The Proud Herd
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Vede-los Alemães, soberbo gado, Que por tão largos campos se apascenta, Do sucessor de Pedro, rebelado, Novo pastor, e nova seita inventa: Vede-lo em feias guerras ocupado, Que ainda com o cego error se não contenta, Não contra o soberbíssimo Otomano, Mas por sair do jugo soberano.
Look at the Germans, that arrogant herd grazing over such wide fields, in revolt against the successor of Peter: they invent a new shepherd for themselves, and a new sect. Look at them taken up with ugly wars — not even satisfied with their blind error — wars fought not against the overweening Ottoman, but simply to throw off a sovereign yoke.
Jupiter's council over, the narrator turns from the fleet to Europe itself, cataloguing the Christian nations that will not help. Germany comes first: the Reformation, seen from Catholic Lisbon.
The stanza opens the poem's survey of Christian Europe, and Camões starts with Germany and the Reformation. The metaphor is a single sustained one: the Germans are cattle, the pope is their proper shepherd, and Luther is the new shepherd they made up for themselves. Everything in the eight lines runs through that one image — pasture, herd, shepherd, yoke.
What a first reader misses is that the complaint is not really theological. The last two lines give the game away: what angers the narrator is that these wars are aimed at the wrong enemy. The Ottoman Empire is at Europe's edge, and Germany is spending its soldiers on itself instead. Camões is writing in the 1570s, when the Turkish threat was concrete and the fleets he cares about are undermanned; the doctrinal insult is the frame, but the grievance underneath is strategic.
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