During this time the Wends in Prussia again arose, and after a long and wasting war, in which the German settlements beyond the Elbe received little help from the Imperial government, the latter were either conquered or driven back. The relations between Germany and France were also actually those of war, although there were no open hostilities. The struggle for the throne of France, between Duke Charles, the last of the Carolingian line, and Hugh Capet, which ended in the triumph of the latter, broke the last link of blood and tradition connecting the two countries. They had been jealous relatives hitherto; now they became strangers, and it is not long until History records them as enemies. [Sidenote: 996. OTTO III.'S CORONATION IN ROME.] When Otto III. was sixteen years old, in 996, he took the Imperial government in his own hands. His education had been more Greek than German; he was ashamed of his Saxon blood, and named himself, in his edicts, "a Greek by birth and a Roman by right of rule." He was a strange, unsteady, fantastic character, whose only leading idea was to surround himself with the absurd ceremonies of the Byzantine Court, and to make Rome the capital of his Empire. His reign was a farce, compared with that of his grandfather, the great Otto, and yet it was the natural consequence of the latter's perverted ambition. Otto III.'s first act was to march to Rome, in order to be crowned as Emperor by the Pope, John XV., in exchange for assisting him against Crescentius, a Roman noble who had usurped the civil government. But the Pope died before his arrival, and Otto thereupon appointed his own cousin, Bruno, a young man of twenty-four, who took the Papal chair as Gregory V. The new-made Pope, of course, crowned him as Roman Emperor, a few days afterward. The people, in those days, were accustomed to submit to any authority, spiritual or political, which was strong enough to support its own claims, but this bargain was a little too plain and barefaced; and Otto had hardly returned to Germany, before the Roman, Crescentius, drove away Gregory V. and set up a new Pope, of his own appointment.