Assuming a real life event inspired accounts of the Trojan War, what were the war's likely motives?

by JimHarbor

There is historical evidence of a conflict between Mycenaeans and Wilusa sometime during the Bronze Age Collapse and there is evidence that an Anatolian city on the coast was raised during this period.

Given evidence that something happened in this region at this time, what are some plausible reasons why the Mycenaeans would cross the sea to attack a city so far away since the Helen story is almost certainly a fiction.

Was it related to wider pressures causes by the Collapse? I.e. lack of reasources leading to fighting over what little there was?

KiwiHellenist

There's a bundle of false premises here, enough to make the core question too speculative to answer, in my view. First:

There is historical evidence of a conflict between Mycenaeans and Wilusa sometime during the Bronze Age Collapse

This is untrue: we don't have evidence of a conflict, and the evidence you're thinking of wasn't at the time of the Bronze Age collapse.

There is documentary evidence of a dispute between the king of Ahhiyawa -- which, we'll grant, was a Mycenaean state, though we can't know where -- and the Hittite king, concerning Wilusa, in the so-called 'Tawagalawa letter' dating to the early or mid 1200s BCE, several decades before the collapse. The fact that the dispute is referred to in the past tense probably indicates sometime around 1300 BCE, perhaps a bit later.

Armed conflict can't be ruled out, but isn't attested in the letter. Here's how Trevor Bryce describes the matter (Beckman, Bryce, and Cline, The Ahhiyawa texts [2011] p. 121):

Hostilities had apparently broken out between them over the country called Wilusa ... This is the only occasion in the Ahhiyawa corpus where there is a reference to what appears to have been direct conflict between Hatti and Ahhiyawa. In all other cases, hostile action by Ahhiyawa against Hatti appears to have been limited to support for the activities of local insurrectionists like Piyamaradu. However, we do not know what the nature or the scale of the hostilities was on this occasion, whether it amounted to outright war, a skirmish or two, or merely a verbal dispute conducted through diplomatic channels. (The verb ku-ru-ri-iḫ-ḫu-e-en used in this context could mean any of these things.)

Next:

and there is evidence that an Anatolian city on the coast was raised during this period.

The 'Anatolian city' you're thinking of is most definitely on the same site as classical-to-Byzantine-era Ilion, so there's no reason to be wary over naming it. Whether it's to be identified with the Wilusa referred to in Hittite documentary evidence is of course open to debate, but most people would grant it.

There is evidence of fire on the citadel of Troy VIIa, dating to ca. 1190-1180 BCE, but the city wasn't razed. The citadel was promptly rebuilt (Troy VIIb), and the site continued to be inhabited continuously until around 950 BCE. That is, Troy carried on after being 'razed', for roughly as long as the USA has existed.

Some cities in the Mycenaean and Hittite arenas were indeed destroyed in the 'Bronze Age collapse', such as Mycenae, Pylos, Hattusa, and Ugarit. Others suffered an economic downturn, such as Thebes, Miletos, and Knossos. Still others seem to have been unaffected, such as Ephesos and Tarsos. Wilusa/Troy definitely belongs in the second category. There was a downturn, and gradual population decline, but there's no consistency about these things across the Mycenaean-Hittite arena.

The reasons for the collapse are unknown, and we know essentially nothing about pressures that it caused; at any rate, lack of resources isn't on the face of it the most obvious interpretation, since the 12th century BCE saw drastic population reduction, not increase. The downturn in the transition from Troy VIIa to Troy VIIb is probably to be explained in the same breath as the downturn that affected Miletos, but that tends to suggest something other than conflict with people on the other side of the Aegean.