While the outlook was thus gloomy in Germany, the march of events in Italy gave but little encouragement to Pope and Emperor, and demanded the personal presence of Otto, who had been forced to return to Germany in the vain hope of appeasing the general opposition to his policy. Before he crossed the Alps for the last time, Otto went to Aachen, and, if we can believe one of his followers’ statement, visited the vaults beneath the venerable palace-chapel to gaze upon the corpse of Charles the Great, sitting as in life upon a throne, with crown on head and sceptre in hand. When he reached the south, he found to his dismay that lower Italy had fallen altogether from his obedience, and that even Tivoli, in the immediate neighbourhood of Rome, had rebelled against him. Otto made feverish efforts to restore his authority. He clamoured for Byzantine help, and begged for a Byzantine wife. He paid a flying visit to the Venetian lagoons, seeking for a fleet from the great Doge Peter Orseolo. But worse news now reached him. Rome itself now rose in revolt, and Otto, postponing in despair his warlike operations, could only find consolation in visits to the holy Romuald in his inaccessible island hermitage amidst the swamps of Ravenna, and in the practice of penances, mortifications, and scourgings. Recovering his energy, he now sought to obtain an army from Germany to procure, as in the old days, the subjection of Italy; but it was the very moment of the crisis of the Gandersheim struggle, and no German help was forthcoming. A sharp fever now attacked Otto at the very moment of the collapse of all his plans. He died on 23rd January 1002, at Paterno, near Rome, when only twenty-two years old. [Sidenote: Death of Otto III., 1002.] With him perished his lofty ambitions. He had made himself the wonder of the world; but all that he had accomplished was to play the game of the high ecclesiastical party. The tendency of his policy, like the latter Carolings, was to subordinate the visionary Empire to the practical Papacy, thus exactly reversing the ideas of the great Saxons, and bringing out in its most glaring contrast the incompatibility of the union of the German kingship with the imperial claims to universal domination. Within a year Sylvester II. followed him to the tomb. [Sidenote: Henry II., 1002–1024.]