With such authorities accepting it, post-Roman Europeans continued to accept Troy and the events of the Trojan War as historical. Geoffrey of Monmouth's pseudo-genealogy traced a Trojan origin for royal Briton descents in "Historia Regum Britanniae". Merovingian descent from a Trojan ancestor was embodied in a literary myth first established in Fredegar's chronicle (2.4, 3.2.9), to the effect that the Franks were of Trojan stock and adopted their name from King Francio, who had built a new Troy on the banks of the river Rhine (modern Treves). However, even before the so-called Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century these supposed facts of the medieval concept of history were doubted by Blaise Pascal: "Homer wrote a romance, for nobody supposes that Troy and Agamemnon existed any more than the apples of the Hesperides. He had no intention to write history, but only to amuse us." During the 19th century the stories of Troy were devalued as fables by George Grote.