Troy lost the war, and for the next two and a half thousand years the royal houses and cities of Europe competed to descend from it. This is the story of the Trojans after the defeat: the refugees who sailed west, the Roman epic that made Aeneas the ancestor of the Caesars, and the medieval fashion in which Franks, Britons, Normans, Welsh, Icelanders and Venetians all claimed the blood of Priam, because Troy was older than Rome. One strand is ancient myth. Almost all the rest is political invention, and each card says which. Companion piece to The Odyssey, the same war told from the losing side. Images: Wikimedia Commons.
In the chronology worked out by the Greek scholar Eratosthenes in the third century BC, Troy falls in 1184 BC. Its survivors, a few bands of exiles who sail west, are the people that royal houses and cities across Europe will later claim as their ancestors.
The wooden horse is opened, the gates are taken and the city burns. Priam is killed at his own altar, and the Greeks sail home with the plunder and the captive women. For Odysseus the night begins a ten-year voyage, told in The Odyssey. For the Trojans it begins a second life, as a defeat that dynasties across Europe would later compete to claim as their origin.
Aeneas, son of Anchises and the goddess Venus and a cousin of Priam, leaves the burning city with his father on his shoulders, his small son Ascanius by the hand and the household gods of Troy in his care. His wife Creusa is lost in the smoke. Every later version of the legend, Roman, Frankish or British, starts from this flight.
Hector's infant son Astyanax is thrown from the walls of Troy so that no heir of the royal house survives. In Greek tragedy that is the end of the line. Renaissance writers who needed a Trojan founder for the kings of France reversed it: in their versions the boy is smuggled out alive, renamed Francus, and becomes the ancestor of the French crown. Ronsard built his national epic on that reversal in 1572.
The Trojan elder Antenor, who in some versions argued for giving Helen back and in others betrayed the city, leads a second band of survivors north-west, together with the Eneti of Paphlagonia. Livy opens his history of Rome with this voyage: Antenor settles the head of the Adriatic, his people become the Veneti, and he founds Patavium (Padua). Padua, Venice and the dukes of Normandy will all claim him later.
Priam's son Helenus, the prophet, and Hector's widow Andromache end up ruling in Epirus, where they build Buthrotum as a small copy of Troy, with its own Scaean Gate and a stream renamed Xanthus after the Trojan river. In Aeneid III, Aeneas walks through it and weeps. It is the first place in the tradition that is Troy by name alone.
After Carthage and Dido, Aeneas lands in Latium. The promised sign appears, a white sow with thirty piglets, and he founds Lavinium, marries Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus, and fights a war to keep her. In none of the Roman versions does Aeneas found Rome. He founds the line that will produce its founders.
Aeneas' son Ascanius, also called Iulus, leaves Lavinium and founds Alba Longa in the Alban Hills above the lake. A line of Alban kings follows. The second name is the one that mattered politically: the gens Iulia, the family of Julius Caesar and Augustus, traced itself through Iulus to Aeneas and so to Venus.
About four centuries after Aeneas, an Alban princess of his line bears twins to Mars. Left to die by the Tiber and suckled by a she-wolf, Romulus and Remus grow up to found Rome, and a Trojan refugee becomes, by this reckoning, the ancestor of the Roman state. It is the oldest of the Trojan-descent claims on this timeline, and the model for nearly every later one.
Under Augustus the legend moves from folklore into state literature. Within one generation the leading Roman writers fix the Trojan descent in Latin prose and verse, and medieval Europe takes its template from their texts for the next fifteen hundred years.
Livy begins Ab Urbe Condita with the survivors of Troy before he reaches Romulus, and he names two of them: Antenor in the Adriatic and Aeneas in Latium. Because Livy put Antenor on record beside Aeneas, Padua, Venice and later the dukes of Normandy each had a second Trojan founder to claim, one with no connection to Rome.
Virgil dies with the Aeneid unfinished and asks for it to be burned. Augustus overrules him and has it published. The poem gives Rome an origin as old as the Homeric poems and gives the ruling family a goddess as its ancestor. In the Latin West, where almost nobody could read Homer in Greek, Aeneid II and the short Latin prose accounts attributed to Dares and Dictys were how Troy was known for the next thousand years.
In the Pharsalia, the poet Lucan records that the Arverni of central Gaul dared to claim they were brothers of Latium, sprung from Trojan blood. It is a single line, and the first evidence that a people outside Rome had seen what the story could do for them. The Arverni made the claim six centuries before the Franks.
Rome falls, and the kingdoms that replace it want its prestige. Over four centuries Frankish and Norman chroniclers settle on the claim that would serve the Middle Ages: descent from Troy itself, the city Rome claimed to descend from, which outranked every rival.
An anonymous Burgundian compiler, known as Fredegar, writes the first Trojan origin story for a people other than the Romans. After the fall of Troy, he says, one band of exiles followed Aeneas to Italy while another followed Priam and a king named Francio north. From Francio the Franks took their name and the Merovingian kings their pedigree. None of it is historical. It was copied and believed for a thousand years.
The Liber Historiae Francorum turns the story into a route. Twelve thousand Trojan refugees cross the Black Sea and the Danube, settle in Pannonia and build a city called Sicambria, then move west to the Rhine and become the Franks. A migration with named stopping places was easier to believe than a bare genealogy, and this is the version later chroniclers repeated.
The dukes of Normandy commission the canon Dudo of Saint-Quentin to write the history of a dynasty founded by Viking raiders three generations earlier. Dudo makes the Danes into Dacians, descended from the Trojan Antenor, and retells the settlement of Rollo in Francia in language borrowed from the Aeneid. The founder of the duchy becomes, on the page, a second Aeneas.
Within a century the legend moves from Latin chronicles into the vernacular. An Oxford cleric writes the book that does it, two poets translate it, and an Icelandic chieftain attaches the Norse gods to Troy.
Geoffrey of Monmouth finishes the Historia Regum Britanniae and gives Britain a line of kings two thousand years long that never existed, starting with Brutus, great-grandson of Aeneas. Brutus kills his father in a hunting accident, is exiled, gathers the enslaved Trojans of Greece, sails past the Pillars of Hercules and lands on Albion, an island of giants, which he renames after himself: Britannia. Around 215 medieval manuscripts of the book survive.
In the same book Brutus founds his capital on the Thames and names it Troia Nova, New Troy, which Geoffrey says was later worn down to Trinovantum and then to London. The name lasted four centuries: Tudor pageants and Elizabethan poets still called the city Troynovant.
The Norman poet Wace completes the Roman de Brut, which by tradition he presented to Eleanor of Aquitaine. The Latin history of Geoffrey becomes about 15,000 lines of French verse and moves from the monastery to the court. Wace also gives the first known mention of the Round Table.
Layamon, a parish priest in Worcestershire, rewrites Wace in early Middle English, the first telling of the Brutus story in the language of the English. He writes under Norman rule, in English, an account in which the first kings of the island came from Asia Minor.
In the Prologue to the Prose Edda, the Icelandic chieftain Snorri Sturluson explains that the Æsir were not gods but men who came out of Asia, from Troy. Thor is the son of a king called Múnón who married Tróán, a daughter of Priam, and Odin is his descendant. A Christian writer kept the pagan poems in circulation by giving their gods a classical human ancestry.
The legend begins to do practical work. It settles precedence between cities, legitimises dynasties and names royal children, and an Ottoman sultan uses it to explain the conquest of Constantinople.
Workmen dig up an ancient sarcophagus in Padua. The poet and judge Lovato Lovati declares that it holds Antenor, the Trojan founder of the city, has a monument built over it by 1284, and arranges to be buried beside it. A modern study of the bones points to a man of the third or fourth century AD. The tomb still stands in Padua.
The monk Primat presents the Grandes Chroniques de France to Philip III at Saint-Denis. The Trojan descent of the Franks is now the opening chapter of the official history of the French crown, and the abbey copies and illuminates it for the next two centuries.
The history of Geoffrey is translated into Welsh as Brut y Brenhinedd and becomes the basis of Welsh dynastic argument. Brittany makes the same claim, on the grounds that the Bretons are Britons who crossed the Channel. By the fifteenth century Welsh poets and princes were invoking Brutus to address English kings as kinsmen.
Nine years after taking Constantinople, Mehmed II visits the ruins of Troy and asks to see the tombs of Achilles and Ajax. His Greek historian Kritovoulos records the sultan saying that God had kept him to avenge this city and its people, the Asians, on the Greeks. While the courts of Europe were inventing Trojan ancestors, the sultan stood on the site and claimed the grievance.
Henry VII, a Welshman on the English throne after Bosworth, names his first son Arthur and arranges for him to be born at Winchester, which Malory, the year before, had identified with Camelot. The family tree drawn up for the Tudors ran through Cadwaladr and Brutus to Aeneas. A dynasty with a thin claim to the crown gave itself a pedigree back to Troy. Arthur died at fifteen, and his brother became Henry VIII.
Venetian humanists extend the Antenor story from Padua to the lagoon: the first islanders, they argue, were Trojan fugitives. The purpose was plain. Descent from Troy made Venice as old as Rome, answerable to neither pope nor emperor, and senior to its rivals on the mainland.
The tradition reaches its height and starts to break in the same century. Humanist scholars test the chronicles against older sources and find nothing behind them. Three and a half centuries later a German businessman digging in Anatolia shows that the city, at least, existed.
Jean Lemaire de Belges publishes Illustrations de Gaule et Singularitez de Troye, which joins the Gauls, the Franks and the people of the Low Countries into one Trojan family tree. By then Saxons, Bavarians, Bretons, several German princely houses and a number of Italian cities had made similar claims, and historians describe the habit as a European fashion.
The Italian scholar Polydore Vergil, writing English history for the Tudor court, states that Brutus never existed and that Geoffrey made him up. The reaction lasts a century, and John Leland and others defend Brutus as a patriotic duty. Vergil had made the case in print, with his reasons, and later historians took it up.
Pierre de Ronsard publishes four books of La Franciade, a national epic in which Astyanax survives Troy as Francus and founds the French royal line. It was planned to run to twenty-four books. Charles IX died in 1574, the royal support ended, Ronsard never finished it, and the fashion faded with it.
Three centuries after the genealogies fell apart, Heinrich Schliemann, digging on a site Frank Calvert had pointed him to, cuts a trench through the mound of Hisarlik in Anatolia and finds a city. There are nine of them, built one on top of another, and one was destroyed by violence in the late Bronze Age.
Two separate things. Established: medieval chroniclers, royal courts and city republics did claim Trojan descent and used it for legitimacy, and the documents survive in quantity. Not established, and held by no historian: that any of these peoples descended from Trojans. The Roman claim and a few others, such as that of the Arverni, are ancient. The rest are medieval and Renaissance political invention. For more than a thousand years the rulers of Europe traced themselves to the losing side of a war.