A nearer future than Easter had a share in Richard’s secret anxieties. All these weeks ships had been plying to and fro between Joppa and Acre, too many of them bringing from the northern city visitors who were not merely useless but undesirable, and carrying back thither lukewarm Crusaders who preferred its pleasures and indulgences to the hard work of the Holy War; whereby the host was considerably diminished in numbers.[801] The extent of the leakage seems to have been made fully apparent to the princes when at the end of September they removed their troops from the gardens to a new encampment somewhat further out, near the Casal of S. Habakkuk.[802] King Guy was commissioned to go to Acre and bring the truants back;[803] and while awaiting their return Richard, probably to keep the enemy inactive, sent on October 3 a messenger to Safadin to propose a renewal of the suspended negotiations. A few days earlier, Saladin had received from Conrad of Montferrat overtures for an alliance; Conrad offered to make peace with the Moslems, break openly with the Franks, and recover Acre for the former, if they would give him Sidon and Beyrout. Saladin was quite willing to agree to these terms—“for,” says Bohadin, “the marquis was a most terrible adversary to us”—but not to grant Conrad’s demand that the Sultan should pledge himself by oath to the cession of the two sea-ports, till Conrad should first have proved his sincerity by attacking his fellow-Christians at Acre and releasing his Moslem prisoners at Tyre.[804]