Vita Wenceslai (Legenda Gumpoldi)
Heaven's Vengeance on the Guilty
Those who shed Wenceslaus's innocent blood were struck by divine fury, suffering demonic madness, bestial transformation, or bodily decay until death.
As we have often been told by reliable witnesses, after the champion's most steadfast triumph, all those who shed the blood of the innocent one — struck by a heavenly fury — were either snatched away by the power of demons and never appeared again among human beings, or, their nature altered as a consequence of their vices, they used dogs' barking in place of speech and imitated dogs' bites with the grinding of their teeth, or, wretched with a dryness of their bodies and also continuously deprived of hearing, they ended their lives, hateful at least to themselves.
Read the original Latin
Ut veracium saepe nobis relatu patefactum est, post constantissimi triumphum athletae omnes sanguinis effusores innocentis superno incussi furore, aut demonum potestate rapti inter homines postea non comparuerunt, aut versa pro viciis natura, canum latratu vice loquendi utentes, dentium stridore morsus imitantur caninos, aut misera corporum ariditate siccati, necnon auditus continua privacione, vitam ipsis saltim odiosam finierunt.
Gumpold of Mantua's Vita Wenceslai (Legenda Gumpoldi) companion
Read the full Vita Wenceslai, a chapter a day
All 30 chapters are in Chosen Portion as daily readings, free on iOS, with 77 more royal devotional texts
Gumpold portrays a ruler whose devotion was a fixed daily discipline amid duties; Chosen Portion's brief daily chapter makes reading his life the same kind of fixed daily practice
- Finish the complete vita in a month at one short chapter a day
- Chapters average 1-7 sentences - readable in 2-4 minutes
- Move on to the lives of other royal saints when you finish