In January 1523 he set out for Barcelona, trimming his nails, combing and clipping his hair, and exchanging his sack for clothes of coarse grey stuff. He did not wish to attract too much attention, he said. He was detained a few weeks at Barcelona, and begged his bread, and served the poor and the sick, in the way which was to become characteristic of the early Jesuits. On Palm Sunday he entered Rome, lost in a crowd of other pilgrims and beggars, and from there he walked on foot to Venice, whence he sailed in July. Within six months he was back in Venice. The Franciscan monks who controlled the Christian colony at Jerusalem had sent him home very quickly, fearing that his indiscreet fervour would lead to trouble with the Turks. The whole expedition was Quixotic, if it was really meant to be more than a pilgrimage, as Ignatius knew not a word of any language but Basque and Castilian. He returned to Venice in a thin ragged coat, his legs showing flagrantly through his tattered trousers, and in this guise he crossed on foot to Genoa, in hard wintry weather. By the end of February he was again in Barcelona. For several years yet Ignatius will continue to speak of the conversion of the Turks as his chief mission, but his actions suggest that the alternative in his mind was growing larger. The year's experience had taught him that the knight of the Lord needed education, and he sat among the boys at Barcelona learning the Latin grammar and startling them by rising into literal ecstasies over the conjugation of the verb "to love." He now dressed in neat plain clothes, but begged his bread on the way to school and took every occasion to preach the gospel. Once, when he had converted a loose community of nuns, the fast young men of Barcelona, who were angry at this interference with their pleasures, sent their servants to waylay him. They nearly killed him with their staves. Many jeered at him as a hypocrite or a fanatic: many revered him, and a few youths became his first disciples. With three of these he went, after two years' study in Barcelona, to the University of Alcalà, and began his higher studies. But he was so eager to make an end of this intellectual preparation, and so busy with saving souls and gaining proselytes, that he tried to take simultaneously the successive parts of the stately mediæval curriculum, and learned very little.