The Nations Gathered at the Siege
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Persas feroces, Abassis e Rumes, Que trazido de Roma o nome têm, Vários de gestos, vários de costumes ( Que mil nações ao cerco feras vêm), Farão dos Céus ao mundo vãos queixumes Porque uns poucos a terra lhe detêm. Em sangue Português, juram, descridos, De banhar os bigodes retorcidos.
Fierce Persians, Abyssinians, and Turks—who take their name from Rome—differing in looks and differing in customs (for a thousand nations come, ferocious, to the siege), will pour vain complaints up to the heavens against the world, because a few men hold the ground back from them. Faithless, they swear to bathe their twisted moustaches in Portuguese blood.
A prophetic muster of Portugal's eastern enemies. Persians, Abyssinians and Ottoman Turks pour toward a besieged Portuguese stronghold, swearing to dye their moustaches in Portuguese blood while only a handful of defenders hold the ground.
This is one of the prophecy stanzas near the end of the poem, where the future of Portuguese arms in the East is unrolled like a map. Camões lists the enemies by name—Persians, Abyssinians, Ottoman Turks—and stresses their sheer number and variety against the smallness of the Portuguese garrisons. The picture is deliberately lopsided: a thousand nations swarming a fort that a handful of men refuse to give up.
What a first reader misses is that the last couplet is not the poet's contempt but the enemies' own oath, quoted back at them. The Turks are made to swear they will dip their curled moustaches in Portuguese blood—a vivid, almost swaggering vow that Camões hands to the foe so their eventual failure will sting more. The detail of the retorcidos moustaches is not decoration; it marks these men as proud, and pride sworn aloud in an epic is pride that gets broken.
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