† (Rome speaks:) “Sweeter to me this defeat than those victories; greater am I poor than when rich, greater prone than standing; more than the eagles has the standard of the cross given me, more Peter than Caesar, more a weaponless crowd than commanders girt with arms. Standing I mastered nations; ruined I strike the depths of the earth; standing I ruled bodies, broken and prostrate I rule souls. Then I commanded a miserable populace, now the princes of darkness; then cities were my realm, now the sky.”
‡ Another source is a manuscript in the Harleian Library, written before 1264, and published by Thomas Wright in 1841 as Latin Poems Commonly Attributed to Walter Mapes.
* “May God be propitious to this toper!”
* Tannhäuser, one of the later minnesingers, has been confused by legend with the knight Tannhäuser, who fled from Vcnusberg to Rome, and found a niche in opera.
* Grail is uncertainly traced to a hypothetical cratalis derived from the Latin crater, cup.
* Chaucer’s translation—The Romaunt of the Rose—oí the first half of William’s poem is as fine as the original.
* We should except Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s translations of the Vita nuova and of Dante’s predecessors.
* The adjective Divina was added by admirers in the seventeenth century.
* The following recapitulation is mostly confined to medieval Christianity, and will not repeat the summary of Islamic civilization given at the conclusion of Book II.