capture by flight to a passing merchant vessel. Next year he died, in
the midst of feverish preparations to wipe out this disgrace. It was
left for the despised Greeks to repel the Arabs from the mainland;
Sicily remained a Mohammedan possession till the coming of the Normans
(1062).

It is easier to sympathise with the policy of Otto II than with the man
himself. The case is reversed when we turn to the career of his son.
Otto III, an infant at his father's death, escaped from female tutelage
in 996, and made his first Italian expedition as an autocrat of sixteen.
He went to free the Papacy from the bondage of a Roman faction, the
party of the infamous John XII, again rearing its head under a new
leader. The boy-ruler suppressed the rebels with some gratuitous
cruelty. But he was not without noble ambitions or the capacity of
appreciating finer natures than his own. Called upon to nominate a Pope
he selected his cousin Bruno, a youth little older than himself, but a
statesman and an idealist, who set himself to assert the authority of
the Holy See over the national Churches, partly no doubt in the
interests of the Empire but more in those of morality and discipline.
Unhappily Bruno died before his influence had eradicated from the
Emperor's character the weaknesses fostered by scheming flatterers and
an injudicious education. Gerbert, who succeeded Bruno with the title of
Sylvester II, encouraged his pupil in a career of puerile extravagances.
While the new Pope extended his jurisdiction and magnified his office,
the young Emperor was planning to revive in Rome the ancient glories of
the Caesars. Otto built a palace on the Aventine; he imitated the
splendour and travestied the ceremonial of the Byzantine court; he
devised pompous legends to be inscribed on his seal and on his crown. In
the year 1000 he made a solemn pilgrimage to Aachen and opened the vault
of Charles the Great; another to Poland, to pray at the shrine of his