Treaty Of Tordesillas Quotes

Pope Alexander VI issued a Papal bull authorizing the Treaty of Tordesillas on June 7, 1494. The treaty gave everything located beyond 370 leagues or exceeding 1,110 nautical miles west of Cape Verde to Spain for exploration, and everything east of this meridian went to Portugal.

Magellan referred the distinguished members of the Casa to a clause in the Treaty of Tordesillas

originated in a papal bull issued in 1455 that permitted the Portuguese monarchy to seize West Africa. Following Columbus’s infamous exploratory voyage in 1492, sponsored by the king and queen of the infant Spanish state, another papal bull extended similar permission to Spain. Disputes between the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies led to the papal-initiated Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which, besides dividing the globe equally between the two Iberian empires, clarified that only non-Christian lands fell under the discovery doctrine.3 This doctrine on which all European states relied thus originated with the arbitrary and unilateral establishment of the Iberian monarchies’ exclusive rights under Christian canon law to colonize foreign peoples, and this right was later seized by other European monarchical colonizing projects. The French Republic used this legalistic instrument for its nineteenth- and twentieth-century

Magellan and Faleiro were ordered to record every landfall and landmark they attained, and if they came across any inhabited lands, they were to “try and ascertain if there is anything in that land that will be to our interest.” They were also to treat humanely any indigenous peoples they happen to find, if only to make it possible for the fleet to assure its supply of food and water. Magellan could seize any Arabs he found in the Portuguese hemisphere—an implicit admission that he might violate the Treaty of Tordesillas, after all—and, if he wished, sell them for slaves.