§ 96.3. =Otto III.= now raised to the papal chair his teacher Gerbert, whom he had previously made Archbishop of Ravenna, under the title of =Sylvester II.=, A.D. 999-1003. Already in Ravenna had Gerbert’s ecclesiastical policy been changed for the high church views of his former opponents, and as pope he developed an activity which marks him out as the worthy follower of his predecessor and the precursor of a yet greater Gregory (VII.). He energetically contended against simony, that special canker of the church, and by sending the ring and staff to his former opponent, Arnulf, made the first effort to assert the papal claim to the exclusive investiture of bishops. But he had previously, as tutor of Otto, by flattering his vanity, inspired the imaginative, high-spirited youth with the ideal of a restoration of the ancient glory of Rome and its emperors exercising universal sway. And just with this view had Otto raised him to the papal chair in order that he might have his help. The pope did not venture openly to withdraw from this understanding, for in the condition of Italy at that time in a struggle with the emperor, the victory would be his in the first instance, and that would be the destruction of the papal chair. So there was nothing for it but by clever tacking in spite of contrary winds of imperial policy, to make the ship of the church hold on as far as possible in the high church course and surround the emperor by a network of craft. The phantom of a _Renovatio imperii Romani_ with the mummified form of the Byzantine court ceremonial and the vain parade of a title was called into being. On a pilgrimage to the grave of his saintly friend Adalbert in Gnesen (§ 93, 13) the emperor emancipated the Polish church from the German metropolitanate by raising its see into an archbishopric. He also, in A.D. 1000, released the Polish duke Boleslaw Chrobry (§ 93, 7), the most dangerous enemy of Germany, who schemed the formation of a great Slavic empire, from his fealty as a vassal of the German empire, enlisting him instead as a “friend and confederate of the Roman people” in his new fantastic universal empire. In the same year, however, Sylvester, in the exercise of papal sovereignty, conferred the royal crown on Stephen the saint of Hungary (§ 93, 8), appointed the payment by him of a yearly tribute to the papal vicar with ecclesiastical authority over his country, and made that land ecclesiastically independent of Passau and Salzburg by founding a separate metropolitanate at Gran. Though Otto let himself be led in the hierarchical leading strings by his papal friend, he yet made it abundantly evident by bestowing upon his favourite pope eight counties of the States of the Church, that he regarded these as merely a free gift of imperial favour. He also lashed violently the extravagances as