Pope Alexander VI Issues Inter caetera Bull
Alexander VI issued the bull Inter caetera on 4 May 1493, dividing the unexplored world between Spain and Portugal along a line 100 leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde. Columbus had returned in March. Ferdinand and Isabella went straight to a pope who was himself Spanish — Rodrigo Borgia, elected the previous year — and obtained a series of bulls granting them everything discovered west of the line, with the obligation to send men to instruct the inhabitants in the Catholic faith. The instrument was not new. Papal grants had underwritten Portuguese expansion down the African coast for fifty years, and the authority claimed rested on the doctrine that the pope held temporal jurisdiction over all souls, Christian and otherwise. Portugal rejected the line as too far east, since it threatened the route round Africa that Dias had opened. John II negotiated directly with Spain rather than appeal to Rome, and the Treaty of Tordesillas moved it to 370 leagues the following year — which is how Brazil became Portuguese. The bulls became the legal foundation of the Spanish empire and of the requerimiento, the document read aloud to indigenous peoples, often in Spanish and sometimes from shipboard, demanding submission to the Church and the crown and holding them responsible for what followed if they refused. France, England and the Netherlands never accepted any of it. Las Casas argued that the grant conveyed a duty to evangelise and no title to conquer. The doctrine of discovery derived from these bulls was cited by the United States Supreme Court in 1823 and repudiated by the Vatican in 2023.
- Year: 1493 CE
- Category: Political
