The times were singularly unfit for a war against the infidels. Crusading ardour had long been extinct, and though Pope Pius II. (Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini) had in the preceding century tried to form a coalition against the Turks, and in 1571 Don John of Austria had broken their naval power at Lepanto, the ardour of the Pope and the navy of the prince were directed against the Turks, not because they were unbelievers, but because they were a conquering race and threatened Western Europe. The expeditions of the Emperor Charles V. against Tunis in 1535, and Algiers in 1541, were dictated rather by naval and commercial than by religious considerations, and John III. had acted with the thorough sanction of the Church, whose most humble devotee he was, in abandoning the smaller towns held by Portugal in Morocco. Yet Dom Sebastian persisted; he would be crusader rather than politician, and he was determined to fight the Mohammedans. His first idea was to go in person to India and place himself at the head of the Portuguese forces there; but the minister, Pedro de Alçaçova Carneiro, pointed out the difficulty of finding a regent to govern during his absence, and his former tutor, Aleixo de Menezes, turned his thoughts to Africa. He was fired by the fame of his ancestor, Affonso V. “the African,” and determined to waste what strength still remained to the exhausted Portuguese nation in useless expeditions to the barren regions of north-west Africa, where no possible advantage could be obtained of the slightest value to Portugal. Filled with the notion of recapturing the useless places which his grandfather had evacuated, such as Alcacer Seguier, Azamor, Arzila, and Cafim, King Sebastian in his twentieth year, in 1574, suddenly made up his mind to sail across to Africa. The expedition partook rather of the nature of a _reconnaissance_ than of a serious campaign. The king spoke only of a visit to Tangier, and started off suddenly with his guards and courtiers from a hunting excursion, ordering the Duke of Aveiro to follow with a force of four hundred cavalry and one thousand two hundred infantry. With these troops Dom Sebastian made a few raids, and exhibited his personal courage by uselessly exposing his person, and he returned more bent than ever on a great war in Africa, which was to end in the Portuguese conquest of Morocco, and the acquisition of everlasting fame for its leader as a brave “soldier of the Cross.”