The principal town of Lycaonia, ICONIUM, is mentioned first by Xenophon, who considered it the most eastern one of Phrygia, at one day’s journey, according to Cicero, from Philomelium (Ak-shehr). Its position, amid many small streams, which exhaust themselves in watering its gardens, and as the meeting-place of several of the most important of the Roman roads through Asia Minor, made it, from the first, an important _entrepôt_; and, though Strabo calls it πολίχνιον (a little town), the account of Pliny, and the narrative in the Acts of the Apostles, prove it was a large and populous place in the middle of the first century A.D. Indeed, in Pliny’s time, its territory embraced fourteen towns, stretched around the capital (v. 27). Cicero was there for several days previously to his Cilician campaign. Iconium will always be invested with much interest owing to St. Paul’s visits to it; the first of which was immediately after his expulsion from Antioch in Pisidia, when the Apostles “shook off the dust of their feet.” Messrs. Conybeare and Howson have well remarked, that the vast plain and the distant mountains are the most interesting features of modern _Konieh_; for these, probably, remain as they were in the first century of Christianity, while the town has been repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt. Little, indeed, remains of Greek or Roman Iconium, except the inscriptions and fragments of sculptures built into the Turkish walls. Iconium was famous in the early Middle Ages as the capital of the Seljuk Sultans,[96] but was taken by the Emperor Barbarossa, during the second Crusade, in his famous but futile attempt to force his way through Asia Minor. To quote the picturesque words of Gibbon, “Forty campaigns in Germany and Italy had taught Barbarossa to command; and his soldiers, even the princes of the empire, were accustomed under his reign to obey. As soon as he had lost sight of Philadelphia and Laodicea, the last cities of the Greek frontier, he plunged into the salt and barren desert, a land (says the historian) of horror and tribulation. During twenty days every step of his fainting and sickly march was besieged by innumerable hordes of Turkmans, whose numbers and fury seemed after each defeat to multiply and to inflame. The emperor continued to struggle and to suffer; and such was the measure of his calamities, that when he reached the gates of Iconium no more than 1,000 knights were able to serve on horseback. By a sudden and resolute assault he defeated the guards and stormed the capital of the sultan, who sued for pardon and peace. The road was now open, and Frederic advanced in a career of triumph, till he was unfortunately drowned in a petty torrent of Cilicia.”[97] Leake points out that its walls, still between two or three miles round, are full of inscriptions and of other ancient remains, which the Seljuks seem to have tried to preserve. Footnote 96: