THE NEGATIVE ROLE assigned to the bride's father in the perilous bridal quest results in the portrayal of Constantinople as a negative narrative space, the polar opposite of Rother's kingdom. König Rother, however, differs significantly from other bridal quests in the minstrel epics — Oswald, Salman und Morolf, Ortnit — in that Constantin is a Christian; this limits to some degree the ways the poet can portray the negative otherness of the East. In constructing his narrative poles, the poet plays on contemporary stereotypes and prejudices, namely, the conflict between the pretensions to superiority of the Byzantine Empire and the claims of equality by the upstart (from their perspective) dynasties of the Holy Roman Empire to the west. One would do well to remember that this political tension was not merely a matter of theory, particularly for the southern Italians. As was noted earlier in the discussion regarding the genesis of König Rother, the Langobard and Frankish kings had been trying to expel the Byzantines from the Italian peninsula for several centuries by force of arms, something which only the Normans, led by Robert Guiscard of Sicily, had finally been able to do in 1071, a scant 100 years before the text was fixed in its written form. For those living in the medieval West, the Byzantines, who regarded all other peoples as barbarians, had the reputation of unshakeable pride and unbearable arrogance (Szklenar 1966, 141), and were characterized as deceitful, cunning and mendacious (fallacia, astutia, mendax), among other things, in the catalogues of nations popular in monastery schools (Gellinek 1968, 90 and n276).