The character of Dom Sebastian was one of the most important factors in bringing about the final overthrow of Portugal, and therefore deserves some examination, the more especially as the nature of the Portuguese monarchy was now entirely absolutist, owing to the wealth brought into the private treasury of the king by the Asiatic trade, and his consequent independence of the Cortes. The young king was rather German than Portuguese in appearance, with his blue eyes and fair hair and his face disfigured by the Hapsburg lip, and in his nature there was much of the Teuton dreaminess and love of the marvellous, which impelled him to take part in rash undertakings.[19] He was fond of solitude, and of building up castles in the air, in which he always appeared as a Christian hero exterminating the Mohammedans. For with his German dreaminess he united a truly Spanish fanaticism. His tutor, Luis Gonçalves da Camara, made him a bigot, and his governor, Dom Aleixo or Alexis de Menezes, taught him to look upon warlike enterprise as the chief aim of a monarch’s career, and the double teaching had inspired him with crusading ardour. He was not likely to be satisfied like his grandfather, John III., with showing his zeal for Christianity by rigorous orthodoxy and systematic persecution at home, but longed rather to unite war with religion, and to spread Christianity, like St. Louis of France, by his sword. To fanaticism and warlike ambition he added an obstinacy and imperiousness of character, which made him a tyrant. While training himself from boyhood for war, he determined to train his people also by issuing a sumptuary edict that none of his subjects might have more than two dishes, and those of the simplest character, for their meals, forgetting that no decree could alter the daily life of his people. Lastly, with these characteristics he united a spirit of profoundest melancholy, which is evident in his portraits and in all his actions, a melancholy which seemed to presage his early and tragic death, and is indicated by the motto he selected for himself: “Un bel morir tutta la vita honora.”