The Crusaders under the command of the archbishop of Mayence and Valeran de Limbourg, were the first to arrive in Palestine. Scarcely were they landed when they expressed their desire and resolution to begin the war against the infidels. The Christians, who were then at peace with the Saracens, hesitated to break the truce signed by Richard, and were, further, unwilling to give the signal for hostilities before they could open the campaign with some hopes of success. Henry of Champagne and the barons of Palestine represented to the German Crusaders the danger to which an imprudent rupture would expose the Christians of the East, and conjured them to wait for the army of the dukes of Saxony and Brabant. But the Germans, full of confidence in their own strength, were indignant at having obstacles thrown in the way of their valour by vain scruples and chimerical alarms; they were astonished that the Christians of Palestine should thus refuse the assistance sent to them by Providence itself, and added, in a tone of anger and contempt, that warriors of the West were not accustomed to defer the hour of battle, and that the pope had not induced them to take up arms and the cross to remain in a state of shameful inactivity. The barons and knights of the Holy Land could not listen to such injurious speeches without indignation, and replied to the German Crusaders that they had neither solicited nor wished for their arrival; that they were better acquainted than the northern warriors of Europe with what was advantageous to the kingdom of Jerusalem; that they had without any foreign succour braved the greatest perils, and that when the proper moment should arrive they knew how to prove their valour otherwise than by words. Amidst such warm debates the minds of both parties became daily more exasperated, and the most cruel discord thus prevailed among the Christians before war was declared against the infidels. All at once the German Crusaders marched out in arms from Ptolemaïs, and commenced hostilities by ravaging the lands of the Saracens. At the first signal of war the Mussulmans gathered together their forces; and the danger that threatened them putting an end to their discord, from the banks of the Nile and from the remotest parts of Syria crowded hosts of warriors but lately armed against each other, but who now, assembled under the same banners, acknowledged no other enemies but the Christians. Malek-Adel, towards whom all Mussulmans turned their eyes when the defence of Islamism was the question, marched from Damascus at the head of an army and repaired to Jerusalem, where all the emirs of the adjoining provinces came to take his orders. The Mussulman army, after dispersing the Christians who had advanced towards the mountains of Naplouse, laid siege to Jaffa.