The Byzantine Empire acquired a negative reputation in the Western world as early as the Middle Ages. The creation of the Holy Roman Empire by Charlemagne in the 9th century and the East–West Schism in the 11th century made the Empire an outcast to the Western European countries following the Roman Church, and the siege and sack of Constantinopole during the Fourth Crusade in 1204 only cemented those differences. Hence the European medieval stereotypes of the people of the Byzantine Empire portrayed them as perfidious, treacherous, servile, effeminate and unwarlike.