Then the Duke, separated from his men, went to help him; when the wretched man, weeping with pain and fear, saw him, he called upon the man's noble nature, and urged him to help him. Nor did the Duke, whose nature consisted almost entirely of virtue, delay helping him, but he swiftly drew his sword from its scabbard and forcefully struck the head of the beast. More annoyed than wounded, because of the hardness of its bones, the beast attacked the Duke, removing its teeth from the leg of the unfortunate man whom he had first attacked so fiercely. The man quickly departed, without troubling himself about the Duke's difficulty, but saving himself, leaving the man and the beast to resolve their conflict between them. The beast, angry at the blow he had received, leapt up, seized the Duke with his claws, threw him down, and pinned him under his terrible limbs. With his raging mouth he bit the Duke's leg,[215] but the noble-minded man remained steadfast in spite of his fall, and tightly held onto the sword he had drawn.[216] As he lay there, and the beast continued to gnaw at the hip he had seized, the Duke, fully aware of his predicament, placed his sword between the head and arm of the beast, gathered all of his strength, and drove the point of the blade into the depths of the beast's body. When he felt the metal gliding through his viscera, the beast finally relaxed the jaws that had sunk into the Duke's flesh. When the Duke saw that he had been released from the beast's mouth, and noticed that the beast was not moving from its place, he pushed with both feet, but in the act of pushing he received an almost mortal wound in his leg from the sword that was stuck in the breast of the beast above him. He fell down in worse shape than when he had been held by the beast, and now, weakened from loss of blood, after some time he was found by his men. The Duke was now sorry, although too late, for having gone out by himself, since this adventure was costly for his own warriors, and for the entire sacred army. Until the siege of Antioch was over, he had to be carried on a litter, and since he could not look after himself or others, he quickly lost almost 15,000 men of those who had belonged to him, but who abandoned him when he became disabled.