In 951, Otto successfully carried out his first expedition to Italy. He met with no serious resistance, and on 23rd September entered in triumph into Pavia, the old capital of the Lombard kings. Adelaide was released from her captivity, and appeared in Pavia. Otto, who was now a widower, forthwith married her, assumed the crown of Italy, and fruitlessly negotiated with the Pope to bring about his coronation as Emperor. But Otto soon crossed the Alps, leaving Conrad of Lorraine to carry on war against Berengar. Next year, however, a peace was patched up. Berengar was recognised as vassal king of Italy, with Otto as his overlord, and the lands between the Adige and Istria—the mark of Verona and Aquileia—were confirmed to Duke Henry, who thus drew substantial advantage from his brother’s intervention. The revolt of Ludolf and Conrad in 953 was largely due to their disgust at Otto’s vigorous and successful defeat of their schemes. [Sidenote: Position of the Papacy, 914–960.] Nine years elapsed before Otto again appeared in Italy. Though he needed the help of the Papacy more than ever, its condition was not one that could inspire much hope. It was the period of the worst degradation into which the Roman See ever fell. For more than a generation the Popes had almost ceased to exercise any spiritual influence. The elections to the Papacy had been controlled by a ring of greedy and corrupt Roman nobles, conspicuous among whom was the fair but dissolute Theodora and her daughters Marozia, wife of the Marquis Alberic I. of Camerino, and the less important Theodora the younger. Imperialist partisans like Liutprand of Cremona have drawn the character of these ladies in the darkest and most lurid colours; but, allowing for monastic exaggeration, it is hard to see how the main outlines of the picture can be untrue. With all their vices, they did not lack energy. Pope John X. (914–928), an old lover and partisan of Theodora, was not destitute of statecraft, and did much to incite the Italians to drive away the Saracens of the south; but, quarrelling with Marozia, he had to succumb to her second husband, Guido, Marquis of Tuscany. After John’s death in prison in 928, Marozia became mistress of Rome, and made and unmade Popes at her pleasure. She married as her third husband, Hugh of Provence, the nominal king of the Italians, and procured the election of her second son, a youth of twenty, to the Papacy, under the name of John XI. About 932 her elder son, Alberic II., a strong, unscrupulous but efficient tyrant, whose character found many parallels in later Italian history, drove his father-in-law out of Rome, and reduced the city to some sort of order under his own rule. His policy seems to have been to turn the patrimony of St. Peter into an aristocratic republic, controlled by his house, and leaving to the Pope no functions that were not purely spiritual. He took the title of ‘Prince and Senator of all the Romans.’ He kept his brother, Pope John XI.