…Otto fails to reach Rome before the…

…Otto fails to reach Rome before the Pope dies.

Once in Rome, he engineers the election of his twenty-four-year-old chaplain and cousin Bruno of Carinthia as Pope Gregory V, the first German pope, on May 3.

The new pontiff, son of the Salian Otto I, Duke of Carinthia, who was a grandson of the Emperor Otto I the Great, had crowned Otto emperor on May 21, 996, in Rome.

Here, his main advisors are two of the main characters of this age, his tutor Gerbert of Aurillac and the bishop Adalbert of Prague.

Together with these two visionary men, influenced by the Roman ruins and perhaps by his Greek mother, Otto devises a dream of restoration of a universal Empire formed by the union of the Papacy, Constantinople and Rome.

He also introduces some court customs in Greek.

Highly educated and emotionally receptive to exotic influences, Otto devotes more attention to imperial and Italian affairs than to German.

A few days after Otto III's coronation, the emperor and the pope hold a synod in which Arnulf is ordered to be restored to the See of Reims, and Gerbert is condemned as an intruder.

Politically, Gregory V acts consistently as the Emperor's representative in Rome and grants many exceptional privileges to monasteries within the Holy Roman Empire.