After the siege and the assault had ceased at Troy, the city been destroyed and burned to brands and ashes, the warrior who wrought there the trains of treason was tried for his treachery, the truest on earth.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
An extremely consistent part of different Arthurian stories is that all these people are, way back in their lineage, Trojans.
This doesn’t completely come out of nowhere.
Sing, oh goddess…
But if you’re a man who eats the crops of the earth,
a mortal born for death—here, come closer,
the sooner you will meet your day to die!Homer, The Iliad
To give a quick summary, Troy is an ancient city that becomes the focal point of the Epic Cycle - of which today only the Iliad and Odyssey have survived in mostly-original form1.
These stories in their earliest written form come from the Archaic Age, after a 400 year Greek Dark Ages where the stories probably existed as an oral tradition. The date of the “historical” fall of Troy is usually dated near the start of that dark age, about 1200 BCE, in the Late Bronze Age Collapse.
Because of the machinations and squabbles of the gods, a doomed intertwining of mortal politics, and the beautiful Helen - whom Trojan prince Paris takes from her husband Menelaus of Sparta, spurring a broad alliance of Achaean2 warriors to besiege Troy.
The siege lasts for ten years and leads in ever-more-doomed deaths of the great heroes on both sides. Eventually, through the famous Trojan Horse, the Achaeans trick their way into the city and end it once and for all with a horrific victorious slaughter.
Then, as they return (the topic of The Odyssey - which gives its name to that archetype of story - and many other tales in the cycle), most of those who survive also end in death and ruin as they reap what the tragedy they sowed in the war.
Much like the legend of King Arthur, it’s a tale that’s ultimately resonant as the doom of the prior age.
Also, there happens to be a Trojan character named Aeneas.
Roman Fanfiction
I sing of arms and of a man: his fate
had made him fugitive; he was the first
to journey from the coasts of Troy as far
as Italy and the Lavinian shores.Virgil, The Aeneid
Some 600 years later, the Roman poet Virgil writes the Aeneid, answering the burning question of everyone - what happened to Aeneas?
The ancient poems made it clear Aeneas survived, but left the exact details up to the imagination - but to many further flung elements of the Greek speaking world, he became a convenient local legend to give them a special anchor to this heritage. Virgil follows this tradition to claim him for Rome.
According to the Aeneid, Aeneas follows an Odyssey-like series of struggles and strife, still shadowed by the whims of the gods. Perhaps most notably, he strays from his prophesied path for awhile to stay with Queen Dido of Carthage before he is inexorably drawn back and she kills herself out of the loss.
Of course, Aeneas does finally get to his prophesied goal, which is of course to settle Rome.
The Copycats
Brutus! there lies beyond the Gallic bounds
An island which the western sea surrounds,
By giants once possessed; now few remain
To bar thy entrance, or obstruct thy reign.
To reach that happy shore thy sails employ;
There fate decrees to raise a second Troy,
And found an empire in thy royal line,
Which time shall ne’er destroy, nor bounds confine.Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae
Rome is the example for many later states, and lost Trojan refugees start to proliferate like Jedi after Order 66 in later Star Wars canon. For example:
- Britain is founded by Brutus of course, a descendent of Aeneas who is banished.
- The Franks meanwhile claim Francus as a separate exile from Troy
- Some of these stories also mention an Alamanus as ancestor of the Germans.
- The Norse gods are Trojans according to later euhemeristic stories3
(Ireland meanwhile gets, like, six different invasions/settlements in its mythic canon, but none of them are Trojans)
Footnotes
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Though notably, Antiquity and the Middle Ages had more access to texts we no longer have, and the west may have not had as much access to the our survivors as we have. This means stories coming from these times sometimes are referencing variants we no longer have. ↩
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i.e. Greek (…more or less - and also this is way before the ancient Greece we think of) ↩
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i.e. this one’s pretty late in the Middle Ages without prior claims (though Saxo Grammaticus suggests the Danes could be descendents of the Achaeans instead), and Snorri Sturluson is trying to fit these pagan stories into a Christian historical framework. ↩