Another bit of medieval Latin today, this bit is from the Chronicon Johannis de Reading.
Postea, transiens per patrias latitudine XX miliarium omnia devastavit.
Again, let’s break it down.
Postea – adv.; afterwards
transiens (transeo, transire, transivii, transitus) – verb; go over, cross
per– acc. prep.; through, during, by, by means of
patrias – noun; fatherland, country, nation
latitudine– noun; width, breadth, extent, latitude
XX – This is the number 20
miliarium – thousands OR a roman mile (1000 paces); another meaning for this is milestone
omnia – all, totally, completely
devastavit (devasto, devastare, devastavi, devastatus) – verb; devastate, lay waste (to a territory or people), ravage, slaughter
In this case, I’m taking transiens per as an accusative phrase, “crossing through.”
My translation of the phrase?
Afterwards, passing through our homeland he destroyed totally the breadth of twenty miles.
Now…this is probably a little hinky. If you find it to be so, please let me know! This one gave me some trouble and I’m still very rusty at this, but I find it to be good practice, at least! Parsing phrases properly has always been hard for me…so are cases of words, to be honest. In English, for some reason it’s very easy to construct language…probably because we lack endings the way Romance languages have. The only case that’s really easy for me to remember is the genitive possessive!
Here I am commenting to say:
Transiens as a present participle, I can’t believe I remembered what that was! 😀
I would take omnia as an object, and I don’t have context, but I don’t see anything indicating that the homeland is OUR homeland, and not that of someone else. Sooo… my humble and probably incorrect translation?
Afterward, passing through the homeland, he/she/it destroyed everything for twenty miles.
Yeah, I really can’t believe I remembered what the word actually meant, too, when I looked at it originally…blah. What to do with it, however, that was trickier.