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It has been suggested that this article be merged into Historia de preliis. (Discuss) Proposed since March 2024.
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The Navitas et victoria Alexandri Magni regis (The Birth and Victories of King Alexander the Great) is a lost tenth-century Latin translation of the Greek Alexander Romance of Pseudo-Callisthenes, produced from a copy of a Greek manuscript discovered in ConstantinoplebyLeo the Archpriest. Leo had undertaken a mission commissioned to him by John III of Naples. According to Domenico Comparetti, John III was a duke with an interest in the collection of letters and writings from wherever they could be found, of both secular and religious content. It is in this context that Leo was one of John's chief agents in the collection of Greek manuscripts followed by their translation into the Latin vernacular.[1]
The translation is believed to have been produced between 951 and 969, as it was commissioned after the death of John IIIs wife, Theodora, which took place in 951, and it must have been completed before Leo himself died in 969.
Leo's translation was based on the α recension of the Alexander Romance. Though originally titled the Navitas, it came to later be known as the Historia de preliis, a title which refers to not one but three independent Latin versions or recensions on Leo's translation that came to attract considerable popularity in the European Middle Ages and made Alexander a household name.[2]
Despite being lost, a manuscript close to Leo's text is known, it is known from:[3]
