This chapter addresses how the Crusades spurred a renewed appropriation of Alexander in historiography, literature, images and cartography in late medieval Europe. Alexander’s legend was particularly relevant because it reflected the era’s geopolitical and epistemological complexity. The chapter focuses first on the ancient Alexander legend’s adaptation in Crusade-era texts including Crusade chronicles, epics, antique romances and encyclopedias. These works compare Alexander to Crusaders, present Alexander as a precursor of the Crusaders who fights Asian tyranny, interpolate Alexander into the stories of Crusaders through ekphrasis, and frequently cite the legend of Alexander’s enclosure of Gog and Magog. The chapter’s second part focuses on how manuscripts present Alexander as a proto-Crusader even if texts do not overtly describe him as such. Particular attention is paid to compilations that join Alexander and holy warriors (Judas Maccabeus, Godfrey of Bouillon), and to images that Christianise Alexander or demonise his foes. The final section examines the influence of Alexander’s legend on the apocalyptic geography of late medieval maps, which often depict Gog and Magog and other elements (toponyms, sites, monstrous peoples) of the Alexander tradition.

From the moment he assumed the French throne in 1328, King Philippe VI announced his intention to go on crusade. While his activities over the next eight years yielded little militarily, they did leave a significant documentary trail that provides insight into the late medieval understanding of crusade. One artifact stands out – London, British Library, MS Royal 19.D.i – a manuscript that reveals the extent to which storytelling and communication were crucial to crusade ideology and planning. It is designed to highlight the king's need to acquire a wide range of knowledge about foreign lands through stories and reports, and to validate the actors who transmit that knowledge. The manuscript's texts and images portray not just warfare and travel, as is often observed, but they also preserve attitudes toward far-away lands and the first-person voices of figures who travel great distances to inform the French king. Royal 19.D.i is a document about the centrality of communication to kingship, an anthology about the importance of stories as a means of knowing and transforming the world.

Ironically, Philippe's unaccomplished crusade is one of the best documented in medieval history. As a result, we know a great deal about the means the king and his councilors employed as they sought to justify and plan this overseas campaign. Central to these preparations was the gathering of reports, stories and treatises to help the king decide where to go, how to get there, whom and how to fight and what to do once he was victorious. Documentation consulted by or addressed to Philippe VI and his council included accounts of Louis IX's crusade expenses, letters from Marino Sanudo and reports from ambassadors and from prelates living in or recently returned from the eastern Mediterranean, Africa and Asia. Before a single ship could be launched, a great deal of composing, research, reading, copying and discussion had to occur. This was a crusade grounded in texts, but more to the point, it was a crusade grounded in stories.

London, British Library, MS Royal 19.D.i provides a remarkable illustration of this phenomenon. Although it is commonly referred to as a ‘crusade compilation’, Royal 19.D.i contains only one of the many crusade treatises that were available by the 1330s, the Directorium ad faciendum passagium transmarinum, which was written by an anonymous Dominican in 1332, translated into French by Jean de Vignay and addressed directly to Philippe VI.

The oldest textual tradition of Marco Polo's account of his travels in Asia between 1271 and 1295 survives in nineteen Old French manuscripts or fragments copied between the early fourteenth and the early sixteenth centuries. Twelve copies—eighty percent of those whose original contents are known – are compilations, and across these twelve manuscripts a total of twenty other texts accompanies Polo's account. Striking for their variety, these cotexts encompass numerous genres (a crusade chronicle, a roman d'antiquité, first-person travel accounts), historical periods (biblical and Greco-Roman antiquity, the 1320s) and personages (Alexander the Great, Franciscan monks, Prester John). Equally noteworthy are the extensive illustrational programs of Polo's account and its co-texts. Out of the surviving nineteen manuscripts eight possess miniatures, among which are three of the most sumptuously illuminated manuscripts of the entire Middle Ages.

These manuscripts are significant because they allow us to see Marco Po - lo's account as his earliest readers saw it. They suggest that Polo's account was not an authoritative and transparent text for these early readers, but rather was strange and problematic. Although copies were owned by some of the most powerful figures in medieval Europe, including Kings Philippe VI and Charles V of France, the addition of other works on Asia and of images to the Polo text indicates that it incited comparison and visualization to aid its interpretation. The reasons for this supplementary material are clear when one compares Polo's account to other medieval texts on the East. Unlike previous writers of antiquity and the Middle Ages who treated the East, Polo largely eschewed the fantastic, described places no other European had seen or mentioned, and spoke glowingly of non-Christian peoples, especially the Mongols. Polo's vision of the East was unprecedented for European readers, who therefore sought to compare it to other accounts so as to gauge its veracity and authority.

The later additions to Bodley 264 in England are important not only for what they tell us about the reception of this particular copy of the interpolated Roman d'Alexandre, but also as evidence for Alexander's status in late medieval Europe more generally. Certainly the times caught up to the manuscript, but this does not mean that generations of readers, even in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, did not find the manuscript meaningful. Yet there has long been a view, most stridently articulated by George Cary in his study The Medieval Alexander, that the late medieval Alexander was an empty icon: “The old Alexander, the conqueror, dwindled into the pageant figure of the Nine Worthies”; courtly love “was foisted upon Alexander”; “the various medieval conceptions of Alexander … are mingled in general decay” in the late Middle Ages; “the fourteenth century produced nothing except the addition of the last elaborations to the Roman d'Alexandre in the Vœux du Paon and its sequels.” Cary's assertions echo Huizinga's appraisal of late-medieval secular, and especially courtly, culture as an array of empty forms and ceremonies. Much scholarship over the last thirty years has dispelled this image, of course, but the medieval/Renaissance divide is still very much with us.

As the previous chapter demonstrates, a principal function of Bodley 264 was to vivify the imagined connection between ancient and medieval cortoisie. Yet Bodley 264 is exceptional not only as a courtly object, but as the manifestation of a remarkable moment in the history of European urbanization. Produced in Tournai, Bodley 264 belongs to the extraordinary profusion of urban cultural expression in northern France and the Low Countries (le Nord, ‘the North’) during the late Middle Ages. As has long been noted, le Nord was among the first regions in Europe to become urbanized, to have powerful urban patriciates and civic associations largely independent of feudal lords, and to have an economy focused on urban production and consumption. This economic and political power was accompanied by a social dynamism that is often understood as the motor for profound shifts in the history of visual art, theater, devotion, literature, and manuscript production. It is therefore necessary to consider Bodley 264's relationship not only to the courtly society for which it was produced, but to the urban society to which its conceptualizer, artists, and scribes belonged.

There was in fact no clear distinction between courtly and urban societies in the North in the fourteenth century, but rather a deep interpenetration on the social, political, economic, and cultural levels. The rulers of the various principalities in northern France and the Low Countries remained itinerant for much of the fourteenth century, with residences in various cities and towns.