GK Chesterton's Lepanto, with annotations: Part 1

To commemorate the Battle of Lepanto and celebrate the role played by the Blessed Virgin Mary in the victory of the Church's sworn enemies (7th of October 1571), I aim to examine the poem 'Lepanto', written by GK Chesterton and first published in 1911. To read the whole poem without annotations, click on Lepanto.

In the following posts, you will be able to read the text of Chesterton's poem with annotations and images interspersed therein.

White founts falling in the courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;

 'Soldan' = 'sultan', ruler; from Aramaic shultana 'power'; earlier English word was soldan, soudan (c. 1300), used indiscriminately of Muslim rulers and sovereigns; from Old French souldan, soudan; from Medieval Latin sultanus

Selim the Sot. Public Domain

'the Soldan of Byzantium': Selim II (b 1524, 1566-1574), son of  Suleiman the Magnificent.

His nickname was Selim the Sot (drunkard).

Because of his obsession with wine, he is said to have ordered the conquest of Cyprus in 1571 in order to seize its famous vineyards for his own use. This was one of the triggers for the Battle of Lepanto which saw the virtual annihilation of the Turkish battle fleet.

'Byzantium': an ancient Greek colony in early antiquity that later became Constantinople, and later Istanbul. 513 BC: Persian Empire; 408 BC: Athens conquers; 196 AD: Rome conquers; 330 AD:  re-founded as an imperial residence by Constantine I (his 'New Rome'/Nova Roma), becoming Constantinople after his death as a newly baptised Christian in 337 AD; 1453: captured by Ottoman Turks and renamed  Istanbul (officially changed only in 1930). This name derives from 'eis-ten-polin' (Greek: "to-the-city")