The issue of Slovene culture in the European context occupies an important place in Rado Lencek's rich and versatile scholarly opus. This contribution to his Festschrift is written with the intention of supporting the crucial connection of Slovene culture with its Western European models. The Troy legend is an example which indicates clearly the link between Slovene Protestant writings and Northern European historiography. The Troy legend preserved in the historiography ofthe Renaissance and the Reformation period has a long history. Homer's heroes of the Trojan war continued to live through the centuries in later Roman versions of Homer's work as well as in medieval Franco-Roman legends and chronicles. The present paper will not attempt an exhaustive survey of the existing Italian and Northern European medieval and Renaissance versions of the Troy legend. Our task here is to put in proper cultural context the appearance of this legend in Bohoric's Preface to his grammar Arcficae Horulae (1584). However, before we analyze BohoriC's Slavic version of the Troy legend, we should survey its development on Western European soil. The Troy legend played an immense role in the Middle Ages and was popular both in Italy and Franco-Gallia. Although the Troy legend was of Roman imperial origin, the Church kept propagating it persistently with peaceful purposes, tracing the descent of the Franks and Romans from the city of Troy. Thus these two peoples were said to have the same ancestors, and so to be 'German' brothers. The term German derives from this name, which the Romans gave to the Franks. The Romans and the Franks as cousins were consanguineous and the ancient German chronicles represent the Franks as the brothers or the cousins of the Romans: Romanum fore Troianum natura fatetur / Germanus pafriofa suus Jraterque videtur, and as having the same mother: Troia suis populis mater utrique fuit. J It is important to underscore the fact that from the earliest times the Troy legend was widely propagated for political and juridical reasons. The Frankish emperor was the successor of the Roman emperor. The acceptance of the Troy legend in Franco-Gallia embodied the medieval ideal of a universal Roman society and the Holy Roman Empire. Therefore the Roman law received and applied by the Franks and Gauls was considered by the Romans as the imperial law applicable to all Roman territories. The trans/atio imperii had as its goal to preserve that ideal and universal state which was the Roman Empire, with its providential mission towards the human race; a mission analogous in the natural order to that of the Church in the Order of Grace. The Troy legend, with its Roman ideal of the universal Empire, found its best expression in Dante's works. For example, in the Fourth Treatise of the Convivio Dante sets forth the high mission of the Roman people: