9. Correction Levy, for scansion.

11-12. It looks as if ms. C tried to make sense of a garbled phrase in v.11 but produced a hypermetric line. Levy’s emendation ma dona Dia is confirmed by v. 63 and accepted by De Bartholomaeis, «grazie a madonna Dia», whose identity is unknown. For attempts to identify Taurel, see n. 12 in De Bartholomaeis, who rightly argues that he is not the Taurel of the tenso with Falconet (BdT 438.1) but must be a lord in the entourage of Frederick II who introduced Guillem to the Emperor. De Bartholomaeis’s translation of per as ‘grazie a’ is rather unclear; I understand the implication to be that Guillem is blessing the ground on which the Emperor walks as a result of the support he has received from ma dona Dia and Taurel’s intervention on his behalf.

15. Levy’s suggested emendation of quel to ques (= que·s) is accepted by De Bartholomaeis. – Frederick re-took Gaeta, of which he had previously lost control, in 1233: see the notes in Levy and De Bartholomaeis. The source material they cite does not demonstrate that he physically destroyed the city, though it lost the right to choose its own officials.

16. As Levy notes, for scansion qui ab must elide.

18-21. Levy (also De Bartholomaeis) print 18 as Quar li tensonet no sai que; since it is uncertain where in the missing section these words originally fell I have preferred to omit them.

21-22. De Bartholomaeis suggests that these lines may refer in particular to the occupation of the duchy of Spoleto and the march of Ancona, completed a few months previously. Levy identifies the avi as Frederick Barbarossa, who made peace with his long-standing opponent Pope Alexander III in Venice in 1177.

23. De Bartholomaeis suggests that the Emperor’s albergaria may refer to the Regno to which he had returned after five years of war in northern Italy. For the image of, essentially, «at home» meaning in one’s homeland, compare dinz ma maiso in Peire rey d’Arago, BdT 325.1, 4, my edition on Rialto.

29. Levy corrects to Genoalh, but it is unclear that Genoa has to be trisyllabic: compare Chanson de la croisade contre les Albigeois, ed. Eugène Martin-Chabot, 3 voll., Paris 1931-1961, 12.13 E.l coms Guilhelms de Genoa, d’una terra asazada, 151.72 E intra s’en a Genoa, per so filh esperar, 152.67 e es vengutz a Genoa, es eu pos vos en plevir. C seems to have understood it as bisyllabic, with geno li. – De Bartholomaeis observes that Guillem is exaggerating or ill-informed: Genoa never fell under the Emperor’s rule, and the Riviera, in revolt from 1238, reverted to Genoa in 1240.

41. Levy places Frederick’s visit to Cyprus in 1228 on his way to the Holy Land, so claims that the pueys of 41 is wrong, but perhaps this refers to his stop-off in Cyprus on his way back; if so the lines look like a heavily sanitised version of events.

43. Levy suggested the suppletion e [mostret] lialtatz, arguing that a previous scribe might have omitted it because his eye caught the word in the previous line, though this gives a very feeble outcome. Perhaps gardet, tenet, portet? – Rather than ‘loyalty’, lialtatz here seems to have the nuance of ‘in accordance with the law’ (lei).

45. Levy is right to correct to sols. For the particular sense here see SW, VII, 795, 10, ‘übergeben, aushändigen’. De Bartholomaeis suggests that as Frederick had treated John badly and taken away his property, mss. sol might be thought of as an error for tolc, but that this is hard to square with the Emperor’s «courtesy» (indeed!); he concludes that in such a fervently eulogistic song historical accuracy is not to be expected. In fact Frederick did in a certain sense release the land back to John pending due legal process: see Runciman’s account, referred to above.

46. For the absence of a definite article before the noun in apposition to the implied subject of the verb sols, and for the use of the oblique form emperador as nominative, see Levy’s note to this line.

48. C’s crezan makes the sense clear, though for the pres. subj. form crea compare BdT 375.24, 14-15, E non crea son cor, c’ab leial fe / Serai tostemps sos hom e sos servire (unicum in ms. a1, Leben und Werke des Trobadors Ponz de Capduoill, ed. Max von Napolski, Halle 1879, XXI, p. 80) and Girart de Roussillon, ed. W. Mary Hackett, 3 voll., Paris 1953-1955, 2055 and 9747, creie.

49. Levy deman don, or possibly deman dona B. (see his note), confessing his inability to explain the line; De Bartholomaeis damand [sic] en; in his note he indicates that Berreta is a person unknown, though refers to Salimbene de Adam, Chronica, in Monumenta Germaniae Historia, Scriptores, XXXII, p. 70 who attests a «Beretta» brother of Gigliuolo «de Gente», «detto anche di “donna Agnese”, Parmense, podestà di Reggio nel 1223 “pulcher miles et fortis bellator et validus, qui staturam habuit ita longam quod mulieres et homines mirabantur”». I follow his emendation of on.

50. Levy notes that Cremona and Parma were among the cities that remained loyal to Frederick and therefore suffered much from his enemy cities, especially Milan and Piacenza. The Emperor recognised their loyalty, honoured them with his visits, and gave them other indications of his favour. In 1236 he sent unusual animals, elephants and dromedaries to Cremona, and it was there he made his celebratory entry after the battle of Cortenuova. He was also often in Parma and celebrated Christmas there in 1238.

51. Levy (Aquelh de Darnelh) and De Bartholomaeis, who think along the lines of a knight de Darnelh, are mystified, the latter leaving the translation blank. My emendations are easily explicable paleographically.

53. Levy translates in a note: «Allezeit fortan werde ich, Figueira, denjenigen lieben, der nicht ablässt ihn zu loben», accepted by De Bartholomaeis. Is that right? Why n’? «I, Figueira» seems strained. Should the reading be n’amara, or should we understand n’amara.y (Figueira will love him for this, y = ‘there’ as in lai, though I can find no support for this on COM, amar + y)? And is Figueira then the subject of recre and ditz?

60. The allusion is to Raimon VII of Toulouse (Levy, p. 99; De Bartholomaeis, Poesie provenzali, p. 151); De Bartholomaeis comments that Guillem was probably maintaining contact with his natural lord.

61-62. C nos lauent hom mal euoz | uendetz la be, R nos laue(n)t ho(m)z mal e nos ve(n)dem la be, where the m is a correction written over an s. Levy follows C but corrects the first nos to vos, without recording R’s reading in the variants; he and Tobler found the sense unclear. In his «Osservazioni», p. 116, De Bartholomaeis comments, «la mercadaria di cui qui si tratta non può essere che quella che il poeta poteva solo smerciare: la poesía, i genere, e, nel caso attuale, questo stesso sirventese. L’autore dichiarava modestamente di spacciarla male, ma raccomandava a Trello di spacciarla bene, cioè di farla ben fruttare presso quel Fre-de-ric, ch’egli e madonna Dia devono amare»; see also his Poesie provenzali, II, p. 151 and his translation «la vostra merci altri ve la vende male, ma voi vendetela bene». While there is no guarantee that nos or uos have not been misread in transmission, there is no reason to reject the first nos which is in both mss. It would seem that the common source had uendes or uendetz and R had reason to alter this, perhaps because he saw a different source (which supplied the second tornada). I do not think it can have been because he had written the second nos and thought this was the subject of the verb, since nos vendetz could potentially make sense. – An objection to De Bartholomaeis’s idea about the «merchandise» is that this is first of all Taurel’s, not Guillem’s (uostra CR). It would be possible to speculate, but I do not think the reference is likely ever to be explained.

64. Correction Tobler (see Levy’s note). The pun on Frederick’s name (fre de ric) is also found in BdT 173.11, 57 and 60 (Les Poésies de Jausbert de Puycibot, ed. William P. Shepard, Paris 1924, XI, p. 38) and BdT 10.26, 41 and 43 (William P. Shepard and Frank M. Chambers, The poems of Aimeric de Peguilhan, Evanston, Illinois 1950, p. 147).