This book’s theme is imagining ethnicity.From the comfort of his monastery cell in Wiltshire,William of Malmesbury (c. 1090–c.1143) had plenty to say about the supposed characterof nations. Three decades after the First Crusade(1095–99), this erudite Benedictine monk crafted apolished account of Pope Urban II’s (1035–99)belligerent call in 1095 to embark on a bloodycrusade against Muslim rule in Palestine. In hisversion, inserted into the Deeds of the English Kings, a moralisticguide to rulership dedicated to the Scottish KingDavid I (c. 1085–1153)and Empress Matilda (1102–67), the librarian ofMalmesbury abbey decided to show off his familiaritywith Graeco-Arabic environmental theory, which atthat time was gaining influence at western Europeanschools and courts. William embellished Pope Urban’scall to arms with a parade of various European andwestern Asian peoples’ military skills, wieldingancient Hippocratic climate theory that explainedthe mental and physical character traits of ethnicgroups on physiological grounds.

Allegedly, the pope had deplored the incapacity ofEurope’s northern regions to produce good knights.In doing so, Pope Urban linked environment toreligion and culture: ‘There remains Europe, thethird zone. How small is the part of it inhabited byus Christians! For none would term Christian thosebarbarous people who live in distant islands on thefrozen ocean, for they live in the manner ofbrutes.’ Far removed from the sun’s heat, these menwere ‘less rational but fight most readily, in proudreliance on a generous and exuberant supply ofblood’. William looks towards regional environmentto explain the French army’s prowess as well. TheTurkish foe, on the other hand, suffered from acontrasting ineptitude, shooting arrows at adistance out of cowardice, for ‘it is in fact wellknown that every nation born in an eastern clime isdried up by the great heat of the sun; they may havemore good sense, but they have less blood in theirveins, and that is why they flee from battle atclose quarters’. Only the French – Pope Urban wasaddressing a crowd assembled in the Auvergne inpresent-day central France – produced excellentarmies, endowed with the courtly ideals of bothrational thought and courage: ‘You are a nationoriginating in the more temperate regions of theworld