d morals and Italian ignorance and crime,
which was at last to produce such important results for Europe.

Once more Gerbert retired to the court of the emperor. It was at the
time that Otho III. was contemplating a revolution in the empire and a
reformation of the Church. He saw how useful Gerbert might be to his
policy, and had him appointed Archbishop of Ravenna. [Sidenote: Gerbert
the pope.] On the death of Gregory V. he issued his decree for the
election of Gerbert as pope. The low-born French ecclesiastic, thus
attaining to the utmost height of human ambition, took the name of
Sylvester II.

But Rome was not willing thus to surrender her sordid interests; she
revolted. Tusculum, the disgrace of the papacy, rebelled. It required
the arms of the emperor to sustain his pontiff. For a moment it seemed
as if the Reformation might have been anticipated by many
centuries--that Christian Europe might have been spared the abominable
papal disgraces awaiting it. [Sidenote: Poisoning of the emperor and
pope.] There was a learned and upright pope, an able and youthful
emperor; but Italian revenge, in the person of Stephania, the wife of
the murdered Crescentius, blasted all these expectations. From the hand
of that outraged and noble criminal, who, with more than Roman firmness
of purpose, could deliberately barter her virtue for vengeance, the
unsuspecting emperor took the poisoned cup, and left Rome only to die.
He was but twenty-two years of age. Sylvester, also, was irretrievably
ruined by the drugs that had been stealthily mixed with his food. He
soon followed his patron to the grave. His steam organs, physical
experiments, mechanical inventions, foreign birth, and want of
orthodoxy, confirmed the awful imputation that he was a necromancer. The
mouth of every one was full of stories of mystery and magic in which
Gerbert had borne a part. Afar off in Europe, by their evening
firesides, the goblin-scared peasants whispered to one another that in
the most secret apartment of the palace at Rome there was concealed an
impish dwarf, who wore a turban, and had a ring that could make him
invisible, or give him two different bodies at the same time; that, in
the midnight hours, strange sounds had been heard, when no one was
within but the pope; that, while he was among the infidels in Spain, the
future pontiff had bartered his soul to Satan, on condition that he
would make him Christ's vicar upon earth, and now it was plain that