Page:The Fall of Constantinople.djvu/60

42 Scarcely a year had passed between the opening of the century (when the first Kilidji Arslan, Saltan of Iconium, was reigning) and 1192, when the second of the same name died, without a battle being fought between the Greeks and the Turks. In 1105 the latter had again obtained possession of Nicfea. In 1108 the Greeks destroyed an army of 24,000 men which had pillaged the country around Philadelphia. Four years later the Emperor Alexis found that a new band of Turks from Khorasan had arrived and was ravaging Bithynia. These were attacked, and with such success that, according to one writer, these Khorasan Turks were never again seen ; according to another, they vanished like smoke. While the empire was obtaining these successes over the Turks, the Crusaders, who had established themselves in the north of Syria, were continually struggling against them. Still their numbers enabled them to hold their own against the soldiers of the West as well as against those of the emperor. In 1111 the province of Gihon was taken from the Franks, and the next year Baldwin, the Count of Edessa, a principality which the Crusaders had established around the city of that name to the northeast of Aleppo, found an innumerable army of Turks marching towards his territory.

Two years later, in 1114, Alexis is again fighting the Turks in the neighborhood of Nicasa and Nicomedia, the modern Ismidt, under the leadership of Saison or Malek Shah, Sultan of Iconium, the son of Kilidji Arslan. Following up the victories he obtained, the emperor pushed on to Iconium, where he found what is again described as an innumerable horde of Turks ravaging the country, and captured the city of Philomelium, near Iconium. Saison, utterly defeated, had to sue for peace, and obtained it on condition that the Turks should