Sometime between March and November 1481, William Caxton printed Godfrey de Bouillon or the Siege and Conquest of Jerusalem. Published some 190 years after the fall of Acre and the destruction of the last crusader state in the Levant, this text highlights the enduring attraction of crusade narratives – and of the crusader heroes contained within them – for late-fifteenth-century English society. As the first English translation of the First Crusade portions of William of Tyre's Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, the production of the text has been interpreted as the product of Caxton's canny awareness of the reading tastes of the English book-buying public. At the heart of the marketability of Godfrey as a text – and of Godfrey as a hero – lies his reputation as the European crusading hero par excellence. Despite the existence of other more specifically English crusader-narratives, such as that of Richard the Lionheart, Godfrey's appeal as a universal exemplar of a hero of unified Christendom seems to have won out. Celebrated in chronicle accounts and the legendary Chanson d'Antioche and the Chanson de Jerusalem, and elevated to the ranks of the nine worthies, Godfrey represents the epitome of a heroic model that takes on many forms in the literature and culture of medieval Europe. The late-medieval renown of Godfrey is emblematic of the long-held appeal of crusading figures in the medieval popular mind. From the late eleventh-century Chanson de Roland through to Caxton's Godfrey, we find a dizzying array of heroic crusaders brought to life within chronicle, romance and other forms of medieval narrative.