Hello and welcome to the history of the Germans, Episode 14, or to the third, the collapse of a dream.

Thanks again for sticking round. We are now on episode 14 and if you have listened to all the episodes until now and the three prologues, you've endured over eight hours of me droning on about long-forgotten German rulers.

You definitely ooze stamina.

I also need to make a correction.

Last episode, I said that during Otto III's first expedition to Rome,

Cresentius had appointed a priest as Pope John

the 16th, who we know literally nothing about, no name, no background, nothing.

Well, on further review I realized that the reason he is so obscure is because he did not exist.

Note 1166 C of the Regesta Emperee, where I got this nugget from, is, to use a technical

term, bollocks. The author struggled with counting Pope John's beyond the number 15, so he invented

one to make his failed math set up, and I fell for it. And that also means that Johannes Philagathos, the anti-Pope Otto

the third, had mutilated and deposed, was John the 16th, not John the 17th. Not that he much

cared about that additional indignity. Apologies, and I will now be super vigilant to avoid such

mistakes in the future, but no promises.

Let's pick up our teenage hero where we left him last week. He had come down to Rome for a second

time, to bring his cousin, Pope Gregory V, back into the Holy City, from where he had been expelled

by the prefect of Rome, Crescentius II.

Otto III had besieged and captured Crescentius, had him beheaded, thrown from the walls of the Castel San Angelo,

and finally strung up by his feet at the gallows of Montemario.

He then embarked on his most ambitious policy, the restoration of the Empire of the Romans,

which was actually more attempt at copying the Byzantine Empire.

He organized his court and administration along Byzantine lines, awarding fancy Greek titles

...