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Rh  defeated. No expedition so numerous or so well equipped had either before or has since left Europe, and none has more signally failed. The Germans had lost a magnificent army and their emperor. The French and English had lost the flower of their chivalry. The disasters which had befallen the armies of the West had been of a crushing character. Germans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen alike had learned, by a terrible experience, with what a persistent, unrelenting, and dangerous enemy the Byzantine empire had to deal. It is, in fact, in reading the history of so gigantic a failure, that we realize what the strength of that empire had been which had been able to hold its own against the Turks. The Crusaders in their dealings with the same enemy had had a similar experience. The imperial troops had also won almost every battle, had inflicted crushing defeats upon the Turks, had reconquered the country again and again, but new hordes, ever pressing into Asia Minor from Central Asia, had enabled the enemy to fight successfully for Islam and to drain away the strength of the empire by ever-renewed struggles.

Two years after the departure of Richard, namely, in 1195, the truce which he had concluded was broken. Saladin died suddenly in 1195, and his empire was at once divided. One of his sons, named Aziz, took Egypt; the eldest, named Afdal, became possessed of Palestine and Damascus; and a third, Dahir, of Aleppo. Saladin's brother, Malek-Adel, seized Mesopotamia. When Aziz and Afdal quarrelled, Malek-Adel took advantage of their differences to make himself sultan, and became master of Egypt, where, as we shall see, he played an important part in the outrage of the fourth crusade.

At the end of 1196, Henry the Sixth, the Swabian successor of Frederic, determined to undertake a crusade, and for this purpose sent an embassy to Constantinople to make exorbitant demands on the new emperor, Alexis. This crusade, which may be regarded as supplementary to the third, lasted but a few months and was a miserable failure. The emperor of the New Rome dreaded the passage of the Crusaders through his territory, and for the first time in Byzantine history, says Nicetas, the emperor determined to