Constantine: Gerbert, to his contemporaries a marvel of piety and learning, in later legend the magician who, at the price of his own soul, purchased preferment from the Enemy, and by him was at last carried off in the body. With the substitution of these men for the profligate priests of Italy, began that Teutonic reform of the Papacy which raised it from the abyss of the tenth century to the point where Hildebrand found it. The Emperors were working the ruin of their power by their most disinterested acts. [Sidenote: Schemes of Otto III: Changes of style and usage.] With his tutor on Peter's chair to second or direct him, Otto laboured on his great project in a spirit almost mystic. He had an intense religious belief in the Emperor's duties to the world--in his proclamations he calls himself 'Servant of the Apostles,' 'Servant of Jesus Christ[165]'--together with the ambitious antiquarianism of a fiery imagination, kindled by the memorials of the glory and power he represented. Even the wording of his laws witnesses to the strange mixture of notions that filled his eager brain. 'We have ordained this,' says an edict, 'in order that, the church of God being freely and firmly stablished, our Empire may be advanced and the crown of our knighthood triumph; that the power of the Roman people may be extended and the commonwealth be restored; so may we be found worthy after living righteously in the tabernacle of this world, to fly away from the prison of this life and reign most righteously with the Lord.' To exclude the claims of the Greeks he used the title '_Romanorum Imperator_' instead of the simple '_Imperator_' of his predecessors. His seals bear a legend resembling that used by Charles, '_Renovatio Imperii Romanorum_;' even the 'commonwealth,' despite the results that name had produced under Alberic and Crescentius, was to be re-established. He built a palace on the Aventine, then the most healthy and beautiful quarter of the city; he devised a regular administrative system of government for his capital--naming a patrician, a prefect, and a body of judges, who were commanded to recognize no law but Justinian's. The formula of their appointment has been preserved to us: in it the Emperor delivering to the judge a copy of the code bids him 'with this code judge Rome and the Leonine city and the whole world.' He introduced into the simple German court the ceremonious magnificence of Byzantium, not without giving offence to many of his followers[166]. His father's wish to draw Italy and Germany more closely together, he followed up by giving the chancellorship of both countries to the same churchman, by maintaining a strong force of Germans in Italy, and by taking his Italian retinue with him through the Transalpine lands. How far these brilliant and far-reaching plans were capable of realization, had their author lived to attempt it, can be but guessed at. It is reasonable to suppose that