De multa Cristiani sanguinis effusione.
The Pagan Conspiracy Against the Faith
The pagan captains fix a day to slaughter every Christian they can find and destroy the faith utterly.
These captains and leaders of the armies set a fixed day for this purpose: so that all who gathered in arms might kill every professor of the Christian faith they found and destroy them utterly, to the last.
Desecration and Slaughter Across the Land
The pagans massacre Christians, enslave captives, burn churches, profane the sacraments, and slaughter priests and ministers.
And they carried it out, because they found all the Christians they could outside the fortifications in the land of Prussia — some they slaughtered miserably, others they captured and led away into perpetual slavery. They burned the churches, chapels, and oratories of God, treated the sacraments of the church irreverently, dragged sacred vestments and vessels off to unlawful uses, and miserably slaughtered priests and other ministers of the church.1
The Cruel Martyrdom of a Teutonic Priest
The Sambians crush a Teutonic priest between two beams, claiming this bloodless method of killing is a fitting martyrdom for holy men.
The Sambians seized a certain priest, a brother of the house of the Teutonic Order, who had been sent to baptize them, and crushed his neck between two beams until, failing, he expired — asserting that this kind of martyrdom was fitting for holy men whose blood they did not dare to shed.23
Read the original Latin
Hii capitanei et duces exercituum statuerunt diem certum ad hoc, ut omnes convenientes in armis, quoscunque fidei Cristiane professores occiderent et usque ad internecionem delerent. Quod et perfecerunt, quia omnes Cristianos, quos extra municiones in terra Prussie invenerunt, quosdam miserabiliter trucidantes, alios captivantes, in perpetuam servitutem'1 deduxerunt; ecclesias, capellas et oratoria dei comburentes, sacramenta ecclesie irreverenter tractantes, vestes sacras et vasa ad illicitos usus pertrahentesa, sacerdotes et ministros alios ecclesie miserabiliter1' trucidabant. Sambite quendam sacerdotem, fratrem dornus Theutonice, qui ad baptizandum eos missus fuerat, comprehenderunt, et collum ejus sub duobus asseribus eompresseruntc, quousque deficiens expiraret, asserentes, quod tale genus martirii competeret viris sanctis, quorum sanguinem fundere non auderent.
Notes
- 1 ↩The manuscript reads 'pertrahentesa' (token 39), a variant/dittography for 'pertrahentes' ('dragging'). The normalized text retains the manuscript form; the translation follows the intended sense.
- 2 ↩The manuscript reads 'eompresseruntc' (token 19), a variant for 'compresserunt' ('they crushed'). The normalized text retains the manuscript form; the translation follows the intended sense.
- 3 ↩The phrase 'asseribus' (beams/timbers) describes the instrument of crushing. The Sambians' claim that this 'genus martirii' was 'fitting for holy men whose blood they did not dare to shed' is a grim irony — they invent a bloodless martyrdom to avoid the guilt of direct bloodshed while still killing.
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