Gerbert’s first royal pupil, Otto II, was married to a Greek princess and fully in control of his kingdoms by age 18. He continued his father’s project of campaigns against the Slavs; the Poles and Bohemians were converting to Christianity—and choosing to ally with Rome, not Constantinople, by using the Latin Rite.
The Byzantine princess, now Queen Theophanu, must have been delighted to find that her husband was well educated. She shocked the German court by taking a bath every day and eating with a golden fork instead of her fingers. Her education was so good that she was often involved with diplomacy; of course, she also spoke Greek, which in the Frankish lands was an exotic foreign language, not yet one of its standard school subjects. Theophanu had three girls before producing an heir, Otto III. But in 983, the Holy Roman Emperor Otto II died, probably of malaria. He was only 28.
It took Theophanu about two years to gain control of her young son and the regency, and then it was clear that no expense could be spared in educating the young King of the Germans. So Theophanu sent for Gerbert of Aurillac to come from Reims and teach her six-year old, who already spoke both German and Greek. Otto III learned Latin, which he may have spoken a little already, since his grandmother had been born Queen of Italy in Rome. He may have learned basic Arabic reading skills; he certainly learned the mathematics/astronomy curriculum that was Gerbert’s specialty. He was probably the best-educated non-scholar of his era.
Otto III assumed full control of Germany at age 14, and by 16, he rode into Rome to claim his birthright there, too. Poland was brought fully under Germany’s overlordship, with parts of Bohemia. Otto III acted as baptism sponsor to the first Christian King Stephen I of Hungary. He began building a palace in Rome, and he made a contract to marry a Princess Zoe of Constantinople. It was Otto III who also had the colorful experience of entering Charlemagne’s tomb to get relics, only to find his great-great-grandfather seated in a chair, mummified by the dry air, with gold teeth shining in the lantern-light.
Otto III’s attitude to the Papacy was full-on assault. First he appointed his 24 year old cousin as Pope Gregory V. A few years later, in 999, he appointed his best friend and tutor, Gerbert of Aurillac. At this time, it was unclear how Popes should be chosen. If a strong Holy Roman Emperor appointed one, who could say no? If Otto III could appoint a Pope, why couldn’t his distant cousin Hugh Capet, now King of France? Medieval Europe’s history is shaped by the struggles of the Pope to remain separate while French and German kings tried to co-opt his power. This subject will come up many more times.
In 1002, Otto III suddenly died. He was in Italy on campaign at age 21, with his Byzantine princess bride Zoe just arriving in Apulia for their wedding. The very ambitious Ottos came to an end without a next heir. His legacy was in doubt and disarray, left to his cousins in Bavaria. Only Gerbert remained, as Pope Sylvester II.
Gerbert of Aurillac ruled the church as Pope Sylvester II for only four years, 999 to 1003. His appointment was almost certainly meant as a stick in the eye of the Roman and Italian hierarchy, who had opposed Otto III. Gerbert was a Frenchman from Aquitaine, appointed by a Greek-speaking German. Rome rebelled against both the king and his Pope. It is said that Italians threw mud at Otto’s coffin as it processed back to Germany.
Although Gerbert had served as the Archbishop of Ravenna (another Otto appointment), he had never been much involved with church politics, and when he was, the results were poor. He was just not interested in theology and church governance. He really wanted to study math. He had written Latin books on Arabic mathematics, with an emphasis on simple trigonometry for figuring out surveying problems: heights of mountains, areas of fields. Shortly before he became the Pope, his personal letter to a Frankish friend discussed the proper way of figuring the area of an equilateral triangle.
Gerbert’s career problem was that universities had not yet been founded, so he could not chair a math department. The only career track in which lifelong study was funded was the church; influence in the church entailed promotion in its governing structure. He was always a bit lost. As Pope Sylvester II, he did his best to govern the church, but his time was short since he died only a year after Otto III.
One might think Sylvester II would be soon forgotten if he was Pope for such a short time, but instead, he became legendary in fantastical stories.
The root problem seems to have been that he could speak Arabic. Europe was not even close to ready to accept a new mathematics system emerging from Christendom’s enemy Islam. The numbers probably struck them as magic symbols (as opposed to the honest old Roman tally marks and C’s). Although Gerbert of Aurillac had learned math in Barcelona and perhaps Cordoba, rumors spread that he had gone all the way to Morocco to learn magic. All the way to Morocco! Imagine! And if not, well Cordoba was almost as bad.
How had such a wicked priest become Pope? The only possible answer was that he had made a deal with the Devil. (Common folk may literally not have known that he had been the tutor for two generations of Ottos.) According to later legend, he had a long relationship with a succubus; this was an embodied she-demon named Meridiana who favored him with success and wealth as long as he was true to her. According to another legend, if he went to Jerusalem and said Mass as Pope, he would instantly be struck dead when the Devil came to take his soul. Some rumors reported that he indeed died that way.
In our terms, Pope Sylvester II’s only great failure was that his understanding of Arabic numerals never really included the power of zero. He taught place value with an abacus, but he used only places 1 through 9. The word “zero” came into Latin two centuries later, borrowed from Mozarabic cero. Without zero, the system is interesting but not compelling. In fact, without zero, the place-value method is a “cipher,” borrowed from the Arabic word for zero, tsifr. Cipher came into English with various meanings of mystery: a code, a puzzle we can’t figure out, a character that stands for something mysterious. And so both Andalusian zeros made their way into English.
When Pope Sylvester II and his star pupil Otto III were both gone, the school at Rheims carried on his curriculum, but Arabic numbers remained an arcane academic subject. There was no celebrity pushing for their adoption, no king ordering their use. Until Italian merchants began to feel the need for the new numbers a few centuries later, Europe just lumbered on with additive numbers like CVIII.