The Cilician river, now the Göksu, in which Frederick I Barbarossa drowned on 10 June 1190, destroying the largest army of the Third Crusade before it reached the Holy Land.
The Saleph is the river now called the Göksu, which rises in the Taurus and reaches the Mediterranean near Silifke in southern Turkey, the ancient Seleucia. It was the last natural obstacle on the land route from Anatolia into Cilician Armenia and so onward to Antioch and the crusader states.
It is remembered for one day. On 10 June 1190 Frederick I Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor and the most experienced commander of the Third Crusade, died in its water within sight of the end of the hardest part of his march.
Frederick left Regensburg in May 1189 with by far the largest of the three armies of the Third Crusade — contemporaries gave impossible figures, and modern estimates run to some fifteen thousand fighting men. He chose the land route through Hungary and the Balkans, wintered in Thrace after a tense standoff with the Byzantine emperor Isaac II, and crossed into Asia in March 1190.
The crossing of Anatolia was fought the whole way against Seljuk forces and hunger. In May 1190 the army stormed Konya, the Seljuk capital, revictualled there, and came down through the Taurus passes into Cilicia in the first days of June, where the Armenian ruler Leo was expected to receive them.
The sources agree on the date and the river and on nothing else. One account has the emperor, against advice, trying to swim the current and being swept away. Another has him thrown from his horse while fording in armour and going under. A third, from a churchman, has him bathing to cool off after weeks of marching in heat and drowning from exhaustion; some modern writers suggest a heart attack in cold water after a hot ride.
The place is equally unfixed. The march lay between Karaman and Silifke and the crossing was somewhere on that stretch, but no source identifies a ford, a bend or a landmark, and the river has since been dammed and has moved in its bed. Any confident marking of the spot is a modern invention.
The effect was immediate and catastrophic. Several thousand Germans simply went home through the Cilician and Syrian ports; others died of disease at Antioch. Of the force that had crossed into Asia, perhaps five thousand reached Acre, led on by the emperor's son Frederick VI of Swabia, who himself died in the siege lines in January 1191.
That left the crusade to Richard I of England and Philip II of France, and removed the one leader whose rank and experience might have held the expedition together. Frederick's death is the single largest reason the Third Crusade arrived at Acre as a coalition of rivals rather than an imperial army.
The corpse could not be carried home in summer heat, so it was treated in the customary way for a great man who died far from his burial place: the flesh was boiled from the bones. The flesh was buried in the church of Saint Peter at Antioch, the bones in the cathedral at Tyre, and the heart and internal organs at Tarsus.
None of the three has been located since. An emperor who had reigned for thirty-eight years, been crowned with the Iron Crown at Pavia in 1155 and made peace with the Lombard cities at Constance in 1183 has no identified grave, which is part of why the legend of the sleeping emperor in the Kyffhäuser attached to him so readily.