Goa, Mistress of the East
Read the full text in our reader
Goa vereis aos Mouros ser tomada, A qual virá depois a ser senhora De todo o Oriente, e sublimada Co'os triunfos da gente vencedora. Ali soberba, altiva, e exalçada, Ao Gentio, que os ídolos adora, Duro freio porá, e a toda a terra Que cuidar de fazer aos vossos guerra.
Goa you shall see taken from the Moors, which will afterwards become mistress of all the East, and exalted by the triumphs of the conquering people. There, proud, haughty, and raised on high, she will lay a hard bridle on the heathen who worships idols, and on every land that thinks to make war upon your people.
Jupiter, reassuring Venus, foretells the Portuguese conquests still to come in the East. Here he sees Goa taken from the Moors and raised to command the whole region.
This is still Jupiter's prophecy to Venus, spooling out the empire that lies ahead of Gama's ships. He names the taking of Goa and its rise to rule the whole Orient, personifying the city as a woman: mistress of the East, proud and haughty, exalted by the victors who won her. The stanza works by throwing a future the characters cannot see onto the screen of the poem's present. Goa fell to Afonso de Albuquerque in 1510, more than a decade after the 1497 voyage the epic narrates, so what sounds like prediction is really the history Camões and his first readers already knew.
The image a first reader skims past is the freio, the bridle or bit. Camões governs the whole picture through horsemanship: empire is a rider curbing a beast, and the beast is the idol-worshipping East. That single word yokes conquest to control rather than mere victory, and the line before it does the theological work quietly, casting the war as a check laid on idolatry. The crusading logic of the House of Aviz is folded into the prophecy, so that dominion and religious mission arrive in the same breath.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Os Lusíadas 2.51 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Os Lusíadas — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Os Lusíadas 2.51 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/lusiadas/2.51/