Original designs (petit patrons) for the Trojan War tapestries still exist; eight large drawings in the Louvre. The design may actually have been conceived for a French court patron sometime in the mid-1460s.
These designs are not based on Homer's <i>Iliad</i> but old medieval literary versions (for example Benoit de Sainte Maure's <i>Roman de Troie</i> from c. 1180). The story was a popular subject in medieval Europe - many of the north european courts had a set, of which also many claimed to be descended from the Trojans, sometimes through Aeneas. The renewed interest of the story may partly have been from the fall of Constantinople in 1453.