42 THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE.
Scarcely a year had passed between the opening of the cen- tury (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 Bi- thynia. These were attacked, and with such success that, ac- cording 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 cit}^ 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 Is- midt, under the leadership of Saison or Malek Shah, Sultan of Iconium, tlie son of Kilidji Arslan. Following up the victo- ries 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 Philo- melium, near Iconium. Saison, utterly defeated, had to sue for peace, and obtained it on condition that the Turks should ' It is diflBcult to avoid the use of the terra. The people called them- selves Romans, though the Byzantine writers themselves occasionally called them Greeks. 2 Ann. Com. xiv. ' Ibid.
- Zonaras, xviii. 27. * Michael Elycas, ii. 624.
« Matthew of Edessa, 213. ' Ann. Com. xv.