About the year 900, the Benedictine AbbotRegino of Prüm (c.840–915) drafted a letter to Hatto, the archbishopof Mainz (c. 850–913),wherein he gave a definition of what in his viewconstituted ethnicity: ‘Just as various peoples aredifferent in descent, manners, language, and laws,so the holy and universal church throughout theworld, although joined in the unity of faith,nevertheless upholds various ecclesiasticalcustoms.’ As his remark attests, although a fluidsocial category, ethnicity featured on the imaginedworld stage of Christendom from late antiquityonwards. It did so in language, politics and law, onworld maps, in military and cultural traditions andin memories. On a rhetorical level, there existedunity in diversity, for the universal Church ofwestern Europe nominally bound together theassemblage of ethnic groups. The umbrella or tertium comparitionis underwhich the manly, warrior gentes dwelled was the imperium christianum, theChristian imperial successor to the Roman empire,which, monks and clerics after the death ofCharlemagne in 814 more frequently claimed, spannedan expanding world of west and east under thehegemonic power of a world emperor. Within thereligious community, however, monks eagerly comparedthe alleged character and customs of descent groups,their virtues and vices, while juxtaposing them withthe supposed features of groups outside Christendom,including Jews, Persians, Egyptians and Greeks. Thecomparative schema according to which the monksarranged the groups was predicated on their, from aChristian perspective, assigned role in time andspace.

It is this temporal and geographical framework withwhich monks schematized ethnic groups that is thetopic of the present chapter. It commences circa 950when monks in Spanish monasteries, but soonthereafter across western Europe, began to recordlists cataloguing ethnic characteristics, virtuesand vices. The Benedictine monks compiling theselists dealt closely with the descendants ofmigratory warrior bands, categorized as Franks,Longobards, Angles and Goths, who in earlierhistories had settled and converted to Catholicism.Claiming genealogical, linguistic and cultural ties,monks traced back the lineage of royal dynasties toTrojan, biblical or Scandinavian origins inso-called origo gentismyths. In particular, however, the lists drawn up bythe Benedictine monks now turned to and interwovebiblical patristic traditions commenting on thepropensity of groups to succumb to or overcomesinfulness with regard to their role in salvationhistory.