All seemed now to tend rapidly towards the great enterprise; nothing was seen in the various countries but the symbol of the Cross, which in England was of _ermine_ or white, of _gules_ or red for France, and of _synople_ or green for Flanders. But the whole current of feeling was suddenly turned, by an aggression of Richard, Duke of Guienne, afterward King of England, upon the territories of the Count of Toulouse. Philip Augustus flew to arms to avenge his vassal and friend; Richard met him with equal fierceness, and the feuds between France and England were renewed with increased violence.[659] Many of the French and English knights, several of the clergy of the two countries, together with a great multitude of Germans, Italians, and Flemings, waited not for the tardy journey of the crusading monarchs, but passed over into the Holy Land, and joined themselves to Guy of Lusignan, who had now collected the remnants of all the military orders, and with those princes and knights who had escaped the Moslem scimitar, was engaged in besieging Acre. His forces[660] gradually increased till they became immense; and, owing to the skill of those by whom he was accompanied, rather than his own, the camp of Lusignan was fortified in such a manner that no efforts of the Saracens could penetrate its lines. Saladin pitched his tents on the mountains to the south, not long after the Christians had undertaken the siege, and innumerable battles in the open field succeeded, in which neither army gained any material advantage that was not compensated by some following reverse. The fleet of the Saracens supplied the town,[661] and the fleet of the Christians brought aid to the camp, so that the conflict seemed to be interminable, from the equal zeal and force of the contending parties. In the mean while, the war between Henry and Philip continued; and, from a personal dispute between Richard Coeur de Lion and the French monarch, had so changed its character, that Richard, accompanied by his brother John, went over to the faction of the enemy, and did homage to the crown of France.[662] Henry, abandoned by his children and the greater part of his nobles, found himself forced to sign an ignominious peace; and after one of the violent fits of passion to which he so often yielded himself, was taken ill, and concluded a long life of vice and crime before the altar of the Lord,[663] which he had once caused to be stained with blood.[664]