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The Greek mariners, deceived by the specious tale, turned their vessel’s prow towards Rossano, and on coming near that city, shifted their course towards the shore. Otho had been eagerly awaiting this opportunity. When they had approached sufficiently near to the land, he suddenly sprang from the deck into the sea, and swam ashore with a strength and swiftness that soon brought him to the strand. In a short time afterwards he entered Rossano, then held by his forces, and joined his queen, who had been left in that city.

This singular adventure is told with a number of variations by the several writers who have related it, most of them significant of the love of the marvellous of the old chroniclers. One writer tells us that the escaping emperor was pursued and attacked by the Greek boatmen, and that he killed forty of them with the aid of a soldier, named Probus, whom he met on the shore. By another we are told that the Greeks recognized him, that he enticed them to the shore by requesting them to take on board his wife and treasures, which had been left at Rossano, and that he sent young men on board disguised as female attendants of his wife, by whose aid he seized the vessel. All the stories agree, however, in saying that Theophania jeeringly asked the emperor whether her countrymen had not put him in mortal fear,–a jest for which the Germans never forgave her.

To return to the domain of fact, we have but further to tell that the emperor, full of grief and vexation at the loss of his army, and the slaughter of many of the German and Italian princes and nobles who had accompanied him, returned to upper Italy, with the purpose of collecting another army.

All his conquests in the south had fallen again into the hands of the enemy, and his work remained to be done over again. He held a grand assembly in Verona, in which he had his son Otho, three years old, elected as his successor. From there he proceeded to Rome, in which city he was attacked by a violent fever, brought on by the grief and excitement into which his reverses had thrown his susceptible and impatient mind. He died December 7, 983, and was buried in the church of St. Peter, at Rome.

The fancy of the chroniclers has surrounded his death with legends, which are worth repeating as curious examples of what mediaeval writers offered and mediaeval readers accepted as history. One of them tells the story of a naval engagement between Otho and the Greeks, in which the fight was so bitter that the whole sea around the vessels was stained red with blood. The emperor won the victory, but received a mortal wound.

Another story, which does not trouble itself to sail very close to the commonplace, relates that Otho met his end by being whipped to death on Mount Garganus by the angels, among whom he had imprudently ventured while they were holding a conclave there. These stories will serve as examples of the degree of credibility of many of the ancient chronicles and the credulity of their readers.