High clerical office had come too often to be bought and sold, and the churches were becoming mere appanages of the great principalities. It was wise of Otto I. to try to win from the dukes the power they had obtained: but it was not for the good of the Church that the power should be even in the imperial hands. [Sidenote: Otto III. and the popes.] Otto I. died in 973. He had begun the reformation of the papacy. His son and grandson succeeded him, Otto II. in 973, Otto III. in 983. In 996 died Pope John XV., a Roman whom the Frankish chronicler, Abbo of Fleury, declares to have been lustful of filthy lucre and venal in all his acts. To Otto the clergy, senate, and people of Rome submitted the election of his successor. He chose his own cousin Bruno, "a man of holiness, of wisdom, and of virtue,"--news, to quote the same saintly writer, more precious than gold and precious stones. His throne was insecure: the Roman noble Crescentius drove him from it, but he won his way back and overcame one who had been set up as an anti-pope. He died in 999. {200} At the close of the tenth century a pope and an emperor of great ideas stand forth from the blackness of an age when, according to the evidence of councils and of monastic chronicles alike, vice was rampant--"the more powerful oppress the weaker, and men are like fishes in the sea, which everywhere in turn devour one another"--and the bishops and clergy alike neglected their duties. Otto III. (983-1002), the offspring of the German who sat on the imperial throne and the daughter of the Caesars of the East, made himself a real ruler of the Empire in Church as well as in State, and after the disputed succession of his cousin Bruno (Gregory V., 996-99) placed on the papal throne the first of the great line of later medieval popes. Gregory V. was the first pope of transalpine birth imposed by the Germans; Gerbert was the first of the French popes. It needed the imperial army to keep Gregory on the throne, and to crush the last of the Roman princelets who had made the papacy infamous; Gerbert (Silvester II., 999-1003) was only able to remain in the eternal city so long as Otto was there to protect him. [Sidenote: Gerbert.] But Gerbert's greatness belonged to a sphere far wider than that of the local papacy. He was a scholar in the ancient classics, a logician, mathematician, astronomer and musician, a great collector of books and a great teacher of men. An Aquitanian by birth, he was brought up at Aurillac, and then passed from one place of study to another, till, by the influence of the Emperor Otto I., he settled at Rheims in 972. His school was a famous one: among those whom he taught were many bishops, Robert the future king of the Franks and Otto the future emperor. From Rheims he went as abbat to {201} Bobbio, where the necessary severity of his rule provoked such opposition that he was obliged to return to Gaul. [Sidenote: In Gaul]