ABSTRACT
When Otto II died at the age of twenty-eight, his son Otto III was only three years old. News of his father’s death in Rome reached the heir in Aachen, where he was spending Christmas in order to receive the royal crown. Henry the Wrangler, duke of Bavaria, immediately set out for Cologne where the child king was staying in the custody of Archbishop Willigis of Mainz. 1 Henry apparently wanted to seize the crown by first acting as regent for his cousin. The archbishops of Cologne, Metz, Magdeburg, and Trier gave him their support, but he failed to win over the bishop of Verdun or the archbishop of Reims. Nor did he convince Gerbert of Aurillac who was a resident scholar at the cathedral school of Reims. Gerbert was one of the cleverest men of the tenth century and was to become a staunch supporter of the young Otto.
