Around 1136 Geoffrey of Monmouth completed one of the most important books of the Middle Ages, the Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), in which he presented Arthur as a historical king. In 1155 the Latin text, which provided the chronological framework for subsequent Arthurian romances, was adapted into French by Wace, who was first to mention Arthur’s famous Round Table. Wace’s Roman de Brut (Romance of Brutus), standing at the beginning of Old French Arthurian tradition, was very influential. One of the authors acquainted with it was Chrétien de Troyes, the greatest writer of medieval French romance. In the second half of the twelfth century he composed the five Arthurian verse romances which gave the genre its own face: Erec et Enide, Cligés, Lancelot or Le Chevalier de la charrete (The King of the Cart), Yvain or Le Chevalier au lion (The Kinght with the Lion) and Perceval or Le Conte del Graal (The Story of the Grail). In the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries Chrétien’s Old French followers produced about thirty Arthurian texts in verse. In the same period of time, moreover, lengthy Arthurian prose cycles like the Lancelot-Grail and the prose Tristan were written. Authors in other vernaculars were fascinated by this vast corpus of Old French Arthurian works, as a by non-exhaustive overview of their translations shows here.