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18 In consequence of the geographical position of Bohemia, these tales reached the country later than lands lying farther west, and often from German sources. Yet the prejudiced attempts of German writers to prove that the Bohemian remains of chivalrous poetry are adaptations and translations from the German have in many cases proved unsuccessful.

In consequence of the wholesale destruction of Bohemian literature, we are here also obliged to found conjectures on a comparatively small number of fragments.

Of only one of these epic poems has a considerable portion been preserved. This is the Alexandreis, of which several manuscripts of different dates are in existence. From these fragments the erudition of Bohemian scholars has, to a great extent, reconstituted the poem: we now possess more than half the poem, and can, to a certain extent, conjecture what was contained in the still missing parts. The Bohemian Alexandreis is undoubtedly an adaptation of the Latin poem of Philip Gaultier (Walter) de Chatillon, also known from his birthplace, Lille, as Gualterus de Insulis, who lived in the twelfth century, and died about the year 1201. Chatillon's Alexandreis, based on the work of Quintus Curtius, enjoyed great popularity during the Middle Ages, and was generally adopted as the classical account of the career of the great Macedonian. The author of the Bohemian Alexandreis is unknown, but it is possible to fix an approximative date for the poem. It was undoubtedly written during the reign of King Premysl Ottokar II. (1253-78). Ottokar, who had extended the frontiers of Bohemia from the Baltic in the north to the Adriatic in the south, was often compared to Alexander the Great, and that hero's history,