The second army of Christians, having made the voyage down the Atlantic and through the Mediterranean, landed at Beirut and inflicted a crushing defeat upon Malek-Ahdel, who had advanced from Jaffa to oppose its progress. Henry VI. busied himself in Sicily until he had secured that country, and with it restored the imperial preponderance in the affairs of Italy. This he accomplished through the perpetration of barbarities from which the Turks would have recoiled, and in which the Greeks at Constantinople were his only competitors. He put out the eyes of the son of Tancred, ruler of Cyprus, and stole his daughters. With the instinct of a ghoul, he dug up the body of Tancred in order to strip from it the badge of dead royalty. When he had satisfied his remorseless ambition in this section, he allowed the remnant of his army to proceed to Palestine for the succor of their brethren. He engaged to keep a force of fifty thousand in the Holy Land for one year at his own expense. The third army was led by Conrad, Bishop of Hildesheim, chancellor of the empire. Thus augmented, the Christians in the East were enthusiastic for the recapture of Jerusalem; but the coming of winter, the well-known strengthening of the fortifications about the Holy City, and, above all, the dissensions among the rival leaders, who cared more for the maritime cities, with their treasures, than for a place whose chief glory was its sacredness, led to the postponement of the enterprise until the spring. An assault upon Thoron occupied them meanwhile. The fortress of Thoron, between the Lebanons and the Mediterranean, was the great menace to the ambition of the invaders. This stronghold was on the top of a mountain, and guarded from hostile approach by precipitous walls and deep ravines. Its seeming impregnability did not daunt the spirit of the crusaders; they bridged chasms and dug into cliffs, until they thoroughly undermined the masonry of the fortress.