consulted him in affairs of state, and finally promoted him to the Papacy. Gerbert was in fact a subtle and ambitious politician, who filled the chair of Peter with no small degree of credit. But his more serious talents would never have found their opportunity save for his skill in ministering to the pseudo-classicism of rustic Saxons. Each of these Emperors turned his back on Germany at the first opportunity. Each met in Italy with bitter disillusionment and an untimely fate. Otto II, in whose idealism there was a trace of his father's concrete ambition, planned the conquest of South Italy and Sicily. The scheme was not impracticable as the Hohenstauffen were afterwards to prove. And in the year 980 it could be justified as advantageous to the whole of Christian Europe. A new Saracen peril was impending in the Western Mediterranean. A new dynasty of Mohammedan adventurers, the Fatimites, had arisen on the coast of Northern Africa and had made themselves masters of Egypt (969). Five years before that event they had already occupied Sicily; in 976 they turned their attention to Italy. The south of the peninsula was divided between the Eastern Empire and Pandulf Ironhead, the lord of Capua, who had established an ephemeral despotism on the ruins of Lombard and Byzantine power. Even he could not face the Arabs in the open field, and his death (981) was followed by the partition of his lands and bitter strife among his sons. Unless Otto intervened it was not unlikely that Italy, south of the Garigliano, would become a province of the Caliphate of Cairo. Otto, however, was ill-qualified to be the general of a crusade. His military experience had been gained in petty operations against the Danes and Slavs, and in an invasion of France vaingloriously begun but ending in humiliation (978). Full of self-confidence he led a powerful force into Apulia, intending to expel first the Greeks and then the Arabs. He captured Bari and Taranto without difficulty; but he had no sooner entered Calabria than he allowed himself to be entrapped by the Emir of Sicily. On the field of Colonne (982) he lost the flower of his army and barely escaped 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).