Otto III
Otto III became Holy Roman Emperor at three, ruled in his own name for six years, and died at twenty-one with a programme nobody else believed in. Born in 980, he was the son of Otto II and the Byzantine princess Theophanu, which made him half Greek and gave him an education in imperial ideas that his Saxon magnates did not share. His father died when he was three. His mother governed as regent for seven years with unusual competence, and after her death in 991 his grandmother Adelaide held it until he came of age in 994. His idea was the renovatio imperii Romanorum — the renewal of the empire of the Romans — stamped on his seals. He moved his residence to Rome, built a palace on the Aventine, adopted Byzantine court titles and ceremonial, and governed alongside two men he had made himself: his cousin Bruno as Pope Gregory V, the first German pope, and then his tutor Gerbert of Aurillac, the finest mathematician in Europe, as Sylvester II. He granted Poland an independent archbishopric at Gniezno in 1000 and Hungary a crown, dealing with both as partners in a Christian commonwealth rather than as subjects. He also had the corpse of Charlemagne exhumed at Aachen and, by one account, sat with it. The Romans expelled him from his own capital in 1001. He died of fever in January 1002 near Viterbo, unmarried and childless, marching to retake it. His succession passed to Henry the Quarrelsome's son, who abandoned Rome and governed from Germany.
- Lived: 980 CE – 1002 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state
