Peace, and Two English Brides
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Destas e outras vitórias longamente Eram os Castelhanos oprimidos, Quando a paz, desejada já da gente, Deram os vencedores aos vencidos, Depois que quis o Padre onipotente Dar os Reis inimigos por maridos As duas ilustríssimas Inglesas, Gentis, formosas, ínclitas princesas.
By these and other victories the Castilians were long ground down, until at last the winners granted the losers the peace the people had already been longing for — this after the omnipotent Father willed that the two enemy kings should be given as husbands to the two most illustrious Englishwomen: noble, beautiful, renowned princesses.
The long war between Portugal and Castile closes. As part of the settlement, God's providence arranges marriages: the two English princesses, daughters of John of Gaunt, are given to the once-enemy kings.
The stanza ends a war. Camões has spent the preceding octaves on Portuguese victories over Castile, and here he stops the fighting the way the period actually stopped it: with a treaty sealed by marriages. The two Englishwomen are the daughters of John of Gaunt — Philippa, who married João I of Portugal, and Catherine, who married Henrique III of Castile. The line "Dar os Reis inimigos por maridos" is worth slowing down on: it is the kings who are given, and the princesses who receive them.
What a first reader misses is that Camões credits the settlement to God, not to diplomacy. The peace is not negotiated in this stanza; it is granted, and only after the "Padre onipotente" has decided. That matters for what follows, because Philippa is the mother of the Aviz princes — Duarte, Pedro, Henrique — and the whole voyage the poem is about descends from her line. The marriage that closes one war opens the dynasty that will send Gama out.
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