Pope Sylvester II

Gerbert of Aurillac was the most learned man in tenth-century Europe and became, as Sylvester II, the first French pope, reigning from 999 until his death in 1003. He was born in Aquitaine to a family of no rank and entered the monastery of Saint-Gerald at Aurillac. A visiting Catalan count took him to the Spanish March, where he studied mathematics and astronomy in a region that touched al-Andalus, and it is from there that his reputation derives. He reintroduced to Latin Europe the abacus, the armillary sphere and the water organ, instruments largely lost since the fall of the western empire. He is credited with being the first in Christian Europe outside al-Andalus to teach the Hindu-Arabic numerals, though not the zero that makes them powerful. As master of the cathedral school at Reims he made it the finest in Europe, and his pupils included the future emperor Otto III, whose patronage carried him to the archbishoprics of Reims and Ravenna and then to the papacy. As pope he worked with Otto on a vision of a renewed Christian empire, recognised the crowns of Hungary and Poland, and sent Stephen I of Hungary the crown that became that kingdom's central symbol. He opposed simony and clerical marriage. Otto's death in 1002 left him isolated in a hostile Rome, and he died the following year. His learning was so far beyond his contemporaries that later legend held he had studied sorcery in Córdoba and kept a brazen head that answered questions.

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