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168 parative peace he gave. The problem of defence against the barbarian invader, which had baffled the fleeting Italian kings and had contributed to their ruin, was solved. Otto himself crushed the Hungarian hordes for good and all: it was fitting that in his reign the Saracens of Fraxinetum also, who so long preyed on the routes between Italy and France, should be abolished. The impulse to this deliverance was given by a crowning outrage. St Maiolus, Abbot of Cluny, revered throughout the West, was captured in July 972 while crossing the Great St Bernard Pass with a numerous caravan of fellow travellers. The Cluniac monks at once raised the enormous ransom demanded by the Saracens, but the indignation roused by the event and perhaps a hope of so great a booty at length moved the great barons on either side of the Alps to act in concert. The Saracens who had seized St Maiolus were cut off and destroyed, and a federation of nobles led by the counts of Provence and Ardoin of Turin closed in on Fraxinetum itself. The Saracen colony was extirpated. Once more the Alpine passes were free to travellers, save for exactions by the nobles and occasional brigandage.

The Regnum Italicum could now rest under the shadow of the strong monarchy, untroubled save by the violence of the nobles and the unappeased strife of Roman factions. Otto the Great had nominated in 973 Benedict VI to succeed to the Papacy, but a relative of John XIII and of Alberic, Crescentius, son of a Theodora, thrust in a usurper, the deacon Franco, as Boniface VII in 974. Yet a reaction, perhaps provoked by the true Pope's murder, soon came, and the imperial missus, Count Sico, was able to instal the Bishop of Sutri as Benedict VII, although Franco contrived to escape to Constantinople with a quantity of church-treasure. The revolution had not even required a German army, much less an imperial campaign.

Not till December 980 did Otto II (the Red) find leisure or occasion to proceed to Italy. He came to be reconciled with his mother Adelaide, and perhaps to give her some voice in affairs. The young Emperor, then aged twenty-five, was not eminently gifted with a ruler's wisdom; but he was ambitious and energetic, and his ambitions now were directed to that conquest of the south which his father had abandoned. There was much that was tempting in the situation of Byzantine Italy, much that seemed to call for intervention. In answer to the proceedings of Otto the Great an attempt had been made by the Byzantines to unify the administration by transmuting the strategos of Longobardia into the catapan or viceroy of Italy with a superior authority over the strategos of Calabria. This new system was soon put to hard proof. In 969 the Fatimite caliphs conquered Egypt, and thus became hostile neighbours to the East Romans in Syria. War broke out, and spread to the western provinces of both powers. Once more Calabria was ravaged by the