Crusader: By Horse to Jerusalem by Tim Severin

Author:Tim Severin [Severin, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2019-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16 - Sarah's Accident

Nicaea, William of Tyre had written, 'has the best of fields and fertile soil'. Today the rich silt around the fringes of Lake Ascanius is watered by a very successful irrigation scheme, and we approached the city, its name now adapted to Iznik, through flourishing market gardens and vineyards. Some bygone Roman governor, eager to commemorate himself, had erected in his own honour an obelisk whose tall shaft soared up from the middle of the vines. Wild ducks bobbed in the ripples along the shallows of the lake, moorhens paddled jerkily among the stalks of tall spiky reeds, and we passed a line of sheds for storing the fruit crop. Then, abruptly, for there were no suburbs, we were riding under the massive sandstone courses of the same north gate that Duke Godfrey had blockaded in the early summer of 1097.

We found that Nicaea had grown old with grace and style. On three sides of the city the splendid circuit wall with its garland of towers still stood, and by a happy chance the present population had barely spread beyond the medieval boundary so the place kept its original scale. The grid pattern of the streets was largely unchanged. An unassuming and overgrown ruin near the central square was where the Council of Bishops in 325 AD had shaped the future of Christianity when they formally established its doctrines in the Nicene Creed, and children played casual hide-and-seek among walls and crenellations that Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders and Turks had defended or attacked. At this season of the year the setting sun eased down the length of the lake and into a notch in the distant hills as accurately as into a gunsight, so that each evening the sunset cast an almost contrived-looking red glow across the lake. Only the waterline itself had changed, receding a fraction, so that a pleasant shoreside esplanade had been built at the point where Butumites' lake flotilla had approached the western wall to infiltrate his mercenaries through the watergate. Here, in a small hotel, we rested for three days, while the horses cropped the grass in the shade of the ancient city's defences.

Nicaea's lake moderated the evening chill, but in the mountains the night-time temperature was near freezing. It was now the second half of September and in the eastern Anatolian plateau the average temperature would soon start to plummet. It was time to find a place to winter the horses. We had actually come farther, by some two hundred miles, than Godfrey's first season's march. Our daily distances were the same as his, but by starting our journey earlier, in late spring, we had been able to spend more time on the road. Yet there was a limit to what our horses could do. Bone tired, they were showing signs of the constant strain of travel, despite the ten-day respite in Istanbul. Carty's hooves, in particular, were beginning to break up from the pull of the nails holding on the heavy road shoes and the repeated removal and fitting of replacements.

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