Offered a continued resistance

He defeated the sultan’s army in a pitched battle, stormed Iconium and captured it. The Turks, as with the usual, offered a continued resistance. “ The more,” Turks says a report written by a pilgrim to the pope—“ the more we killed, the more they multiplied. During many days we fought from morning till night.” The army was in the greatest distress for want of food and forage, and was decimated by disease. All this time the Turks, or rather their ruler, Kilidji Arslan, professed to desire the friendship of the Germans, so that the Western chronicler remarks that the Turks were Greater dissemblers than even the Greeks. In this crusade it was noted that the Christian populations, which had on previous occasions flocked to the Christian armies for support and to give aid, fled before it, a fact affording striking evidence that the subjects of the empire had lost all hope of relief against the Mahometans from the soldiers of the West.

As the army of Frederic advanced its sufferings became more intense. The Turks harassed them daily, and the straits to which the were terrible. Horses were killed in order that their blood might be drunk. The foul, fever-impregnated water of the marshes became sweet to the soldiers in their extremity. Some even deserted the faith and went over to the infidels.

Armenians in Cilicia

Yet the discipline preserved by Frederic was worthy of the race which he led. The Armenian patriarch, writing to Saladin, describes the Germans as extraordinary men, of inextinguishable courage—an army subjected to the severest discipline and in which no crime remained unpunished. Passing from Asia Minor through the territory of the Armenians in Cilicia, Frederic proceeded to Antioch, and the conquest of Palestine appeared within his grasp. There, however, his progress was checked. lie died in June, 1190, according to one account, from cold caught while bathing in the Calycadnus, near Sefticetas, however, affirms that he was drowned in that The Greek historian, like the Western writers, does to his ability, his burning zeal for Christianity, his bravery, and his disinterestedness.