In medieval times Homer's "Iliad" was taken to be based on historical facts, and the Trojan War came to be considered as seminal in the genealogies of European monarchies. Virgil's "Aeneid" was taken to be the Roman equivalent of the "Iliad", starting from the Fall of Troy and leading up to the birth of the young Roman nation. According to the then prevailing conception of history, empires were born and died in organic succession and correspondences existed between the past and the present. Geoffrey of Monmouth's 12th-century classically inspired "Historia Regum Britanniae", for example, fulfilled this function for the British or Welsh. Just as kings longed to emulate great leaders of the past, Alexander or Caesar, it was a temptation for poets to become a new Homer or Virgil. In 16th-century Portugal, Luís de Camões celebrated Portugal as a naval power in his "Os Lusíadas" while Pierre de Ronsard set out to write "La Franciade", an epic meant to be the Gallic equivalent of Virgil's poem that also traced back France's ancestry to Trojan princes.