Turn the Guns East
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Aquelas invenções feras e novas De instrumentos mortais da artilharia, Já devem de fazer as duras provas Nos muros de Bizâncio e de Turquia. Fazei que torne lá às silvestres covas Dos Cáspios montes, e da Cítia fria A Turca geração, que multiplica Na polícia da vossa Europa rica.
Those fierce new inventions, the deadly instruments of artillery, ought by now to be making their hard trials on the walls of Byzantium and of Turkey. Make the Turkish race — which keeps multiplying inside the settled order of your rich Europe — go back there, to the wild dens of the Caspian mountains and of cold Scythia.
Still in the long address to King Sebastião that opens Canto 7, Camões turns from praising Portugal to scolding the rest of Christian Europe: the new artillery should be aimed at the Ottomans, not at fellow Christians.
Camões points the guns. He has just been listing the Christian nations that fight each other, and here he names the target he thinks they should share: the Ottoman power at Constantinople, which Portuguese ships were also meeting in the Indian Ocean. The artillery is called new because it was — siege cannon had changed war within living memory, and Camões treats it as a tool with a proper address that Europe keeps misdelivering.
The line a first reader slides past is "polícia." It does not mean police; it is the older sense of settled civil order, the thing a polis has. So the charge is not that the Turks are outside Europe but that they are inside it, growing in the very order that should have expelled them — and Camões wants them sent back to Scythia and the Caspian, the classical map's edge of the barbarian world. He is arguing with a Latin geography rather than a real one, which is part of why the wish stays a wish.
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