Connecting Troy with Turkey probably seems a natural association, as, after all, the site of Hisarlık, generally acknowledged to be that of the ‘real’ Troy1, is in the modern Republic of Turkey and Turks have ruled the region since the last decade of the thirteenth century2. When the Ottoman Turks began preparing for their final assault and conquest of Constantinople, Sultan Mehmet Fetih is said to have written to the Pope and the King of France claiming that, as Romans and Franks, they should support the Turks in gaining vengeance on the Greeks for the fall of Troy, twenty six centuries earlier3. In 1453, the idea that the nations of Europe could trace their origins back to exiles from Troy was commonly held4. Famously, Geoffrey of Monmouth had demonstrated the descent of the Britons from Brutus, grandson of Aeneas, and the story was repeated and elaborated5; only in the 16th century was it relegated to myth6.
Troy itself was near the very heartland of the Ottoman state while ‘Teucrian’ – a name derived from Teucer, the mythical ancestor of the Trojans – had been used by Vergil as an alternative name for the Trojans7. The leap from ‘Teucria’ to ‘Turcia’, the Latin form of Turkey, would seem no great leap and normative in a period when ancient Scythians might be linked to peoples as disparate as the Scots8 and the Ottomans9 by authors seeking more classical names for modern peoples. So, the idea that the Turks might put forward the same claim seems hardly unusual in the 15th century.
Yet long before the site of Troy had come under Turkish rule, Trojans and Turks had become intertwined in two quite different European medieval contexts. The first of these is also the first post-classical claim of descent from Trojan exiles and is found in the Merovingian Chronicle of Fredegar written around 66010. In it, the author describes the Franks as sharing a common ancestry with the Turks among refugees from the Fall of Troy. In one of the first sections of the Chronicle, Fredegar summarizes St. Jerome’s universal history. When Jerome mentions the fall of Troy, Fredegar adds:
The origin of the Franks is due to these events. They had Priam as their first king. It is written in books of history how afterwards they had Frigas as king. After this, they divided into two parts. One part went to Macedonia and they are called Macedonians after the people by whom they were received and the region of Macedonia. They had been invited to give assistance to the Macedonians, who were being overwhelmed by neighbouring peoples. Afterwards when united with that people, they gave birth to a great many offspring and from that stock the Macedonians were made into the strongest of fighters. In the future, in the days of King Phyliphy [Philip] and his son Alexander, report confirms what kind of courage they possessed. For the other part, which advanced from Frigia [Phrygia], had been deceived by the fraud of Olexo [Ulysses] and, though not taken captive, had nevertheless been cast out from there. Wandering through many regions with their wives and children they chose from amongst themselves a king by the name of Francio; from him they are called Franks. Francio, it is said, was very strong in war, and for a long time fought with a great many peoples, but in the end, after devastating part of Asia, he entered Europe and settled between the Rhine or the Danube and the sea11.
He then writes of how, after Francio’s death, the Franks were ruled by dukes until Pompey’s attempted conquest of Germania. The author implies that his failure was due to the fact that
No people up to the present time have been able to conquer the Franks, but the Franks have been able to subjugate them to their authority. Cast in the same mold were the Macedonians, who were of the same descent, and although they had been ground down by brutal wars, still they have always tried to live free from external domination12.
Having established the ultimate origins and character of the Franks, he then adds a third branch (in addition to the Franks and Macedonians) of the Trojan people:
A third people of the same origin were the Torci [Turks] as their fame confirms. When the Franks had experienced many battles in their travels through Asia and entered Europe, one part of them settled on the bank of the river Danube between the Ocean and Thrace. They even chose from among themselves a king, called Torquotus, from whom the Turks get their name. The Franks in this journey made their way with their wives and children, and there were no people that could withstand them in battle. But since they fought a great many battles, when they settled on the Rhine, a small band of them arrived, for they were diminished by Torquotus13.
A fourth people, the Romans, were, of course, also derived from Troy and the author does not leave them out:
The first king of the Latins arose at this time, for they had fled from Troy, and he and Frigas were from that stock. But on account of the capture of Troy and the flood of Assyrians and their persecution, they had left that city and region in two parts. For that reason, they established one kingdom of Latins and another kingdom of Frigians. Aeneas ruled the Latins, who were later called Romans, in the third year after the capture of Troy, or as some believe, in the eighth year. Aeneas and Frigas, it is said, were brothers14.
A second version of this same account is given in the third book of the chronicle where it has been interpolated into the text of Gregory of Tours’ History. There, we learn that:
Concerning the kings of the Franks, blessed Jerome has written15 who they were once upon a time, and before him the poet Virgil told the story. They had Priam as their first king. When Ulysses took Troy by deceit, they departed from there. Afterward they had Frigas as king. Divided into two, part of them proceeded to Macedonia. The others under Frigas were called Frigians; they wandered about Asia and settled on the shore of the Danube and the sea of Ocean. Again there was a division into two, and one part of them under Francio their king entered Europe. Wandering about Europe, they settled along with their wives and children on the bank of the Rhine. And they sought to build a city named after Troy not far from the Rhine. This work was begun but was left uncompleted. The remaining part of them that stayed on the bank of the Danube elected from among themselves a king, Torcoth by name and were then called Turks after him. The others are called Franci after Francio. For a long time afterwards under their dukes they always rejected the rule of strangers16.
That is all that the Chronicle of Fredegar has to say about Turks and, if one simply reads it as it is, it would appear to be relatively straightforward. Like the link between the Franks and the Trojans in the ancient past, the link with the Macedonians is clearly extremely prestigious. The Macedonians were one of the four great monarchies depicted in the Book of Daniel, as explained by St Jerome17, as well as in the pagan tradition18, and Alexander the Great had long been the subject of popular myth and legend.
The Turks, though, are a strange addition and one that was only briefly current. When Fredegar wrote, the nearest Turkish state, the Western Göktürk Khaganate, was in Central Asia and had its center in modern Kyrgyzstan19. The distance between them and the Franks appears to be so large that any direct contact seems unlikely. Possibilities have been previously suggested for the identity of Fredegar’s Turks other than the Göktürks, including the Avars20, Bulgars21, and Huns22, as well as the more obscure Turcilingi23. However, none really fit. The only one of these to have self-identified as « Turks » were the Göktürks, the first people to have called themselves « Turks » and any earlier people would make little sense. Usage of the ethnonym « Turk » assumes both wide knowledge of the name and the sort of use of it as a collective for Turkic-speaking steppe peoples that would have been impossible for someone in the seventh century; it is the sort of linguistic collective term that only makes sense in retrospect. Instead, the presence of the Turks can help explain this Urtext of medieval Trojan origins.
The Göktürks appear in contemporary Byzantine sources as Tourkw'n24. Their khaganate was the first Turkish empire and became one of the most powerful states on Earth, stretching from the Caucasus to northern China. When the Persians invaded and occupied Syria, Palestine, Egypt and advanced to the Bosporus during Heraclius’s reign, the Western Khaganate proved to be one of the Byzantines’ most important allies. In 625, the Emperor Heraclius, at a point when the armies of both Avars and the Persians were massed outside the walls of Constantinople itself, sent an emissary named Andreus to the Western Turkish Khagan to propose a wedding match of Eudocia Epiphania, Heraclius’s eldest child, with one of the Turkish rulers (whether Tung Yabghu, Ziebel, or a son is unclear). In the following years, though, the Göktürk Khaganate broke up. The Turkish name was largely in eclipse from the mid-seventh century on and was used to describe solely Central Asian peoples.
They would remain obscure for several centuries before reemerging at the end of the millennium as a Muslim people.
Other historians and chroniclers of the Franks don’t give anything approaching this tale. Gregory of Tours had no Trojan story at all but the eighth century Liber Historiae Francorum25, and later chronicles consider Troy as the origin of the Franks. But none mention the Turks. The Turks were not ‘current’ anymore (though they would reappear in later medieval texts regarding Frankish origins)26. Fredegar’s use of the name itself suggests that his sources come from a very narrow chronological period between 558 (the first Göktürk contact with the Byzantines) and 632 (Göktürk collapse) with the 620s as the most likely. In Fredegar’s passage, mention of the Turks as an additional Trojan people only makes sense if they were a hugely successful (and probably warlike) people. Their (apparently doubtful) relationship with Franks and Macedonians was after all demonstrated by their fama. At the time Fredegar wrote around 660, they had recently become vassals of Tang China, but, a few decades earlier, they would have qualified.
But, even then, it is doubtful their fama could cross Europe to reach Francia directly. The only place where Franks could make contact either with Göktürks or with their fama was Constantinople27. It seems likely then that the myth of Frankish Trojan origins might have something to do with Byzantine diplomacy28. The Franks, especially the Austrasian (eastern) kingdom, were long time allies of the Byzantines, albeit not exactly reliable ones. Frankish historiographers appear to remember close diplomatic ties with Byzantium (and political interferences from Byzantium) in the sixth century29. Embassies to Constantinople and contacts during the seventh century are also known, albeit not from Byzantine sources30.
The best known and longest claimed descendants of the Trojans were, of course, the Romans. In Heraclius’s time, the two most powerful foreign allies of the Roman Empire were the Turks and the Franks. Both had been allies of the empire in the previous century more often than not31 and imperial gold had found its way to both Turkish and Frankish rulers. It is conceivable that a treaty of alliance might have made mention of all three peoples, Romans, Franks and Turks, as sharing a common Trojan descent though no surviving texts have that sort of style. A few decades later, when Fredegar wrote, the legend might have been recalled but, with Göktürks and Avars both in severe decline, the circumstances surrounding the origin of the claim had already been forgotten.
Fredegar wrote of the year 629, « the envoys that Dagobert had sent to Emperor Heraclius returned home. Their names were Servatus and Paternus. They brought news that they had concluded an everlasting peace with Heraclius »32. Servatus and Paternus are otherwise unknown but their embassy might also be the source for some of Fredegar’s other information about Heraclius as the Chronicle includes fairly current events up to that point in a fairly accurate order. While Fredegar had heard of a battle and single combat between Heraclius and a Persian champion33 datable to 62734, he makes no mention in the Chronicle of what would later be the best-known event of Heraclius’s reign. In the high Middle Ages, accounts of how, after the defeat of the Persians, Heraclius had recovered the True Cross and restored it to Jerusalem were well known in the west35. Fredegar – and with him the rest of the seventh century west – though have no inkling of either the loss or the recovery of the cross36. Such a tale would, one might expect, be a natural feature for a work like Fredegar’s that revels in the entertaining anecdote. But it’s missing. That lack combined with knowledge of the battle with Rhazates helps to demonstrate Fredegar’s source. The battle of Nineveh occurred in 627; the return of the cross to Jerusalem only occurred in September 629. Servatus and Paternus had already returned to the West by then and only carried the news that had been current when they left. They knew nothing of the restoration of the cross; neither did Fredegar. Within only a few years, Turks as a major power would have vanished and they would not find their way into Byzantine, let alone western, sources for centuries. Other powers would rise and new versions of origins myths would appear. This odd story only makes sense in the context of a relatively narrow window of time, even if common Trojan origins might crop up again at the far end of the Middle Ages.
That might seem to be the end of the Trojan Turks. The Trojan Franks forgot their Turkish cousins even while the Franks developed their own mythical origins in ever more elaborate detail. Other peoples developed their own myths of Trojan origins but there was no more talk of Turks and Trojans in most of Europe. When they return, though, the story is odder and from further afield. In the first part of the thirteenth century in Iceland, Snorri Sturluson began compiling works on Norse history and on the myths that had preceded Christianity. While some of the stories derived from his Prose Edda or Heimskringla are extremely well known in the present, usually, the manner in which Snorri himself presented the Norse Gods is skipped over. Snorri was a Christian and lived two centuries after the triumph of Christianity in Iceland. By his time, the worship of the old gods had long since faded and their legends become little more than stories of times gone by37. Snorri himself did not believe in them and thought that they had been famous humans who had lived in the past and only after death had they come to be worshipped38. These humans, he explained, were Trojans who deliberately confused the past to fool the simple-minded natives of the north:
It is told of the Turks, how the men from Asia, who are called Æsir, falsified the tales of the things that happened in Troy, in order that the people should believe them to be gods. King Priam in Troy was a great chief over all the Turkish host, and his sons were the most distinguished men in his whole army. That excellent hall, which the Æsir called Brime’s Hall, or beer-hall, was King Priam’s palace. As for the long tale that they tell of Ragnarok, that is the wars of the Trojans. When it is said that Oku-Thor angled with an ox-head and drew on board the Midgard-serpent, but that the serpent kept his life and sank back into the sea, then this is another version of the story that Hector slew Volukrontes, a famous hero, in the presence of Achilles, and so drew the latter onto him with the head of the slain, which they likened unto the head of an ox, which Oku-Thor had torn off. When Achilles was drawn into this danger, on account of his daring, it was the salvation of his life that he fled from the fatal blows of Hector, although he was wounded. It is also said that Hector waged the war so mightily, and that his rage was so great when he caught sight of Achilles, that nothing was so strong that it could stand before him. When he missed Achilles, who had fled, he soothed his wrath by slaying the champion called Roddros. But the Æsir say that when Oku-Thor missed the serpent, he slew the giant Hymer. In Ragnarok the Midgard-serpent came suddenly upon Thor and blew venom onto him, and thus struck him dead. But the Æsir could not make up their minds to say that this had been the fate of Oku-Thor, that anyone stood over him dead, though this had so happened. They rushed headlong over old sagas more than was true when they said that the Midgard-serpent there got his death; and they added this to the story, that Achilles reaped the fame of Hector’s death, though he lay dead on the same battlefield on that account. This was the work of Elenus and Alexander, and Elenus the Æsir called Ale. They say that he avenged his brother, and that he lived when all the gods were dead, and after the fire was quenched that burned up Asgard and all the possessions of the gods. Pyrrhus they compared with the Fenris-wolf. He slew Odin, and Pyrrhus might be called a wolf according to their belief, for he did not spare the peace-steads, when he slew the king in the temple before the altar of Thor. The burning of Troy they called the flame of Surt. Mode and Magne, the sons of Oku-Thor, came to crave the land of Ale or Vidar. He is Aeneas. He came away from Troy, and wrought thereupon great works. It is said that the sons of Hector came to Frigialand and established themselves in that kingdom, but banished Elenus39.
Not only was Norse mythology to be understood as being based on Trojan themes but it was from « that goodliest of homes and haunts that ever have been, which is called Troy, even that which we call Turkland »40 that the Æsir had come. In Troy, Odin had a prophetic dream and
made ready to journey out of Turkland, and was accompanied by a great multitude of people, young folk and old, men and women; and they had with them much goods of great price. And wherever they went over the lands of the earth, many glorious things were spoken of them, so that they were held more like gods than men41.
Snorri Sturluson’s Trojan ancestry of the Norse Gods is odd in many ways though certainly one of the strangest aspects is his repeated identification of the original Æsir not merely as mortal Trojan exiles but as beings Turks. As the texts were written before the Turks had conquered the site of Troy, it has sometimes been argued as a reflection of the Fredegarian material42 but would appear more likely to be independent.
Snorri’s Troy, while intended as that of the classical tradition, is in a strange place; it would seem that Snorri placed it on the northern side of the Black Sea43. Yet, Snorri was no fool. He was not even the only one of his contemporaries to place Troy somewhere near the Crimea. French authors a few decades prior had already made that connection44 and it was a logical one. They knew, as did Snorri, that Troy had been located near the Bosporus and controlled the straits from the Asian side. They also knew of the existence of two straits called Bosporus: the strait at Constantinople connecting the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea and the other connecting the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov (now called the Straits of Kerch). In that age, the River Don – or Tanias – marked the line between Asia and Europe45. Tmutorakan, the chief city controlling the Cimmerian Bosporus, was ancient, powerful and rich. It could trace its history back over two thousand years and had been a mighty place in the past46. In it, these authors ‘found’ Troy as not only was it in the right place, but, more importantly, as Snorri and other writers of his time knew the Greeks had sailed northeastward from their homeland47. When medieval people thought of Greeks, the first place that they would have thought of would not have been Athens but would have been Constantinople; « Greek-land »48 was centred in Thrace and Western Asia Minor. So, if the Greeks went over the sea to Troy, then Troy logically had to have been at the other Bosporus, the one on the other side of the Black Sea. Tmutorakan fit all they knew of Troy far better than anything in Asia Minor as the ‘real’ Troy.
In that region around the year 1200 lived a Turkic people called variously Kipchaks, Cumans, or Polovtsy who had replaced other Turkic tribes in the region. Clearly, the wellinformed Snorri must have concluded, Troy was a Turkish city and all else followed from that: if the original Aesir had come from Troy, not only were they Asians, something supported by the apparent similarity of the names (Ásíamanna, er er æsir váru)49 but that they were also Turks and would have brought Turkish law and Turkish culture with them when they migrated to Sweden:
The fields and the choice lands in that place seemed fair to Odin, and he chose for himself the site of a city which is now called Sigtún. There he established chieftains in the fashion which had prevailed in Troy; he set up also twelve head-men to be dooms men over the people and to judge the laws of the land; and he ordained also all laws as, there had been before, in Troy, and according to the customs of the Turks50.
The new Troy would become the seat of the first Swedish kingdom; not only were the rulers of Sweden and Norway directly descended from these exiles but their Asian (that is Turkic) language was adopted by all the people already there, Snorri tells us, as well as in Denmark, Saxland, and even England51.
These two accounts of Turks and Trojans, odd as they are, might actually be able to reveal something about the mindset of the authors and manner in which memories of Troy were transformed in the Middle Ages. Interestingly, the peoples of that period who claimed (or were claimed) to have Trojan roots were, with the major exception of the Turks, peoples who had no history of migration. While the Goths, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, Lombards, and so on could easily claim a history of having come from somewhere else, the peoples who claimed Trojan origin could not. From at least the time of England’s Bede, newly Christianized peoples recast their histories as « new Israels ». Like the original biblical Israel, Bede depicted the English as a people who had been chosen by God and had made a great migration to a new Promised Land, replacing a lesser prior population52. For the English, this was a relatively straightforward imagining, as the Anglo-Saxons in Bede’s time knew that their ancestors had arrived from across the sea in the relatively recent past and had, in their new land, become Christians. Now, they could be seen as having a clear destiny of future greatness as the new Chosen People53.
While the English version was probably the most self-consciously developed of these, other nations could make similar re-imaginings of « authentic » histories of migration and imagine themselves as being new Israels. Many looked to a migration from Scandinavia, whether recent (as for the R’us54 and Icelanders55) or at a more distant time (as for the Spanish Christians with their claimed Visigothic origins56 and Lombards57) though that was far from the only starting point. Other peoples, like the Arabs, Bretons, Bulgars, Croats, Jews, Magyars, Scots, Serbs, and, of course, the Turks themselves, all had strong traditions of migrations in the recent past in their own historical traditions.
But not all medieval peoples could do so. Some, notably the British who had been pushed aside by English invaders, the Norse in their homelands, and the Franks had no memories of great migrations in their collective pasts. In the new sacralized Christian history, autochthonous origins placed them in the unenviable role of the Biblical Canaanites rather than that of the Hebrews. Fredegar, with his faulty knowledge of what had probably originated as a diplomatic fiction, had provided a powerful alternative. Instead of originating on the south bank of the lower Rhine as Gregory of Tours had thought58, the Franks now could also imagine themselves as a new Israel, a Chosen People with a sacred history of Exodus into their Promised Land and a future destiny of greatness. Not only did the Trojan origin myth turn them into a New Israel, but it also made the Franks more noble and at least the equals of the Romans. Repeated increasingly in Frankish historiography in the centuries in which it was evolving into French history, the tale was soon imitated by other peoples who also lacked such myths. The British, beginning first with Nennius in the ninth century59 but later developed much more elaborately by Gregory of Monmouth60, too needed such a tale. They knew that their ancestors had been present in the British Isles before the coming of the Saxons and that they were the people who had been there when the Romans arrived. Now, they could claim not simply to be the people who had been there but the equals in nobility to Romans and Franks. As the British legend spread within the « Matter of Britain » alongside the French chronicles, the story became even more prestigious. Like Franks and Britons, the Swedes had been in their homeland for as long as anyone recalled; Scandinavia (as Scandza) appeared in late classical and early medieval sources as the starting point of migrations not as their end61. Snorri’s fiction, even if he believed it (as seems not impossible), gave the Scandinavians mythic equality with the peoples to their south. All three peoples needed myths of origins similar to those of the Biblical Israelites and the ancient Romans, so all ‘invented’ them by borrowing the noblest best story of European origins they could find, that of the Trojans. Fredegar’s repetition of diplomatic myth as fact, something made clear by the inclusion of the Turks, then, was a happy accident that would create a new and more powerful ‘history’, something that other peoples without migration myths of their own could – and would – emulate.