This thesis seeks to investigate and compare two descriptions of the Byzantine court in Constantinople, written twenty years apart in the mid-10th century by the historian and later bishop Liutprand of Cremona. In both descriptions (in the Antapodosis and in the Relatio de legatione constantinopolitana), Liutprand constructed a similar imaginary of 'Greekness', in which the imagery of luxury and exoticism predominates, only that in the first description he evaluated it positively, while in the second he evaluated it in a distinctly negative way. The development of this imagery is then discussed in the descriptions of Byzantine noblewomen who married to Western courts as part of dynastic strategies: Theophanu, Empress and wife of Otto II, and Maria Argyropoulina, who married Giovanni, son of the Pietro II, Doge of Venice. The 10th and 11th centuries are the period of the building of the newly established Holy Roman Empire under the Ottonians, who considered Byzantium as one of their natural rivals. It turns out that the imaginary of Greekness developed by the authors under discussion in the Latin West plays an important role in the construction of a new, Western identity and in the making a distinction from a foreign, Eastern identity.
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