Inter Caetera

Columbus returned in March 1493 and by May the Castilian crown had a papal grant. Inter Caetera, dated 4 May 1493, gives Ferdinand and Isabella and their successors all islands and mainlands found and to be found, discovered and to be discovered, lying west and south of a line drawn from pole to pole one hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde, provided those lands were not already held by a Christian prince. The stated purpose is missionary. The grant is made so that the peoples living there may be instructed in the Catholic faith and in good morals, and the monarchs are charged to send men fit for that work.

Alexander VI was a Valencian, elected with Spanish support, and the speed and generosity of the grant were noticed at the time. Portugal, which held the older bulls and a fleet in the South Atlantic, refused the line outright. Rather than appeal to Rome the two crowns negotiated directly, and in the Treaty of Tordesillas of 7 June 1494 they moved the boundary to three hundred and seventy leagues west of Cape Verde, a shift that later placed Brazil on the Portuguese side.

So the bull's own line lasted thirteen months and was superseded by a treaty between the parties it was meant to separate. What lasted was the premise underneath it: that lands occupied by people who were not Christian could be granted away by a third party who had never seen them.

The grant was conditional. Castile received the lands in order to bring their peoples to the faith, and Spanish law took that condition seriously enough to argue about it for a century. The requerimiento of 1513, a text read aloud to indigenous communities before hostilities, was drafted precisely to discharge it: it announced the papal donation, invited submission, and stated that any bloodshed that followed refusal would be the hearers' own fault. It was often read in Spanish, sometimes out of earshot of anyone, and it was ridiculed by Spanish observers at the time.

The condition also gave the critics their ground. Antonio de Montesinos preached against the encomienda in Hispaniola in 1511 on the footing that the crown's title was a trust and was being betrayed. Bartolome de las Casas built four decades of argument on the same premise, and Francisco de Vitoria at Salamanca went further, holding that the pope had no temporal jurisdiction over unbelievers and could not grant what he did not possess. Vitoria's lectures on the Indians, delivered in 1539, are one of the roots of the modern law of nations.

The atlas records both. Inter Caetera authorised a seizure and set a missionary condition on it, and the condition became the lever with which Spaniards attacked the seizure. Neither cancels the other.