In Spain we find allusion to our story already in the 13th century, when the _Gran conquista de Vltramar_ refers to Fl. and Bl. as the most devoted pair of lovers that one had ever heard of. But there is no proof of the existence of a Spanish version of the story as early as this. In the year 1512, appeared at Alcala the prose romance, _Flores y Blancaflor_, which is current to the present day. The close relationship of this to the Italian versions is very evident. Its source, however, seems hardly to be directly the _Cantare_. The beginning of the Spanish romance, which is entirely peculiar to this version, points rather to a version in the North of Italy, which the Spanish adapter has quite probably translated into Spanish without important alteration. [Footnote I-13: G. Paris distinguishes three general versions, two French versions and a third, “Roman” version, in which the parents of Blauncheflur are not French but Roman.] [Footnote I-14: The evidence cited by G. Paris, consists of allusions to--(1) History of Troy, (2) Siege of Troy, (3) Aeneid, etc. The place of origin, according to G. Paris, was probably in the region about Beauvais, lying between Normandy, Picardy and the Île de France.] [Footnote I-15: Perhaps this is a mere coincidence, since in a poem about Berthe, her father happens to be named ‘Florie,’ a Florie with a different history, _roi de Hongrie_. Later this relationship was commonly assumed. In the _Gran Conquista de Vltramar_, the story of Berthe is intercalated. She is daughter of Blancaflor and Flores.] [Footnote I-16: G. Paris makes this II. version the sole representative of a third distinct form of the story, the 2^o of his general classification, 1^o, 2^o, 3^o.] [Footnote I-17: That is to say, French or Italian.] [Footnote I-18: This version was evidently not translated from a French MS. but written from memory. The details are not always exactly identical with those of the French, though often so, enough so to make the origin of the poem unmistakable though it is much condensed and the order of events somewhat transposed.] [Footnote I-19: Fleck’s work is a paraphrase. The details are identical but are amplified to 8006 verses.] § 3. ENGLISH VERSION.