Any number of similar accounts of the arrival of the Gypsies, similarly constructed, then led to the crystallisation of the image that would be conveyed down the centuries, attributing to the Gypsies a love of theft, a taste for necromancy and a strangely threatening physical appearance. Albert Krantz, from Hamburg, who died in 1517, wrote of a strange people who arrived in the towns of the north German seashore in 1417, dark-skinned and ugly, "cooked by the sun", dressed in filthy clothes; he asserted that they were skilled thieves, especially the women, whose stolen goods sustained the men. Where the earlier chroniclers had limited themselves to calling the Gypsies thieves, Krantz painted an altogether darker picture. They travelled the world but lived lazy lives, and did not recognise any country as their own. They had no religion and "lived from day to day"; he said that this was more the way of life of dogs than of humans. He was sceptical about their tales of penitential wanderings, which he described as fables. Of course, by his time the Gypsies had performed their seven-year penance many times over.  

The puzzlement of Europeans was encapsulated in the persistence of the story that they were Christian pilgrims seeking alms during a penitential journey. The balance between Christian hospitality and xenophobic hostility was a fine one. It was particularly difficult to maintain within the increasingly centralised bureaucratic state that came into being in the 15th and early 16th centuries, to which the alien customs and sheer mobility of the Gypsies seemed to pose a challenge. Western European princes and cities gradually decided that they had no place for wandering nomads within their states, trapping the Gypsies within the negative stereotypes that condemned them as thieves and sorcerers; in later centuries, they also suffered from unfounded accusations of child abduction. Much more positive romantic notions of the Gypsy did surface in the 19th century, in the works of Walter Scott and Victor Hugo, and in the books of George Borrow; but the classic image of them as asocial parasites was tragically revived by the Nazis; their Indo-Aryan origins were conveniently ignored by their exterminators. It is therefore important to remember that the negative image of the Gypsies today is the product of a long tradition of xenophobia, embellished by fantasy and exaggeration.