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Rh Manasse became once more a pluralist by returning to Milan as Berengar's partisan. Among the lay magnates Marquess Otbert went into exile; a general disaffection existed among those who retained their possessions. The king was still eager as Hugh had been before him to amass an imposing royal demesne and to create trusty great vassals. Hitherto central Italy had been faithful to him; now, however, Spoleto seems an enemy, perhaps owing to the new turn of affairs at Rome. On his deathbed in 954 prince Alberic had bound the Romans by oath to elect his son and heir by Alda, John-Octavian, Pope when Agapetus should die. In December 955 the promise was kept and the boy became Pope as John XII. Thus the Pope recovered control of Rome by uniting with the Papacy the chiefship of the strong faction of Alberic. Any design of a permanent principate must have been given up; it was perhaps too anomalous, and it is significant that John renewed the long forgotten habit of dating by the years of the Byzantine Emperors. But the Roman nobles remained in power to the continued subjection of the ecclesiastical bureaucracy. John XII himself was a dissolute boy whose pontificate was a glaring scandal. No gleam of competence redeemed his debauchery, though he was not without secular ambitions. About 959 he made war on the co-regent princes of Capua-Benevento, Paldolf I (Pandulf) Ironhead and Landolf III, with the aid of Marquess Theobald II of Spoleto. He failed, and gave way, for prince Gisulf of Salerno assisted his neighbours; and then Berengar attacked Spoleto on an unknown pretext. Theobald was driven out, and Spoleto taken over by the king possibly to be conferred on his own son Guido. Did Berengar demand the imperial crown? In any case King Adalbert ravaged Roman territory, and John XII was in such straits as to appeal for German intervention, thus strangely shewing how the ancient policy of the Popes could recur in the unclerical son of Alberic.

It was in the summer of 960 that the Pope's envoys, the Cardinal-deacon John and the scriniarius Azo, reached Otto the Great in Saxony. The Pope's prayer for help was seconded by the Lombard exiles and by the messages of numerous magnates. Otto was now unembarrassed in other directions, and could resume his old schemes with the knowledge that he would have at last allies and support south of the Apennines. He was not ready to move, however, till August 961, when he crossed the Brenner Pass in force. Adalbert may have attempted to gather troops to bar the defiles north of Verona, but the universal defection of counts and bishops made resistance impossible, and the German king entered Pavia, whence Berengar had fled after spitefully burning the royal palace. Otto and the infant son Otto II whom he had left in Germany were at once acknowledged as co-regent kings of Italy without further ceremony. All their deserted rivals could do was to hold out in strong castles on the spurs of the Alps and in the Apennines where one magnate at least, Marquess Hubert of Tuscany, remained true to them. Otto was