After the long march they eventually reached Nicea. The Turks had withdrawn into the city to await any attack. Hugh took Eleanor to view the massive fortifications, the lofty yellow brick walls with more than a hundred towers all protected by a double ditch. Eleanor had scarcely returned to her tent when the cry ‘Au secours! Au secours!’ was raised. Warning horns and trumpets blared. She and Imogene hurried down the narrow gulleys between the pavilions leading to the centre of the camp. Here stood a huge cart, poles on each corner displaying the battle standards, containing a great wooden altar surmounted by a stark black cross. Two men, dressed like monks in long grey robes, stood with their backs to the cart wheels, swords and daggers drawn. They faced a threatening line of Frankish foot armed with lowered spears and pikes.
‘Spies! spies!’ a voice accused. ‘We caught them trying to leave camp with drawings and numbers.’ One of the trapped men raced forward, whirling sword and dagger, only to be stopped by a surge of pike thrusts that almost lifted him off the ground. He struggled like a landed fish, legs kicking, gargling on the blood spilling out of his mouth. The other immediately threw down his weapons and knelt, hands extended in a sign of surrender. He was swiftly seized, bound and dragged away. A short while later Hugh came hurrying back, even as the alarm was raised again: a blare of horns and trumpets, men shouting battle cries, war horses being quickly led out. He grasped Eleanor and pushed her inside the tent.
‘They were spies,’ he announced breathlessly, pausing as Beltran, Theodore and Godefroi thrust into the tent behind him. ‘The captured one has confessed. Kilij Arslan, Sultan of Rhum, is marching straight towards us with thousands of horsemen!’
‘Where, when will they attack?’
‘Bohemond besieges the northern side of Nicea, Godfrey of Bouillon the east and we the south, the same direction as Arslan. We will bear the brunt of the first attack.’
He had hardly finished when there was a surge of noise from outside, a renewed blowing of trumpets followed by screams and cries. They hastened out to see people pointing. Eleanor stared in horror at the hills behind the camp where the pine trees clustered close together like a green-black wall. Everyone was staring at them: boys and women collecting water in jars; a cluster of monks, Ave beads wrapped round their hands, gathering for the midday prayer; a cook, all bloodied to his elbows, a dead chicken dangling from his left hand; a young boy with a mongrel puppy in his hands; knights in linen undergarments, all gazing at the horror coming from the hills. Eleanor’s throat felt dry and narrow. She blinked and stared again. Hundreds if not thousands of horsemen, in flowing white robes, sunlight dancing off their helmets, were moving out of the trees like a flood of ants towards them. Already a dust haze was rising. The distant thunder of hooves shook the earth; coloured banners snapped in the breeze. Some children playing amongst the decaying stones of a cemetery laughed and shrieked, pointing their fingers.
‘They say they’ve brought ropes,’ Beltran murmured. ‘To bind us and lead us into captivity.’
The crowd could only stare. A monk began to chant a psalm: ‘Domine libera nos — Lord deliver us.’
‘You pray,’ Hugh shouted. ‘The rest to arms, to arms!’ The menacing spell was broken. Jars were dropped, cloaks doffed, baskets placed on the ground, camp equipment pushed aside. Knights, serjeants, monks and priests, every able-bodied man, hurried to arm against that river of horsemen sweeping down to engulf them. For a short while the enemy disappeared into the tree-covered slopes, only to surge out again. The Turkish battle cries, a piercing, ululating screech, echoed shrilly above the drumming of hooves. The enemy’s coloured banners could now be clearly seen. The Turks reached the foot of the slope just as the Frankish line, knights in half-armour, on clumsily strapped saddles, burst out of the camp. The Frankish mounts were fresh, much heavier and moving at full charge. The Turks, bloodied on the pathetically armed mob of Peter the Hermit, were taken completely by surprise at the sheer fury of the Frankish attack. This only deepened as the phalanx of armour and heavy horse crashed into them like a fast-moving river hurtling up against some makeshift bridge. The Turks, on smaller, lighter mounts, were simply engulfed, then cut up into small groups, which had to face further Frankish attacks. The air rang with the horrid crash of battle, screams and yells. Banners floated down. The ground became strewn with white-garbed corpses. The Turks, not used to such violent hand-to-hand combat, simply broke, retreating up the slopes pursued by the exultant Franks. By now the news of this first skirmish was spreading through the Army of God. Normans, Rhinelanders, Flemings, French and Greeks flooded into Count Raymond’s camp. Eleanor watched them prepare, donning body armour, strapping on helmets. The mounted knights gathered, masked by a screen of dust and smoke deliberately created to blind the Turks already massing again on the tree-lined heights.
Hugh, Godefroi, Beltran and Theodore, now properly armoured, collected their oval shields and maces. Norbert and Alberic, faces flushed, joined the foot gathering behind the horse. Fresh fires, deliberately started, poured out more black smoke, concealing what was happening in the Army of God. The Turkish cavalry gathered again for the charge. Their stratagem was simple: to attack, pin the Franks against the walls of Nicea, destroy them and relieve the city. As Eleanor wrote later in her chronicle, the Turks made two mistakes. They believed that Count Raymond’s host was the entire Frankish army, and that its fighting qualities would be no better than those of Peter the Hermit’s ragged followers. They were soon proved wrong. In the early afternoon, the white-robed horsemen again poured like a waterfall down the slopes. The Franks, behind their screen of black smoke, watched, waited, then charged. The swift, heavy iron wall of mounted knights shattered the enemy and the Turkish line crumbled. The Franks swept through, cutting and slicing, drenching the ground in so much blood it poured in rivulets down the slopes, then turned and charged again. The Turks broke and fled. For a while the Franks hotly pursued them before returning in triumph to the camp, spears and lances displaying grisly trophies, herding lines of prisoners, the decapitated heads of their comrades tied around their necks.
The captives were paraded, taunted and humiliated. One of the catapults Alexius had provided was pushed down to the edge of the great moat around Nicea. As the sun set, the severed heads, gathered in fishing nets, were catapulted into the city. Some smashed in a gruesome pulp against the parapets. Others cleared the battlements, and even from where she stood, Eleanor could hear the groans of the population imprisoned behind the walls. Kilij Arslan had failed! The Army of God now turned on the prisoners. They were herded into the centre of the camp and forced to kneel so they could be decapitated. Simeon the scribe was amongst those captured in the baggage train. Desperately he pleaded for his life. The executioners ignored him. Eventually he broke free and fled through the camp, pursued by Gargoyle and Babewyn, the lieutenants of Jehan the Wolf. He ran screaming down the narrow lanes mocked and pushed by drunken spectators. Eleanor, who had retreated to her tent, heard the uproar and went outside. Simeon almost ran into her and collapsed at her feet. Babewyn and Gargoyle grasped him.
‘I did not beg, mistress.’ Simeon paused in his writing.
‘No, Simeon, you did not. You simply said you didn’t want to die. You claimed you were a Catholic captured by the Turks. If I remember correctly,’ Eleanor added drily, ‘you even quoted canon law, though that made little difference to those two grotesques.’