The approach of Barbarossa's victorious German army greatly concerned Saladin, who was forced to weaken his force at the Siege of Acre and send troops to the north to block the arrival of the Germans. Death and burials Emperor Frederick Barbarossa opted on the local Armenians' advice to follow a shortcut along the Saleph river. Meanwhile, the army started to traverse the mountain path. On 10 June 1190, he drowned near Silifke Castle in the Saleph river. There are several conflicting accounts of the event: According to "Ansbert", against everyone's advice, the emperor chose to swim across the river and was swept away by the current. Another account recorded that Frederick was thrown from his horse while crossing the river, weighed down by his armour, and drowned. According to the chronicler Ibn al-Athir, "the king went down to the river to wash himself and was drowned at a place where the water was not even up to his waist. Thus God saved us from the evil of such a man". The writer of the Letter on the Death of the Emperor Frederick, a churchman who accompanied the crusader forces, reported that "after the many and terrible exertions that he [Frederick I] had undergone in the previous month and more, he decided to bathe in that same river, for he wanted to cool down with a swim. But by the secret judgment of God there was an unexpected and lamentable death and he drowned." Frederick who liked to swim, as he went to bathe with Otto of Wittelsbach in the Adriatic, might have been exhausted from weeks of marching, hence he was fatally affected by the very hot summer in Anatolia. If the writer was Godfrey of Spitzenberg, Bishop of Würzburg, who was a close confidante to Frederick, the report would be the most plausible account of what happened, since he might have witnessed the emperor's death. Jacques de Vitry, a historian of the Crusades, outlined Frederick's endeavors and Saladin's dilemma, in which he reported: Frederick's death caused several thousand German soldiers to leave the force and return home through the Cilician and Syrian ports. The German-Hungarian army was struck with an onset of disease near Antioch, weakening it further. Only 5,000 soldiers, a third of the original force, arrived in Acre. Barbarossa's son, Frederick VI of Swabia, carried on with the remnants of the German army, along with the Hungarian