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Wednesday 29 October 2014

Did a pope and an emperor team up to erase 300 years of history?

S.O.T.T: Pope Sylvester II and Holy Roman Emperor Otto III were two powerful men and two ambitious friends. Just how ambitious? There is a (verycontroversial) theory that between them, they forcibly ushered in a new millennium... 300 years early. Holy Roman Emperor Otto III was a man with a lot of power and a flair for self-aggrandizement. He had quite a bit to work with; the Holy Roman Empire was a huge amalgamation of what is now Germany, much of eastern Europe, northern Italy, and eastern France, and he was put in charge of it when he was three years old. He was crowned, famously, on Christmas day - the same day the original Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne was crowned. (More on that later.) Like another famous person whose reign was ushered in on Christmas day, Otto was threatened by a mad king, his uncle, who coveted his power. The young boy emerged unscathed after some military maneuvers, and was returned to his mother, a Byzantine princess. She brought him up with the idea that he would civilize the barbarous kingdom she had married into...read more>>>...