The Besieger Besieged
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Que estando na cidade, que cercara, Cercado nela foi dos Lioneses, Porque a conquista dela lhe tomara, De Lião sendo, e não dos Portugueses. A pertinácia aqui lhe custa cara, Assim como acontece muitas vezes, Que em ferros quebra as pernas, indo aceso A batalha, onde foi vencido e preso.
For while he was in the city he had besieged, he was himself besieged there by the Leonese, because he had taken its conquest from them, the city being León's and not the Portuguese's. His stubbornness costs him dear here, as happens many times: for on the irons he breaks his legs, going ablaze to the battle where he was defeated and made prisoner.
Camões recounts how Afonso Henriques, Portugal's first king, was captured by the Leonese at Badajoz in 1169 after seizing a city that lay within León's sphere of conquest.
The stanza catches Portugal's first king in his single great humiliation. Afonso Henriques had taken Badajoz, a city that belonged by treaty to León's zone of reconquest, not to Portugal's. The Leonese arrive and turn the besieger into the besieged; the man who took the city is trapped inside it. Camões builds the whole octave on that reversal — cercara, cercado — and lets the irony do the moral work: greed for a conquest that was not his to take is what pins him down.
What a first reader skims past is that the broken legs are literal history, not metaphor. Fleeing through a town gate, the king caught his leg on the iron bolt and shattered it, and the fall ended his career of expansion; the ransom cost him the very lands he had seized. Camões folds Portugal's greatest conqueror's one defeat into a quiet cautionary aside — pertinácia, dogged over-reaching, punished on an iron hinge — rather than dwelling on it, because the poem's business is glory and this is the exception that proves the rule.
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