DISASTERS OF THE GERMANS

T1he passage through Bithynia completed, Conrad entered Lycaonia, the heart of the dominions of the Seljuk Turks. The sultan had assembled from every quarter of his states all the troops that could possibly be brought into the field, and the number was so great that the rivers could not satisfy their thirst or the country furnish provisions. The imperial guides conducted the objects of their care either through deserts where the soldiers perished from hunger, or led them into the jaws of the Moslems. In their occasional transactions, the bread which the crusaders purchased was mixed with chalk, and various other cruel frauds were practised by the Greeks. The assaults of the Turks were incessant.

2The staff of the pilgrim was a poor defence from a scimitar, and the heavily armed Germans could not retreat from the activity of the Tatars. Only a tenth part of the soldiers and palmers that had left the banks of the Danube and the Rhine escaped the arrows of the Moslems, and with their commander secured their retreat to the French army. Louis had been lulled into security by the flattering assurances of Manuel that Conrad, so far from standing in need of succour, had even defeated the Turks and taken Iconium. The French king was lying in camp on the borders of the lake near Nicæa, when some wretched German fugitives arrived with news of the perfidy of the Greeks, and the triumph of the Moslems.

3The allied monarchs soon met and consulted on the road which the champions of the cross should take. They united their crusaders, turned aside from the path which had been trodden by the feudal princes of Europe, and marched in concert as far as Philadelphia in Lydia; but the Germans had lost their baggage, and on a prospect of new calamities, many returned to Constantinople, and near Ephesus (to which place the army directed its course) the emperor himself embarked, and went to Jerusalem by ship.