Papal Bulls

The most formal instrument a pope issues, named for the lead seal, the bulla, that authenticated it. A bull is addressed to the whole church or to a named party and carries the full weight of the office, which is why the ones gathered here range from a claim of universal jurisdiction to the grants of conquest that underwrote the Atlantic slave trade. Their afterlives differ as much as their subjects. Some are spent, having been overtaken by events; some were never formally repealed and simply stopped being acted on; and the fifteenth-century grants have been repudiated by later popes without being annulled as documents. The entries record which of those applies.