Meanwhile the wise advisers of the youth of Sancho II. gradually died off, and his Court was thronged with gay young knights and troubadours, who filled him with conceit and encouraged him in foolish courses. The first result of the removal of his old counsellors was to be seen in a serious quarrel with the Church. When on the death of Sueiro Gomes, the famous Bishop of Lisbon, in 1237, the royal candidate was not elected as his successor, the king sent his brother Dom Ferdinand to the city, where he burnt the house of the opposition candidate, João the dean, and killed several priests; and the king’s uncle, Rodrigo Sanches, acted in much the same high-handed manner at Oporto. Such behaviour was not to be tolerated even in a crusading monarch, and a papal interdict was laid on the kingdom; but prompt submission on the part of Sancho, and the journey of his brother, Dom Ferdinand, to Rome to do solemn penance for his misbehaviour, made atonement and the interdict was removed. The king then once again turned his arms against the Mohammedans, and invaded the Algarves, capturing Mertola and Ayamonte in 1239, Cacello in 1240, and Tavira in 1244. Unfortunately in the interval between these two last campaigns, King Sancho paid a visit to the Court of Castile, where he fell in love with Donna Mencia Lopes de Haro, the widow of a Castilian nobleman, Alvares Peres de Castro, whom he probably married. This woman became the evil genius of his life; the king grew lazy and sensual, and his Court degenerated into a hotbed of vice and intrigue. The connection was most distasteful to the people of Portugal, and gave an opportunity for the bishops and discontented feudal nobility to overthrow Sancho, whom they had always hated, if they could only find a leader and obtain the assistance of the Pope. Even his brother, Dom Ferdinand, deserted him in disgust, and became a vassal of Castile, and his worthless courtiers and favourites, while urging him on to despotism and vicious indulgences, made him more and more unpopular. Pope Innocent IV., who had been forced to fly from Rome to France by the Emperor Frederick II., longed to show his spiritual power over some monarch, and was easily persuaded by the Portuguese bishops that Sancho was both impious and cowardly. A leader was not hard to find, and in 1245, the king’s next brother, Affonso, who had settled at the Court of Blanche of Castile, the mother of Louis IX., and who had there married the heiress to the county of Boulogne, offered himself to the malcontents as a candidate for the throne of Portugal. The Pope then issued a bull “Grandi non immerito,” of which the terms were used as precedents in depositions of the more important monarchs in later days, and João Egas, Archbishop of Braga, Tiburcio, Bishop of Coimbra, and Pedro Salvadores, Bishop of Oporto, went to Paris and offered Affonso of Boulogne the crown of Portugal on certain conditions, which he accepted and swore to observe.