The Saxon dynasty of the Holy Solomon Empire had produced three emperors by the time of Otto II, all three of whom were ambitious emperors and none of them was willing to settle for less.
Emperor Otto's grandfather, Henry I, refused the Catholic anointing ceremony of Solomon when he ascended the throne to show that he would not obey the order established by the Holy See. Therefore, he was nicknamed "the sword without handle".
Emperor Otto's father, Otto I, encountered a rare civil strife in Italia, so with the help of the Florentine faction, he crossed the Alps and entered Italia, abolished the then Pope John XII, and enthroned Leo VIII as Pope.
The Ottonian Privileges were signed as a result, the most famous of which was the stipulation that "the Pope should be absolutely obedient to the Emperor."
As a result, when Pope Innocent came to power, he tore up this humiliating agreement and treated it as if no such agreement had ever been signed.
I'll tear it, so I'll tear it. If you have the guts, come and bite me.
Of course, Otto I did not attack Innocent. Firstly, the golden opportunity like last time was gone. Secondly, he had received a batch of technical assistance from the Holy See. The next priority was to seize the time to develop national strength.
However, the Holy Roman Empire was not an empire after all. The loose feudal system led to the duchies acting independently, and the Frankish-style tax-sharing system aggravated the imbalance in regional development.
Burgundy, Lombardy and Bavaria in the south soon became rich thanks to foreign trade with the Holy See, while Saxony, Lower Lorraine and Bohemia in the north remained extremely poor.
It is said that at one point, in order to build a factory park in Lower Lorraine, Emperor Otto I even had to condescend to borrow money from the Wolf family, and this loan lasted for three consecutive years...
If this continues, let alone "concentrating our efforts on major tasks", it would be great if the empire does not split itself.
According to the arguments of the research enthusiasts in the forum, by the time of Emperor Otto II, the Holy Roman Empire's foreign debt had reached a terrifying point where it was about to explode due to long-term trade deficits, and there was no ability or sign of any reduction at all.
At the same time, the southern principalities also began to show signs of splitting. The Duchy of Bavaria was relatively good, after all, it was separated from Italy by the Alps.
The Wolf family had long-term trade relations with the Solomons in Lombardy, and even their thoughts and culture began to be "Latinized". It is said that the people of Burgundy even began to regard themselves as "High Franks".
Therefore, the mess that Emperor Otto II is facing now is that he can either continue to endure humiliation, keep a low profile, endure the huge foreign debt and the separatist tendencies of the southern principalities, and first try to reform the feudal tax system (Your Majesty, the ancestral laws cannot be changed!), and then build up the national strength.
Or he would just turn against the Vatican and first overthrow the Wolf family who had betrayed their ancestors (which was equivalent to breaking off relations with the Vatican), and then use the momentum of a great victory to march south to Italy again, retracing his father's "entry into the pass" route.
In the end, Emperor Otto chose the latter. No one knows how much of this was his own political decision, how much was the common will of the upper echelons of the empire, and how much was from some unknown mental influence.