67 5 Remembering Spain in the Medieval European Epic: A Prospect Julian Weiss King’s College London A curious scene in the Roman de toute chevalerie (c. 1175) by the Anglo-Norman poet Thomas of Kent describes how the barons of Alexander the Great gather to review their progress following the conquest of India. All corners of the habitable world (Africa, Asia, and Europe, according to medieval cosmographical convention) pay homage to their leader. Now, they declare, it is time to return home. Then, almost as an afterthought, they add: ‘there now remains only the West, where the Irish, Spanish and Britons [or Bretons] live, where he has not travelled over the habitable land’. 1 Before they are able to ponder the implications of this, up hops a hirsute one- legged messenger, with one eye and no head (one of the infamous monstrous races who populate the outer edges of the world) who disdainfully informs Alexander that he has yet to conquer the realms of Gog and Magog. And of they go: Alexander never returns home, and although he began by annexing Lombardy and Rome, he never reaches the furthermost fringes of the Occident. The fantasy of Alexander’s conquest of the West was not new (it stretches back to Late Antiquity, with pseudo-Callisthenes and Julius Valerius, for example), but Thomas was the irst to adapt it for a vernacular audience. Working independently and from diferent perspectives, Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas (2000) and Suzanne Conklin Akbari (2005) draw similar conclusions about its general signiicance. The idea establishes an authoritative genealogy for Western European monarchies, for by tracing a translatio imperii from East to West, it signals ‘la direction du progrès et de l’accomplissement’ (Gaullier-Bougassas 2000: 97), or creates the ‘idea of the West that was founded on humble origins but imbued with ininite potential for growth and expansion’ (Akbari 2005: 123). 1 ‘Ore n’i ad [a] dire si sul occident non/ Ou meinent ly Yreis, Espaniol e Breton,/ Qe la terre habitable ne seit alé environ’ (ll. 5948-51), quoted from the parallel text edition of Gaullier-Bougassas and Harf- Lancner (2003: 462-63). My translation follows their modern French rendering: ‘Il ne reste plus désormais qu’en Occident,/ où vivent les Irlandais, les Espagnols et les Bretons,/ qu’il n’ait pas parcouru la terre habitable’. I am grateful to Ian Short and my colleague Karen Pratt for advice on this passage. They are not responsible for my interpretation of its implications.