory, of the kind that every knight craved, an emotion to which neither of the men with de Hauteville blood in their veins were immune and, as the uncle pointed out, such a laurel could only enhance any later claims for leadership; if it was a distant prospect, it was one to keep in mind.

‘Which,’ Bohemund imparted to Tancred when they were alone, ‘makes it worthwhile we try ourselves.’

‘You and I both?’

‘I cannot deny you what I will not refuse myself and, in truth, I have become heartily sick of watching others fight and not doing anything myself.’

‘Our papal legate will not be pleased if he learns that we intend to carry out the assault in person.’

‘Then, nephew, he must not find out.’

The Norman practice of training extended to the use of siege towers and if what they contrived was gimcrack it served to allow for mock preparation – a roughly hewn platform with a flat screen of canvas and wood that when dropped allowed the Apulian leader to set the pace of advance, for that could not just be a Gadarene rush, but had to be made in an unbroken line, while those following the first wave must be prepared for any number of eventualities. It also allowed Bohemund to think about innovation, a small addition to the normal tactics that might discomfit the defence, this carried on over several days until the morning dawned when the attack would take place.

First the siege tower had to be hauled by ropes to a point just out of arrow range, held to be two furrow-lengths, but that was not the
only weapon they faced. The point of attack being obvious, the Turks had brought to bear their rock-firing ballistae and they had a surprise in store for the Crusaders, for these were used not to spew forth boulders but tightly bound balls of flaming straw wrapped around shavings, soaked with the same pitch and grease previously dropped on the attackers’ heads, these fired at the near unmissable tower in the hope of setting it alight.

Too eager to see the effect, they began to employ them when the men dragging the ropes were in range, causing mayhem as the cables were abandoned and the lightly clad
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fled in all directions. That imposed only a temporary halt; over the last area of ground the tower had to be pushed anyway, Raymond’s bombardment screen having been once more pressed into service to protect those both labouring and following, the bowmen and the mail-clad knights who would wait until the last possible moment to ascend so their weight would not make the task of moving it harder.

Bohemund and Tancred were under that, hidden from view, ostensibly along to provide encouragement, only wearing mail because it was wise to do so, their weapons carried by others. Hard as the Crusaders had toiled to make a smooth surface, the tower, because of its height related to its girth, was inherently unstable and top-heavy. It swayed alarmingly on what was far from even ground and that was more troubling when they came to crossing the filled-in ditches.

Finally, once it reached the point that would be covered by dropping the hinged platform a halt was called and the fighting men began to ascend, the Genoese crossbowmen leading the way to their upper platform, this fronted with a solid screen carved with slits through which they could fire in relative safety. They were the first
of Bohemund’s planned surprises, the second being his own presence and the Turks were not the only ones to experience that, given that a man of his height, once he emerged onto the fighting platform, towering over all around him, was startlingly obvious even amongst a race tall by nature.

The other leaders watching were split between a degree of envy and a less charitable emotion, Raymond of Toulouse being downright angry, Vermandois affronted and from de Bouillon a sense of admiration mixed with natural ire, while the Duke of Normandy pointed out that the family from which Bohemund sprung had ever been both rebellious and devious, which had obliged them to flee his father’s wrath. Bishop Adémar was furious, yet obliged to hold in check any criticism lest it get to the ears of the Count of Taranto after the action was concluded.

On the fighting platform, two lines of a dozen knights each, Bohemund’s doughtiest fighters were waiting, each with a javelin in their hand, while on the floor beside them were half a dozen more. It was a guess on behalf of their leader but he reasoned, from what he had seen of the garrison of Nicaea as well as their leader Acip Bey, they would not wait to be attacked, but would come onto the platform and seek to dominate the killing sector. The task of the crossbowmen above their heads was to create an area in which the Normans could fight on decent terms, initially outnumbered, obviously, but not so much as to render any advance impossible. Bohemund wanted to lower the odds even more.

The release of the platform was a case of simply slipping two knots, added to several kicks so that it moved at speed on its woven-rope hinges, crashing down on the battlements where it would crush anyone foolish enough to be standing upright. But instead of an
immediate advance the Normans held their place, this as a group of Turks, presumably the best fighters, leapt onto the platform to stop their enemies prior to their being able to move. The javelins, thrown at short range by powerful arms, were lethal and three more groups followed the first salvo in what seemed no more than a blink.

With the area in front now full of the writhing, wounded and the odd dead Turk, Bohemund called for his men to pick up their fighting lances and step forward and that they did, one pace at a time and with no precipitate rush. Cohesion was the key to Norman warfare and that was the element they practised whether on foot or mounted. Stand shoulder to shoulder; present no gaps, always cover the flank of the man on your right as well as doing battle with what lay to your front, and trust the left-hand knight to do his task equally well.

The Turks had weapons suited to their general size and weight; the problem for the defence was that that applied equally to the Normans, who overreached massively what could be deployed against them. Their heavy fighting lances were longer, their swords the same and in a confined space, in essence a melee, manoeuvre was impossible; it was one man facing another, at best with a couple extra and that was not enough to overcome the inherent disadvantage faced by the defenders. Slowly, despite their best efforts and greater numbers they were pushed back, some of the men falling in the front doing so because their own people, eager to kill, were pressing them so hard on the back they could not fight properly.