The little Pontifical work which John did during his fourteen years as Pope does not dispose us to alter this estimate. The score of his letters which survive generally relate to privileges of abbeys or prelates which he was asked to grant or confirm. He gave support to the monks of Fulda,[194] of St. Gall,[195] and of Cluny.[196] He sent legates on a vague mission to Spain and granted a pallium to the Bishop of Hamburg, who was converting the far north. He intervened in the religious troubles of Dalmatia, at the invitation of the local prelates, and wrote them many letters[197] for the regulation (or Romanization) of their Slav liturgy and discipline. Even to Constantinople, which had one of its rare moods of affection for Rome, he sent legates to assist the Greeks in obliterating the effects of their latest quarrel. His work in Bulgaria is not wholly clear, or it might be interesting. King Simeon quarrelled with the Eastern Church and turned to Rome, and John naturally encouraged him. He sent legates to Bulgaria, and we learn from a letter of Innocent III., long afterwards, that they presented Simeon with a golden crown from John. It looks as if the Pope gave Simeon some kind of imperial rank, but he did not secure the adhesion to Rome of the Bulgarian Church. A few letters to France and Germany are hardly more instructive. Heribert of Vermandois seized the person of Charles the Simple, and, when he was threatened with excommunication, hoodwinked the Pope. Heribert then, in 925, conferred the rich See of Rheims on his five-year-old son, and John--either in order to secure the release of the King or dreading worse things--acquiesced.[198] In Germany John sent his brother to assist in the restoration of discipline at the Synod of Altheim (916). A few years later he summoned Herimann, Archbishop of Cologne, and Hilduin and Richer, rival bishops of Liège, to the bar of Rome. But in this apparent assertion of authority he was really acting under pressure of the Emperor Berengar, and the sequel is not flattering. There was a complicated quarrel about the bishopric of Liège, and, when the litigants refused to come to Rome, John laid down a principle which would have seemed to Nicholas I. or Gregory VII. an outrage. He rebuked Herimann on the ground of "an ancient custom that none save the King, to whom the sceptre is divinely committed, shall confer a bishopric on any cleric." These letters, a poor record of official work for so long a Pontificate and in so disordered a world, do not alter our impression of John. Rome shared the gloom which lay over Europe, and it is foolish to suppose that the degenerate nobles who ruled the Papacy would put on its throne a man who would rebuke their vices or resent their domination. Indeed, it will be useful to follow the lamentable story a little further, as an introduction to the revival which culminates in Gregory VII.