After the defeat of Soliman,[222] the siege was pressed with renewed vigour; and battering-rams, catapults, and mangonels were plied incessantly against the walls, while moveable towers of wood, called beffroys, filled with armed men, were rolled close to the fortifications, for the purpose of carrying on the fight hand to hand with the enemy, and of endeavouring to effect a lodgment on the battlements. In the mean while, the plains round Nice offered a spectacle of the most extraordinary brilliancy. The glittering arms of the knights, their painted shields, and fluttering pennons--the embroidered banners of the barons, their splendid coats-of-arms and magnificent mantles--the gorgeous robes of the Latin priests, who were present in immense numbers, and the animated multitude of bowmen and foot-soldiers, mingled with thousands of that most beautiful of beasts, the horse, all spread out in the unclouded brightness of an Asiatic sky, formed as shining and extraordinary a scene as the eye could look upon. Not frightened, however, by the terrific splendour that surrounded them, the Turks continued to defend their battlements with persevering valour. Every attack of the Christians was met with dauntless intrepidity, and every laboured attempt to sap the wall, or its towers, was frustrated with unwearied assiduity. Those who approached near were either slain by poisoned arrows,[223] or crushed under immense stones; and the moment any one was killed at the foot of the wall,[224] "it was horrible to see the Turks," says an eyewitness, "seize upon the body with iron hooks let down from above, and lifting it up through the air strip it completely, and then cast it out from the city." Innumerable artifices were resorted to by the assailants to force their way into the town; and none of the chiefs seem to have been more active and ingenious than the Count of Toulouse,[225] who once succeeded in undermining a tower, and casting it to the ground. Before this work was concluded, however, night had fallen over the army, and ere the next morning the laborious activity of the Turks had repaired the damage which their wall had suffered. Two of the principal[226] German barons, also, contrived a machine of wood, to which they gave the name of _the fox_. It was capable of containing twenty knights, and was secured by its immense solidity from all the efforts of the enemy. When this was completed, a vast multitude began to push it towards the part of the curtain which they intended to sap, but the inequality of the ground and the great weight of the machine itself caused some of the joints to give way, when the whole fabric fell to pieces, crushing under its ruins the unhappy knights within.