Garde (‘Joyful Keep’) (Lancelot 1980, vol. 1, p. 283; Truitt 2015, p. 59). In these examples, and similar ones, the artificial figures can be defeated by the hero because he is the hero—one indication of his prowess as a warrior is his ability to subdue the mechanical guardians; the implication is that any other challenger would be  defeated. And in all of these instances, the artificial knights, archers, or pikemen are seen as better than their human counter-parts. Unlike human sentries, the artificial ones will never get tired or ill, lazy or lecherous, and, like the sentries guarding Alardin’s tent, they cannot be tricked or bribed.

The repeated motif of the armed robot guard suggests concern about security and about loyalty, trust, and control. This concern extended beyond keeping a castle or mausoleum or bridge secure to keeping tabs on an entire empire. ‘The Salvation of Rome’ (Salvatio Romae) was an elaborate surveillance and alarm system that could perceive, assess, and react to events taking place far away. This device, attributed, like the bocca della verità, to Virgil, appears in several diferent texts from the late twelfth century onward. The most extensive description of this marvel appears in the natural philosophical treatise On the Natures of Things (De rerum natura, ca. 1190) by the English scholar and courtier Alexander Neckam (1157–1217); according to him, Virgil had built in Rome a palace which contained a number of wooden statues, each rep-resenting a diferent province of the empire, and each holding a bell in its hand.5 ‘Whenever any province dared to foment a plot against the majesty of the Roman Empire, the image of the intemperate traitor began to bang on the little bell. A soldier of bronze, seated on a bronze horse, on the topmost gable of the aforementioned palace, turned itself in the very direction where it might look toward that province’ (Ziolkowski & Putnam 2008, p. 856). Neckam’s description appears in a chapter about the potential of the liberal arts and the places where those arts flour-ished, thereby tying Virgil’s invention to his mastery of the liberal arts rather than forbidden branches of study, such as demonic magic. Furthermore, the function of the Salvatio Romae, to safeguard

the empire from revolt, recalls Virgil’s epic poem about the foundation of the Roman Empire, the Aeneid. Although Virgil may have been known more for his reputation as a magician and learned man in the Latin Christian West than for writing the Aeneid, he remained linked to the Roman Empire and was seen as having some kind of unoficial yet critically important over-sight of it. Moreover, Neckam was writing during a period when the ruling dynasty of England, the Plantagenets, controlled an empire that included England, Ireland, and most of what is now  France. Henry II (1133–1189; r. 1154–1189) faced numerous rebellions—from castellans in his domains, from his Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, and from his wife and sons. Henry’s son and successor, Richard I (1157–1199; r. 1189–1199), likewise spent a significant amount of time responding to challenges to his authority and rule. The invention of the Salvatio Romae mirrors the practical concerns of maintaining control over a large empire and the need to have reliable, timely information about threats to its stability.

# 2.3 Espionage and Surveillance

Artificial intelligence appears in multiple guises in textual and visual sources to provide surveillance and foster espionage, indi-cating a long-standing desire to use artificial means to gather information to gain advantage. The Salvatio Romae is one example, but there are many others. Catroptomancy (using a reflective surface, such as a bowl of water or a polished metal mirror, as a  viewfinder) was one way to see events distant in time and place. All of the mantic arts (the arts of divination)—chiromancy (palm reading), geomancy (interpreting earth signs), pyromancy (fire signs), and scapulomancy (interpreting the marks on the shoulder blades of animals, often sheep or goats)—promised foreknowledge, but catroptomancy also promised knowledge of the distant now. In multiple versions of the history of Alexander the Great (widely translated and circulated in this period),