After a last visit to Cyprus[1045]—perhaps for the purpose of removing the officers whom he had placed there and transferring the custody of the island to representatives of Guy—Richard directed his course straight for Marseille, and in less than a month was off the coast of Barbary, within three days’ sail of his destination. Disquieting rumours had, however, reached him; from passing ships, or at sea-ports where he had touched, there had come to him repeated warnings that the count of Toulouse, so long his determined enemy and now his unwilling vassal, was in league with some of the neighbouring princes and nobles to seize him as soon as he should land. He could not but suspect that [Sidenote: _Oct.-Nov._] Philip Augustus was either an accomplice in the plot or would at least be only too ready to support the plotters; he therefore suddenly altered his course, and sailed to Corfu.[1046] It is difficult to guess why he did not proceed through the Pillars of Hercules direct to England. Instead, he seems to have deliberately chosen the much more hazardous adventure of a voyage up the Adriatic and an overland journey through the territories of the Empire. His motives for this strange choice can only be conjectured. He may have counted on a personal meeting with Henry VI as a means of renewing and cementing the old alliance of England with the Empire, and thus securing a valuable support in the struggle with France for which he knew he must prepare himself in every possible way. But if so, the moment and the circumstances were extraordinarily ill chosen. Richard indeed could not fully know how untoward the circumstances really were. That the young Emperor was as unscrupulous and false as his father had been upright and honourable; that he was just then making an attempt—destined to failure—to obtain possession of Naples; that on his way back to Germany Philip would meet him; and that there were symptoms of coming trouble in the Empire from the party of Richard’s brother-in-law Henry of Saxony, to whom Richard, like his father, had given shelter and protection, and at whose return to Germany in violation of an oath to set foot there no more Richard was said to have connived[1047]—all these things Richard could not know. But he did know, or ought to have known, that the German contingent had been a source of constant disturbance in the crusading host; that his own alliance with Tancred, the Emperor’s successful rival for the crown of Sicily, had made the Emperor his natural enemy; and that he had also a personal enemy—again of his own making—in Duke Leopold of Austria, who, though his territorial possessions were insignificant, was of considerable importance in German politics by reason of his close family connexion with the imperial house and with several of the chief feudataries of both the German and Italian realms.